Armchair Flailing

Wayne Krantz

2012-01-31T18:16:00.000-08:00

For years now guitar wizard Wayne Krantz has been one of my all-time favorite players. In my quest to try to hear everything he ever played on, I just came upon a used copy of a CD he did in 1989 while a member of the band Urban Earth featuring Harvie Swartz, titled Full Moon Dancer. If you read the review of it on the All Music website that I link to here, you'll see that they find it's a bit tepid, and I concur. Yet the players are all really good, and Krantz as usually really shines. Even at this point in his career when he was first making a splash, his playing had a special something that made him stand out amidst the pack of fusiony guitar slingers. The one track he wrote for this date, "Five Years," is easily the best one on the album.

So I'll take this chance to just quietly rave about Wayne Krantz.

I first came upon his name in the credits of former Weather Report bassist Victor Bailey's debut solo album, Bottom's Up, from 1989. I had listened to the opening track, "Kid Logic," and there was a guitar solo that made my ears perk up. Back then I couldn't yet go to the Internet and Google the name, but I filed it away in my brain and kept my antennae up for more from him.

Soon enough I found him on some releases from Leni Stern in the early nineties. Then, if I remember correctly, I read a brief review of his own CD,1995's 2 Drink Minimum, in some magazine, and was inspired to pick it up. To say my socks were knocked off is putting it mildly. A live trio recording from a performance at New York's 55 Bar, it is just chock-full of Wayne's amazing harmonic sense, incredible time, and dazzling single-line improvising. In the few things I'd heard earlier, he was an excellent player in the vein of a Mike Stern or maybe a Scott Henderson, but by the time of this live recording, he was totally in a world of his own. His playing is perhaps the most distinctive of all guitar players I've ever heard. His ideas are as fresh and cliche-free as possible.

Of course I had to go right out and get his earlier two CDs on Enja, Signals and Long To Be Loose.

In the late 90's and into the 21st century Krantz released on his own label a couple of albums that were edited-down fragments from hours and houhttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=34644493#editor/target=post;postID=2056310058369585506rs of live recordings at the 55 Bar: Greenwich Mean in 1995, Your Basic Live in 2003, and Your Basic Live '06 in (duh) 2006. He also played on several other people's projects, notably Chris Potter's Underground, Tal Wilkenfeld's Transformation, and several releases by David Binney.

In 2009 he finally released his first studio recording since the mid-nineties, Krantz Carlock Lefebvre, on the Abstract Logix label. It was one of my favorite records of the year.

A recent news item from the label says he will have a new CD titled Howie 61 to be released in April 2012. I can't wait! Here's a promotional video I just discovered this minute.

Some WK links:

Recording with SONAR X1

2012-01-25T10:30:00.000-08:00

The recent recordings I made with my son David playing drums have finally gotten me into learning the new interface in my recording software, SONAR. The X1 version had very significant changes, most of which I am coming to believe are for the better, despite meaning that I've had to re-learn how to do certain tasks I thought I already knew.

The other thing about it is, I realize I have done very little recording of any note for most of the last decades, and I'm also learning about things that have been in the SONAR bag of tricks for a while and I somehow missed.

In particular, there is a way to record extra passes of audio into a single track. They are called layers, and provide a nice way of grouping multiple takes together and working with them to assemble a composite performance. (For those that don't know, a composite performance is simply editing down a series of two or more takes of a performance, picking the best parts of each track. Typically, for example, your first take will have a so-so first verse, and an excellent second verse and chorus, while the second take really nailed the first verse and the rest were a little off, etc. Rather than re-recording the entire performance over and over again until there's one ideal take that's as good as can be, often you edit the performances, keeping the best parts of each one.)

I'm currently working on recording an arrangement of Ray Charles' "Unchain My Heart," and I've discovered this feature while trying to get as good as vocal performance as I can, and a good guitar solo.

Robben Ford at Yoshi's Oakland, Sunday, January 22, 2012

2012-01-23T15:37:00.000-08:00

It was a wet, rainy weekend in the Bay Area, and spirits got even more dampened when the San Francisco 49ers lost the NFC championship. Maybe the big game explains why the 8 o'clock show at Yoshi's on Sunday was so criminally under-attended. The room wasn't even half full. But those in attendance enjoyed a smouldering set from Robben Ford and his band.

Ford was in fine form, if perhaps a tiny bit taciturn, as if he was mildly tired, or perhaps just a bit disappointed at the turnout. The repertoire for the evening included some of my favorites, like his version of Ray Charles' "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying" (which appears in an acoustic version on his 1998 release The Authorized Bootleg), "Cannonball Shuffle" (his instrumental tribute to Freddie King from 2003's Keep On Running), and "Good Thing" and "Strong Will to Live" from 1995's Handful of Blues. The band was exceptional - Greg Mathieson on Hammond B-3 organ and Fender Rhodes piano, Andy Hess on bass, and Toss Panos on drums. Hess and Panos locked in tight as a grooving and dynamic unit. Panos in particular is an excellent foil for Robben.

He used a volume pedal beautifully in one solo, at the end of which Greg Mathieson stood up for a moment, gestured, and yelled, "ROBBEN FORD!!!" It was a nice moment.

A great show... I wish they had played a bit longer (they were done by about 9:30) but that's a minor quibble...

Aside for the guitar crowd: Ford was plugged into his famous Dumble amp into 2 x 12 cabinet. He stuck mostly with his old Telecaster; several other guitars were standing there waiting, but only one was used, a Gibson Firebird, for one song. His pedalboard contained a wah, a volume pedal, a Fulltone OCD distortion pedal, two TC Electronics Hall of Fame reverb pedals, a Line 6 DL4 delay pedal, and a tuner. Last time I saw him do his own thing (almost three years ago, one of the gigs recorded for Soul On Ten), he used the wah a lot; last night he didn't touch it.

More recording

2012-01-10T10:11:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday my son David and I convened in the family room again and proceeded to re-record the two numbers from the previous week, which had been somewhat spoiled by my careless bass part bleeding into the microphones. Over the week between I bought a very inexpensive headphone distribution box, so I hooked that to a stereo output from the mixer. I played bass direct into the board and so all that was in the 'phones was the bass part. I also added a third mic, so I had one on the bass drum, one on the left side of the kit and a little bit away, and one on the right side of the kit up close to the snare. This time I got very usable tracks from the session. On Sunday I overdubbed a "real" bass part for each song, and on one song added a rhythm guitar part and a quick stab at a second part with some lines. They are starting to sound really nice. I'm looking forward to finishing them up, hopefully before too much time passes.

A dead gig comes back to life

2012-01-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

Early last year I mentioned in a post here the demise of a somewhat regular gig. I was never privy to what actually happened, but my understanding was there was a restaurant manager who had instigated the gig, and there was some sort of shakeup at the place which resulted in his departure. Since the live music nights were his doing, they ceased with his exit.

Now it seems that the management has changed (perhaps new owners?), and the departed manager has returned and has restarted the gigs. It sounds like it will be much the same as before: every Wednesday from 7-9 and every Friday from 7-10.

A pool of musicians rotates filling the seats. I had been averaging about one or two nights per month, so I expect that will continue, though it seems that perhaps the original pool of players has become a little bit depleted, so maybe I will play more often. I will be playing the first one this coming Friday, January 6th. Should be fun!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-03T11:06:00.000-08:00

Well, it's 2012, and after a week and a half of being off, I am back at the day job...

I wish I could say I got a lot done musically in my off time, but that would be a lie. I did achieve my primary goal, which was to set up a few microphones and record my son David playing drums on at least a couple of numbers. David's been playing since last summer and is starting to get pretty good. I played a rough bass part along with him and the plan was to overdub a fuller bass part and some guitars after the fact. The bass bled more than I'd hoped into the drum mics, so I might not be able to do much with these tracks. Next time I'll play through the mixer and we can use headphones to hear the bass part and thus keep it out of the microphones - either that, or I'll just record the real bass part at the same time.

We still have another two weekends with David at home during winter break, so hopefully we'll get in another session and get some really usable tracks.

Digitizing LPs

2011-12-01T15:49:00.001-08:00

Facing the prospect of actually, finally getting rid of my vast LP collection, I have been going through and identifying ones that I would still like to listen to again and digitizing them. To this end I bought a USB turntable to minimize the effort involved in getting them onto the computer.

Then, after doing several LPs using Sound Forge - recording each side, then opening the resulting files, running a click and pop filter on them, cutting them up into songs and saving them individually, I looked around a little on the internet and discovered a wonderful tool that cost a mere $29: VinylStudio from AlpineSoft in the UK. It makes the whole chore so-o-o-o much easier. Input the album name and it automatically names saves side 1 and 2 for you with appropriate names. Then you can download cover art and track information (titles and lengths) from your choice of online database (from Amazon, Diskogs, or several others) and it will automatically insert track markers at the appropriate places. You can easily adjust the markers if they are a little off, then clean up pops and clicks, and finally save the album in any of the usual compressed formats like MP3, or FLAC if you prefer lossless compression. It does this by creating a directory based on the artist and album title, then saves each song with the track name and the beginning and end as defined by the track markers, and with the cover art (if found) stored in the file. Just import into iTunes or whatever player you use.

Just might be the best $29 I've ever spent...

Playing guitar in a trio

2011-11-28T00:07:00.000-08:00

For the first time tonight I tried playing in a trio with electric bass and drums. Yikes, is it hard!

The classic jazz trio is piano/bass drums. A piano player has ten fingers with the same basic function - to hit notes - and the nature of the instrument means they can play rich harmonic accompaniment while also playing lines. But even the most amazing adept guitar players are limited by the nature of the instrument to six notes and the separate and different function of the hands (five fingers of one hand fretting notes and the five fingers on the other hand striking them to make them sound).(Of course I'm referring to standard 6-string guitars played in more-or-less standard ways.) So a guitarist in a trio has to kind of pretend a bit to suggest musically what a piano player can do pretty readily. The best ones are adept at breaking parts down in such as way as to give the impression that there is harmony going on all the time while in fact they are alternating between playing lines and playing chords. It's a kind of aural sleight of hand.

I am not even in the Little Leagues when it comes to his sort of playing and I was pretty chastened by the experience, but it wasn't a total failure, and I think it will be fun challenge to continue to try to play like this. Conclusion: I must be more than a little insane.

Upcoming shows

2011-11-26T19:58:00.000-08:00

I'm excited about the first three months of 2012:

In January I'm going to see Robben Ford at Yoshi's in Oakland
In February I'm going to see Leo Kottke at Yoshi's in San Francisco
In March I'm going to finally see Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at the Warfield

Ruth Davies' Blues Night review

2011-11-21T13:23:00.001-08:00

The latest edition of the Golden Gate Blues Society newsletter (Issue #11, October 2011) has a review I wrote about the Ruth Davies' Blues Night concert I saw this past summer.

Autumn harmony

2011-11-17T10:59:00.001-08:00

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been! - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Here it is a week before Thanksgiving already. Let me take a few minutes to see if I can sort out what's happened in my musical life since my last post... jeesh, this gets harder and harder every day I age...

September and October saw a little bit of SNUG activity. First up was a private event at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge in Millbrae. A stripped-down lineup - SiBon, Ross, and I - crammed into a ludicrously cramped space and played a very short set and got fed some incredible food. Next up was a very fun outdoor brunchtime gig at the Main Street Coffee Roasting Company in Redwood City. We went over well and hope to be back there again when the weather returns to the appropriate temperature. Finally, we played on a Saturday night at a funky bar in San Mateo, Moon's Family Sports Pub (I think the word "family" in the title means the pub is owned/operated by Moon's family, not that it's a family sports pub to take your kids to for a meal and a few brewskis). This time we had a fill-in rhythm section, Alvin Joseph on bass and an old musical colleague of SiBon's, Rick Bailey on drums. We went over well and I suspect might be back there again soon.

In October I sat in for several songs with Stan Erhart's band at the American Legion Hall in Princeton-by-the-Sea, right next door to the OPL, long-time site of Stan's Sunday night jam which I used to frequent when it was still happening. Then in mid-November I played a set with my friend's band Blue Tuesday at McGovern's Bar in San Mateo, an evening that was made noteworthy by the presence of the awesome Berkeley-based guitarist Garth Webber sitting in a later set. It would have been great to have had a chance to play with Garth again (we jammed once or twice a while back at Stan Erhart's OPL jam), but it was wonderful just to be able to watch and listen to him.

I've continued to attend the Club Fox jam on Wednesday nights in Redwood City, but much less frequently. I used to go probably 4 out of 5 times, now I head down there probably once a month or so. My original plan was to switch it up and go to some of the other local jams in between, especially a couple of jazz jams, but I haven't seemed to have been able to do that quite yet.

Concert-wise, I saw a couple of great shows. In October, at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco, there was a King Crimson-centric performance titled Two of a Perfect Trio - Adrian Belew's Power Trio and Tony Levin's Stick Men. Belew and Levin, along with Stick Men drummer Pat Mastelloto, were (are?) members of King Crimson, and the whimsical name for the tour is wordplay on the title of a Belew song and Crimson album, Three of a Perfect Pair. Each trio performed a set of mostly their own originals. Then Belew, Levin, and Mastelloto came out and performed a couple of King Crimson songs. Finally the remaining members of the two trios (touch guitarist Markus Reuter from Stick Men, and bassist Julie Slick and drummer Tobias Ralph from Belew's Power Trio) came out and joined the trio of Crimalums for a pulverizing set of Crimson material.

Then, on Halloween night, at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, I saw Jeff Beck. It was my ninth time seeing him (a review of the previous show in 2009 and a list of all the other times I've seen him is detailed in this blog post). This time his band still had Jason Rebello on keyboards, but the bass and drum chairs were filled by Rhonda Smith and Narada Michael Walden. The set list had a fair amount of overlap from the 2009 show, with the addition of several tunes from Beck's latest studio recording Emotion and Commotion and a couple of new covers added since then.

Not much I can say about Jeff Beck that hasn't been said, so I'll leave it at this - when he comes back next year (with a new studio album, apparently, and a tour with his new trio with Rhonda Smith and drummer Veronica Bellino), I'll be getting tickets if he's anywhere within a couple of hundred miles...

Late August update

2011-08-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

It seems I'm letting the time get away from me again. Missed noting a few things that I did this summer.

SNUG played a short one-hour gig outdoors at the San Mateo High School football field on Saturday afternoon, July 9th, as part of the American Cancer Society Rally For Life event. I recorded it with my digital recorder but it was windy, and I forgot the windscreen, and so the results were essentially unlistenable.

I had the privilege of seeing two great shows at this summer's Stanford Jazz Festival. First, on June 30th, was the wonderful Milton Nascimento and his Band of Four. I've been a huge fan of his work since I first heard his collaboration with Wayne Shorter, Native Dancer, back in the mid-seventies. I had seen him once before, back in the early eighties with a large ensemble, but this time he had a small group with just four other musicians. It was exquisite.

About a month later, on July 24th, I caught Ruth Davies' Blues Night with special guest Robben Ford. It was great to see Ford play with a larger group for a change rather than in a trio setting.

I had a small jazz gig at the Palo Alto Elk's Lodge on August 19th, with some of the guys from the group of folks that used to play at the Turtle Bay Seafood & Grill restaurant in Foster City. It was a lot of fun and I hope to do it again.

Aside from that I've been going to the Club Fox jam now and then, and also the Sunday one at the Pioneer once in a while. But I am scaling it back a bit for the time being. Just too time-consuming for the small amount of playing involved.

Benefit for the Cobb Family - follow-up

2011-06-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

Bobbi Goodman also videoed our performance on June 5th, compiling both tunes into a single video.

Benefit for the Cobb Family

2011-06-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, June 5th, I was honored to be part of an afternoon of music & fellowship in benefit of the family of guitarist Chris Cobb, who lost their younger son Clay earlier this year. It was held at McGovern's Bar in San Mateo and the music lasted from before 1pm until after 9pm. Some of the featured performers were Stan Erhart, Dave Workman, the Daniel Castro Band with Terry Hiatt, the Chris Cobb Band; there were many others. I played three numbers (one with vocals) with the able assistance of Jeff Kamil on guitar, Pat Tinling on bass, and Jackie Enx on drums, with Gino "Bambino" Emmerich guesting with us on one tune.

Dave Workman took some video of two of the numbers with his iPod Touch:
"That Road"
"Unchain My Heart"

As you can tell if you watch those YouTube vids, both numbers were somewhat shabby. We only had one very brief rehearsal about three or four days before the show. I made a bunch of glaring mistakes. But Pat and Jackie are such strong players that it almost didn't matter - the groove and the drive were there for Jeff and I to surf on.

The Tedeschi/Trucks Band at the Warfield in San Francisco, May 22, 2011

2011-06-02T16:06:00.000-07:00

I saw the Tedeschi/Trucks Band a week ago last Sunday night at the Warfield in San Francisco.

Almost exactly two years ago I saw the Derek Trucks Band, which was also a fantastic show by a superb band. But this band is a notch or two better. There are a couple of holdovers - the singer Mike Mattison, though now he's a backup vocalist rather than the featured vocalist, and Kofi Burbridge, the keyboardist and flautist. On bass now is Kofi's brother Oteil, who has been the bassist in the Allman Brothers Band for many years now. There are two drummers, J. J. Johnson and Tyler Greenwell. There's a three-piece horn section with trumpeter Maurice Brown, tenor saxophonist Kebbi Williams, and trombonist Saunders Sermons. Finally, there's one more backup vocalist, Mark Rivers, for a total of 11 folks in the band.

The music was all new stuff to this ensemble, with the exception of the old Derek & the Dominoes song "Anyday," which the DTB Band did perform, and maybe one or two other covers that might possibly have been in the repertoire in either Derek's or Susan's earlier groups. They performed "Space Captain," the tune that they recorded with Herbie Hancock on his last CD, The Imagine Project, and a bunch of stellar originals, some of which I've heard already, like "Midnight In Harlem" which they did on the last Crossroads Guitar Fest DVD. They did a couple of interesting covers, like Jimi's "Manic Depression" (which Oteil sang lead on) in the first encore, and the Meters song "Just Kissed My Baby" in the second encore.

Second encore! I can't remember the last time I've been to a show that had a second encore. They played a bit over two hours in all; I didn't get home until midnight.

Their debut CD, Revelator, is being released in a couple of weeks (June 7th).

Robbie Robertson's new release

2011-05-20T14:07:00.001-07:00

How To Become Clairvoyant is the fifth solo release by Robbie Robertson, coming 13 years since his last release (and I thought Jeff Beck waited a long time between recordings). I remember being really knocked out by Robertson's first solo album in 1987, so when I first heard about this one, my antennae twiggled. Then I learned that it is a collaboration with Eric Clapton, which further tweaked my interest.

I've been quite pleased with it. The songs are all very good, though none of them jump out at you as an instant classic like "Cripple Creek" or "The Weight" from his years in The Band.

Robertson's vocals are... what should I say? -limited? -but they work. He sometimes treads close to pretentiousness, but usually he manages to be emotionally expressive, and he has an excellent sense of phrasing and rhythm.

Sonically the recording is brilliant. It's sort of a combination of raw, lo-fi electric guitars, nylon-string acoustics, and Hammond B-3, mixed up with more modern electronic sounds here and there. Everything sounds organic and loose, but there are all sorts of interesting layers and interlocking bits of sound, in a way that reminds me of Lowell George's production work with his band Little Feat. I haven't been as impressed with the production of a recording in a long time like I have been with this.

Clapton is all over the record, but in an understated way for the most part, except for where he and Robertson trade off lead vocals on the song "Fear of Falling." He co-wrote some of the material, plays guitar and sings backup on many of the tunes. It's wonderful to hear Clapton involved with something as creative as this.

Steve Winwood also appears on organ. Bass and drums are mostly provided by Pino Palladino and Ian Thomas, There are also appearances by Robert Randolph, Tom Morello, Trent Reznor, Angela McClusky, Jim Keltner, and others.

There's a nice little writeup about the disk at NPR's Music's First Listen site.

The 40th anniversary remasters of Layla

2011-05-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

The other day on the way to work I listened to the 40th anniversary remaster of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek & the Dominos.

40 years... whew. I was a junior in high school, a nascent guitar player and a stone Clapton fanatic when I first heard this, and I immediately embraced it as an incredible, near-perfect recording in every way - real emotion, exuberant, passionate playing, great songs, the right balance of rawness and polish, and some of the best-sounding guitar parts ever...

Over the years I have kept coming back to it, and to this day it still always hits me the same way.

At this period of time Eric Clapton was pretty much at the peak of his powers, and ever since his best efforts have never approached even the foothills of the heights he reached on this recording. The stories are legendary - his (at that point) unrequited love for his friend George Harrison's wife, the sympatico meeting between Clapton and Duane Allman - and knowing this history helps inform one's appreciation of the record, but it's really in the music that was put on tape, and the order in which it was presented, that the rubber hits the road.

In the Dominos (Bobby Whitlock on keys and vocals, Jim Gordon on drums, and Carl Radle on bass), Clapton had a crack rhythm section and, in the case of Whitlock, a songwriting partner and strong vocalist to serve as a foil. And with the addition of Duane Allman, and the generosity with which Clapton featured him in the songs he played on (more than three-quarters of the album), an already delicious musical stew got some wonderful extra spice and complexity.

Bobby Whitlock, who has recently been very talkative about this album and his time as a Domino (on the heels of his autobiography that came out a year or two back), says that Allman didn't really add all that much to the album, that it would have been just as great an album had he not been present, but I beg to differ. I'm sure it would have been a great album (a listen to the first three tracks, sans Allman, demonstrate that), but Allman's playing in the presence of "God" is inspired, and I suspect Allman's presence tweaked a bit more divine wattage out of Clapton's playing too.

That said, one of my favorite tunes has always been "Keep On Growing," on which Clapton alone plays guitar (as on the first two tracks, "I Looked Away" and "Bell Bottom Blues") -- but a lot of guitar! There are multiple parts piled up here. Several overdubbed rhythm figures drive the song, and cocky fills bristle in between the lines of the verses and choruses. Then, after the last chorus, several guitars improvise joyously in and out and around and through each other. It's the kind of thing that you would expect to quickly dissolve into raucous cacophony and be an over-indulgent mess, but for some reason it's magical.

Deluxe editions

2011-04-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

Special editions of a couple of my favorite recordings have come out recently: John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic and Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek & the Dominos.

The Traffic set arrived on Friday and includes two disks: the original album remastered on Disk 1, and a couple of alternate takes, including a rather different arrangement of the title track, plus a bunch of live tracks from the Fillmore East from 1970, which include Ric Grech on bass along with the core trio of Steve Winwood on vocals, guitar, piano and Hammond B-3, Jim Capaldi on drums and vocals, and Chris Wood on flute, sax, and Hammond B-3.

The Dominos package is supposed to ship tomorrow so I should have it in a few days. In addition to the remastered album, there are also tracks from their appearance on the Johnny Cash TV show and a couple of tracks that were recorded for an abortive second Dominoes album.

Some band gigs...

2011-04-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

I have almost fully recovered from being up past my bedtime after the second SNUG gig in fifteen days. Both were at Murf's Broadway Cocktail Lounge in Redwood City. Both gigs went well. Not much of an audience - a few friends, and a few other folks... a couple of dancers...

Our fill-in drummer, David Bossler from the local band Funktional Soul, did a great job on our vast repertoire with minimal rehearsal.

One good thing was that for once we seemed to have gotten SiBon's vocals loud enough, and the recordings I made with the Zoom H4n came out very well.

Recordings of "Use Me," the Bill Withers song which is my one lead vocal with SNUG, and my guitar solo on "Chain of Fools" are posted now on my website. Hopefully SiBon will find a song or two worthy of using as demos and will put something up on the SNUG site.

It's spring...

2011-03-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

A rainy first week of spring here in the Bay Area.

The Club Fox jam in Redwood City continues to go strong. I've been there virtually every week since it reopened in November except for two Wednesdays when I was back in NY for the Christmas holiday.

Over the last month or so a new Sunday night jam has been taking place at the Pioneer Saloon in Woodside. It features Terry Hiatt, local guitar player extraordinaire and all-around nice guy. Lots of players and singers are showing up and playing for an enthusiastic crowd.

Also over the last month the live jazz at the Turtle Bay Seafood & Grill in Foster City has ceased. I'd been playing there on average of about once a month since last fall. It's too bad because it was helping me keep my jazz chops on the road to improvement; I'll have to find some other way to accomplish that.

Meanwhile, the SNUG band has landed a pair of gigs at Murf's Broadway Cocktail Lounge in Redwood City, the first this Friday and the second fifteen days later. SNUG has not played a show since August.

On the listening front I have recently been listening to John Coltrane's One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note 2-CD set. The title track, a 27-minute improvisation by Coltrane, is a mind-blowing tour de force. As Elvin Jones is quoted on the slipcase, "it seemed like he was sitting on a mountain of ideas, and they would flake off every three or four seconds."

I am also looking forward to the first album by the Tedeschi/Trucks Band, especially after seeing their transcendent performance of one of its songs, "Midnight In Harlem," on the Crossroads 2010 DVD. I also have tickets to see them perform at the Warfield in San Francisco in late May.

In the bleak midwinter

2011-02-15T14:59:00.000-08:00

Strange that the week of February 6 greeted us here with sunny, beautiful days with temperatures getting up into the low 70's. This week, more wintry weather is back with gray skies, rain and wind on tap for the rest of this week.

The winter is seeming a bit more bleak than it might otherwise, though, due to the demise of Stan Erhart's Sunday night "Killa Jam." This jam was approaching its ninth year (or was it the tenth?), with a brief hiatus at the end of last summer when the Old Princeton Landing was sold and closed for remodeling. We all worried then that the jam would be kaput, but when the new owners reopened, it was back. Then suddenly in mid-January, they pulled the plug on it. Sigh... back to watching Masterpiece Theatre on Sunday nights...

The new member of the menagerie

2011-01-10T11:47:00.000-08:00

(... or the new quiver in the bow, the new brush in the paintbox...)

Saturday I picked up a Squier Esprit guitar. These guitars were part of the Squier Master Series, made in Korea for only a year or so around 2005. It has a double cutaway, chambered mahogany body, a carved mahogany top, a 22-fret mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard, 24.75-in scale (like a Gibson Les Paul or SG, and unlike most Fenders, which have a 25.5-in scale length), with 2 Duncan-designed humbucking pickups, a three-position switch, and a pair of volume and tone knobs, one per pickup. This model was based on the Fender Esprit/Elite models made by Fender in the 80's, and famously endorsed for a while by Robben Ford. The Squier sports a slightly different headstock, and the pickups are not wired so that you can split the humbucker's coils.

This guitar was previously owned by my pal Dave Workman, a terrific Bay Area blues guitarist, so it's got some built-in mojo.

Guitar Player magazine reviewed it back in the August 2005 issue, and gave it the Editor's Pick nod.

I played it a bit when I got it home. After a couple of weeks of only playing my Telecaster (with a 25.5-in scale length), it was quite different in feel, and it took me a while to get comfortable, but the sound was inspiring from the get-go. Played acoustically, it is rich and vibrant, which is always a good sign. Plugged in, it sounds marvelous. Played through a clean amp, it sounds like a good jazz guitar, with a complex character and great definition. Crank up the gain, and the humbuckers sing like a sweet Les Paul. I was impressed with the clarity and definition even when you roll the highs off.

Sunday night I brought it with me to one of the jams that I frequent (Stan Erhart's "Killa Jam" at the Old Princeton Landing out on the Pacific coast) and got to play it into a couple of very fine amplifiers (a blackface Fender Vibrolux and an Allen Brown Sugar) through a couple of different pedals. It sounded very inspiring, was comfortable, and a joy to play.

A passel of miscellany

2011-01-06T15:09:00.000-08:00

"In the Bleak Midwinter" often appears on Christmas recordings. But Christmas is only a couple of days after the first day of winter. What's up with that? By my reckoning, midwinter is around the first of February.

Speaking of Christmas recordings, got a couple more this year. Somehow I missed the fact that the amazing guitarist Tuck Andress recorded a CD of Christmas music in the early nineties... so I got that. Also, I heard a small sample of a recording entitled performed by Christmas Music from Medieval Hungary by Anonymous 4 and thought that, like the review blurb on the album cover, it was "sublime." So I got that, too.

Speaking of sublime, the other night I watched some of the Crossroads Festival 2010 DVD that I got for Christmas. The first track on disk 2, "Midnight In Harlem" by the Derek Trucks/Susan Tedeschi Band, is just wonderful. Other highlights include Jeff Beck's performance of "Hammerhead" and "Nessun Dorma" (yes, the Puccini aria from Turandot). I was also pleased with Eric Clapton's performances with Steve Winwood -- playing with his old friend and collaborator brings out the best in old EC. (Check out "Voodoo Child" if you're so inclined...)

Since last posting here I've been busy with the usual stuff... playing at the Club Fox jam and at Stan Erhart's "killa jam" at the Old Princeton Landing as often as possible, and played a few gigs as part of the thrown-together jazz combo at the Turtle Bay Seafood & Grill restaurant in Foster City.

I hope that 2011 will be full of great things -- more and better gigs, maybe I'll finally get one of my recording projects moved forward, and of course more great stuff to listen to (like the soon-to-be released David Binney CD, Graylen Epicenter, with sax maestro Chris Potter and guitar wizard Wayne Krantz.

Music books

2010-10-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

I've read a couple of music-related books over the past couple of months.

First I read Bill Bruford: The Autobiography by the excellent and erudite master drummer and former member of Yes, King Crimson, UK, and his own bands Bruford and Earthworks. It was a delightful survey of his life as a musician.

Next up was Power, Passion and Beauty: The Story of the Legendary Mahavishnu Orchestra, by Walter Kolosky. A bit raggedy in presentation, looking somewhat like a ineptly-done desktop publishing job by someone not very good with their tools, but a very enjoyable book. I loved this band as much as the book's author obviously does and so I was probably destined to like the book, and I did.

This week I started working through Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991, by Paul Tingen.

All of these books inspired me to re-listen to the music I was reading about. I listen to it fairly often anyway, but it's interesting to listen to it with some new perspective brought about by the discussions in the books.

The return of the Golden Gate Blues Society Wednesday blues jams at the Club Fox in Redwood City

2010-09-21T16:08:00.000-07:00

More good news came in last week. The weekly blues jams at the Club Fox (formerly the Little Fox) in Redwood City will be back on line starting Wednesday, November 17. The jam went dark about ten months ago, and it's wonderful that it's coming back... it's a great jam in a great space with an enthusiastic audience, and it's been much missed.

The first jam will be hosted by Daniel Castro Band...

The return of the Sunday night OPL jam session

2010-09-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

Just a short note to mention that the weekly Sunday night "pro" blues jam at the Old Princeton Landing returns this coming Sunday evening, September 12.

The OPL changed hands at the end of July and was closed for about a month for renovation.

Here's hoping that the jam resumes and continues as successfully under the new regime as it has under the old one for nearly a decade...

Lenny White at Yoshi's Oakland

2010-09-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

My son David has started playing the drums this summer. My other son Ian had been playing for a while a couple of years ago. So when I read that Lenny White's new jazz-rock band featuring guitarist Jimmy Herring were going to be performing at Yoshi's in Oakland, I asked them if they wanted to go see one of the all-time great drummers, and they were agreeable.

The band was billed as Lenny White and Anomaly, which is the title of White's newest CD.

So I came home a bit early that afternoon (Wednesday, August 25) so that we could get across the bay in time to get some good seats and grab a bite to eat before the show.

As things were we didn't have to worry about seats, as the place was sadly only about 1/4-1/3 full. I was surprised that it wasn't better attended, but maybe I shouldn't be.

The music was pretty squarely in a electric guitar-soaked, technically adept, Return To Forever jazz-rock mode. I love this kind of stuff when it's played well, and this group played it well. At the base of it was Lenny White's drums driving it all along with power, finesse, and earthiness. Lenny is one of those ageless people that looks pretty much the same today in his early sixties as he did when I saw him with Return To Forever in his late twenties. The bassist, Richie Goods, locked in tight with Lenny. On keyboards was the very impressive Vince Evans.

On top of this were two electric guitarists. Jimmy Herring was the big draw for me - I've known of him for years through hearing him with Project Z and Jazz Is Dead, guesting on one of Derek Trucks' early albums, Out Of the Madness, and last year's Lifeboat, his solo debut.

The other guitarist was new to me - Tom Guarna - but I was very impressed. He can play this kind of stuff about as well as anyone I've heard.

It struck me as a bit odd that the band would feature two guitarists with such similar sounds and styles, but it worked.

Herring and McKellen-separated at birth?

Lenny White was amusing in some of moments of talking to the audience. He introduced Jimmy Herring and said he'd known of him for a while and had been pleasantly surprised by how good he was as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. He teased Tom Guarna about having a Masters from Julliard. After his first drum solo, a rather sparse, subtle and low-volume performance on his kit over a simple repeating pattern from the band, he said "Now that's an anomaly -a quiet drum solo."

My sons thought it was a cool show. It went over better than when I took them here one Sunday afternoon many years ago when they were pretty small to see Bill Frisell.

Larry Carlton Trio at Yoshi's San Francisco

2010-08-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

On a cool summer night (Friday, July 31st), I took in the Larry Carlton Trio at Yoshi's in San Francisco. Sitting with a couple of my guitar buddies in fantastic seats, we watched the legendary Mr. 335 play his namesake guitar in the company of his bass player son Travis Carlton and drummer... dammit, can't remember his name! and I can't find him listed on either Carlton's site or Yoshi's. Maybe someone that reads this can remind me, or maybe I can dig it up in my email sent messages folder...

This was actually the first time I have had the pleasure of seeing Larry Carlton live. He was a big influence back in the day when he played so tastefully on those Crusaders records and so many others. His guitar parts on Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne" are legendary and universally lauded (Rolling Stone labeled his solo one of the three greatest in rock history). But ever since he began a solo career, he seemed to put out rather dull records - glossy, heavily produced, with little vim and vigor - a progenitor of the sort of music that's come to be known as (excuse me as I try to control my facial expression here) smooth jazz. After buying his first couple of LPs, I kind of stopped paying attention to him.

But as his recent duo CD and DVD with Robben Ford aptly demonstrated, he is as ever a masterful musician. The Yoshi's show bore this out in spades. His touch on the fretboard and the finesse of his right hand are phenomenal. By turns delicate, sassy, growling, tender, always soulful, he stated melodies, improvised solos, and brushed harmonies when his son Travis took solos. As icing on the cake, his tone was also just about perfect, just gorgeous. Me and the gents at my table were all smiles the entire performance.

Aside from his musical gifts, Larry is also an open, affable, warm, humorous and eminently likable performer. One amusing exchange took place where he mentioned that someone had emailed his manager and insisted that he mention his anniversary

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from the stage. First pretending to be dismissive and a trifle annoyed by the request, he then proceeded to ask the man to stand in the audience, and said he would play "Happy Anniversary" (which is the same song as "Happy Birthday") for him and his wife and that he could choose the key. The man called out "B minor." With an amused raising of eyebrows and a few comments about how strange it was to ask for it in a minor key, he said "whatever" and proceed

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ed to play a harmonized and minorized version of the tune, stressing every point where what was normally a major third or a major seventh was now flatted, and making an amused stinky face. The audience was howling.

Local jam sessions

2010-07-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

Some news about some of the local jams, none of it particularly good, but not all totally grim either:

The Old Princeton Landing over on the coast just north of Half Moon Bay is now under new ownership. It will be closed for several weeks as the new owners spruce it up. Word is that Stan Erhart's Sunday night jam session will resume soon... hopefully that will turn out to be the case.
The Little Fox in Redwood City, now called the Club Fox, has reopened officially for a one-off show the evening prior to the Redwood City PAL Blues Festival, but whether or not the Wednesday night blues jam is going to be reinstated, and when, has yet to be announced.
The jazz jam at Angelica's Bistro in Redwood City that I mentioned below was killed off after a mere two weeks, and restarted under new direction. I have not been back yet, so no word on whether it's worthwhile or not...
Finally, to end this somewhat dreary litany of not-so-great news, I'll end on a positive note - the Wednesday night jazz jam at the Milan Pizza Restaurant in Mountain View has really been going strong, with a healthy crowd, an excellent house trio, and some good players sitting in - hats off to Marty Honda for pulling it off.

Brief July update

2010-07-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

Once again I'm killing a few minutes before heading over to the jazz jam at the Milan Pizza Restaurant in Mountain View. I've continued to go almost every week since it started, and it's been kicking my ass, but it's been good for me despite the pain.

The band SNUG has a gig coming up, this Friday evening in Redwood City. I'm looking forward to it.

I've been enjoying Bill Bruford's autobiography the last week or so. He's quite a good writer and it's a thoughtful look at the music business from his personal experiences within it for the last 40-odd years.

Looking forward to seeing Larry Carlton's trio at Yoshi's San Francisco next week...

That's all for the moment, gotta run.

Jammin'

2010-06-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

As I write this I'm anticipating heading out from the office around 6:30pm and heading over to the Milan Pizza Restaurant in Mountain View to participate in a new jazz jam session that's been going on there now every Wednesday night for the last month. I went last week and thoroughly enjoyed myself. The house band has some great players, and lots of folks showed up and played - there was a sax player and his brother on flute, two trumpeters, a trombonist, a pianist, and a couple of bass players and drummers. The horn players typically come up one by one and each call two tunes before making way for the next player. Rhythm section players get to play more. In my case I was treated like a horn, so I called my two tunes, played the heads, and soloed.

Now, to be honest, I'm still a bit out of my depth trying to play jazz. While I've been fluttering around the edges of it for decades, and been a heavy fan and listener since my teens, to this day I have not gotten past the fooling-around stage. But oh-so-gradually I'm getting better at it, which is somewhat gratifying, though the pace is glacial. And really the only way I'm going to keep improving and approaching being able to execute what I hear in my head is to keep at it, as often as possible. The blues jams I've been frequenting are great fun, and lots of times the music is entirely gratifying, but I really feel the need to push out of my comfort zone and be able to do this jazz guitar thing with some style and grace and gravity.

As I wrote about not too long ago, a good part of this is what I do with my practice time, especially since as a working slob with a family, I have so little of it. I'm pleased to say that for the last four or five weeks I have made a concerted effort to play with backing tracks as frequently as I can manage, and it's starting to feel like it's beginning to register an effect. I still have not done any regular transcribing, but... all in good time. Whereas back there in January I gave myself a D+, I think I've definitely moved up to C+, or maybe even B-.

To help keep the momentum up, I'm thinking seriously of taking three or four of the workshops that are offered from time to time at the wonderful JazzSchool in Berkeley. For example, on Sunday Anton Schwartz is doing one of his Playing the Heck Out Of... series of workshops, each of which focuses for a couple of hours on one commonly-played iconic tune. This one is on "Autumn Leaves." Later in the summer are Playing the Heck Out of "It Could Happen to You" and Playing the Heck Out of "So What" and "Impressions." There are also a couple of workshops from guitarist John Stowell coming up. Mimi Fox is also doing a week-long jazz guitar intensive that goes from 9am to 4:30pm every day for a week in August.

Maybe taking some of those workshops will inspire me to take another class or two at the school, as I did back in the early aughts. What a great resource, and the faculty is great. Too bad it's all the way across the bay and north... hard to do week in and week out.

Two recent CDs

2010-06-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

I've gotten the two CDs I mentioned in my last entry, To the One by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension and Renegade Creation from Robben Ford, Michael Landau, Jimmy Haslip and Gary Novak.

The McLaughlin one is pretty good. I found it not quite as terrific as his last release, 2008's Floating Point, but better than 2006's Industrial Zen. This one features his latest touring band, which consists of McLaughlin, keyboardist/drummer Gary Husband, bassist Etienne M'bappe, and drummer Mark Mondesir. The playing overall is top-notch. McLaughlin's playing has a lot of explosiveness. I especially enjoyed the contributions of Husband, who I know of originally as the drummer in Allan Holdsworth's I.O.U. band from the late 70's.

The Renegade Creation CD I found somewhat disappointing. Fine, exemplary (and beautifully recorded) guitar work from both Ford and Landau, and the band locks together well, but the songs just seem a little bit perfunctory. One in particular of Robben's is so cringe-worthy lyrically that I can't listen to it. After seeing them perform at Yoshi's in the winter, I expected a lot more from this project.

Meanwhile two more new disks arrived just yesterday, both from bassist/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist/composer Richard Bona, one of my favorite musicians - his new release, Ten Shades of Blues, and the live Bona Makes You Sweat from 2008. I'll write about these later after I've had a chance to listen through a few times. For now suffice it to say I broke into a broad grin several times while listening to these the first time, and I'm once again dismayed that he is not more widely known...

Spring update

2010-04-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

Spring is not only here, it's 1/3rd gone already... jeepers.

Not much to report, alas. There have been some great recent concerts that I've missed, alas, notably Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny's Orchestrion project, John Scofield, and Jeff Beck. There's been a few new recordings, including the new Jeff Beck one, Emotion & Commotion. On the near horizon (and on pre-order) are new releases by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension and Robben Ford's latest project Renegade Creation, the band formerly know as Trial By Fire, about whose performance at Yoshi's I wrote about previously.

The band SNUG has a new bass player, Mark Cvitkovich, and we are getting him up to speed with the repertoire. I've been doing my usual jamming thing, more often some weeks than others. To fill the void left by the defunct Golden Gate Blues Society jam, I've finally gone out and visited a few of the other jams I've been thinking about trying for a while. I've been trying to play some more jazz too before I start devolving too much.

My trusty old Gibson L6-S is back in action finally. The jack had gotten rather loose and caused an intermittent connection, which rendered it mostly unusable until repaired.

Practice, practice, practice

2010-01-29T16:41:00.000-08:00

It sure is hard to move forward with this guitar playing thing. I practice quite a lot for a guy with very little time on his hands, yet I seem to move ahead so slowly, it's like I'm a glacier or something.

The thing is, I don't practice very well...

There are two pretty simple things that I just don't do enough of, which I'm pretty certain could really help me improve more than anything else besides just putting in the hours - transcribing, and playing along with backing tracks.

For many many years I have heard from a million people that one of the best ways to learn to play blues and jazz is to transcribe the solos I particularly like. Becoming facile with scales gets the notes under your fingertips and helps the execution, but there's little in that to help the musicality of what gets executed. Transcribing lets you see how someone you admire has put together the building blocks to arrive at something exemplary, and learn from it. The goal is not to play just like, say, Wes Montgomery, but to explore the things about Wes that made your ears perk up and take notice.

Yet have I done it? Hardly at all. I just bought a software tool called, oddly enough, Transcribe, which is a fantastic thing - it allows you to mark off parts of a piece of music, slow down the playback without changing the pitch, and play it in a loop if you want. So much easier than the old days when you had to pick up the tone arm on the record player to repeat a phrase or section, or use the fast forward and rewind buttons - and if you wanted to slow it down, the pitch also dropped. I have started working on my first project, transcribing Pat Martino's solo from "Later," a straight-ahead blues from a Willis Jackson recording called Bar Wars. I've gotten through the first chorus and the first couple of bars of the second... in about four weeks. OK, I'm not going to beat myself up yet about how long it's taking, at least I'm doing it.

And backing tracks. There are thousands of well-recorded tracks available from folks like Music Minus One, Jamey Aebersold, Hal Leonard , and many more, which cover practically any style you can imagine. These have been available for many years, first on LP, then cassette, and then CD. It's also become easy to create your own arrangements using a computer and MIDI - these have the wonderful advantage of allowing you to alter the key and tempo at will.

I've had a computer-based MIDI setup since the mid nineties, and I have a dozen or more Aebersold recordings and similar things.

Yet do I practice playing over tracks? Nowhere near as often as I could. I seem to spend way more time practicing things in isolation, without so much as a metronome ticking away, than I do playing over backing tracks.

Amongst my new year's resolutions is to shift the balance of my practice time - more time transcribing, and more time playing with chords, bass lines, and drums providing a reasonably realistic emulation of a infinitely patient band. After the first month, I'd give myself maybe a D+ so far.

I'm writing this as a form of arguing to myself about doing better with it. Sure, conditions are not wonderful, but I can do way better.

Trial By Fire at Yoshi's, Thursday, January 14, 2010

2010-01-16T23:09:00.000-08:00

Trial By Fire is the name of the ensemble consisting of Robben Ford and Michael Landau on guitar and vocals, Jimmy Haslip on bass, and Gary Novak on drums. I saw the early show at Yoshi's on the first of their four-night stint.
The guys came out of the gate seemingly a bit out of synch; Landau's first solo seemed like he was fighting to squeeze notes out his guitar and wasn't quite feeling the music (the first tune was Robben's "Just Like It Is" from Tiger Walk), while Robben seemed way under-represented in the mix. It picked up from there, however, and they locked in well. Both Robben and Mike Landau sang, but neither was in very good voice. And the new songs were OK but none of them really stood out to me.
Aside from those minor quibbles, there was lots of really great playing by both Robben and Landau; both were in excellent form (giving Mike some slack on the opening tune). In addition to the several new numbers from the upcoming CD, they played another song from Tiger Walk, "Oasis," and also did "Spoonful" and the Jimmy Reed medley that appeared on Soul On Ten last summer.
Robben played the sunburst 335 and the Tele about equally. There was a Les Paul there too but he never touched it. Landau played the same Stratocaster for the entire show.
Haslip and Novak were both great and contributed solos in "Oasis" and "Spoonful."
Looking forward to the CD (to be released in March, according to Robben.)

HoBoLeMa: some reviews

2010-01-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

Just a quick posting to collect a few links to reviews of the current HoBoLeMa tour:

from the Santa Cruz Sentinal
from the Oregon Music News website

Pat Martino at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, San Francisco, Fri. 11/6/2009

2010-01-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

Sorry to be out of sequence here, writing about the Holdsworth et. al. show this week before getting caught up with an earlier show.

Pat Martino has been one of my favorite guitar players since I first heard him on an Eric Kloss album in the early seventies. I immediately went out and got his own Live! album and then pretty much everything else he ever recorded. There are lots of jazz guitar players but something about Pat's feel has always hit me right at the core. His personal story is quite fascinating too; google him to find out about that, and if you're interested try to find the documentary film Martino Unstrung if you can.

The concert was part of the Fall San Francisco Jazz Festival program, a show named "Hammond B-3 organ summit" -- Pat's quartet included the fantastic organist Tony Monaco, and the opening act was another great Hammond player, Larry Goldings, and his trio.

Both groups were basically in the classic Hammond organ trio format - guitar, drums, and the Hammond player doing double duty pumping out bass lines as well as chords, melodies, and solos. (Never mind that Pat's group was a quartet with the inclusion of tenor sax player Eric Alexander.)

Golding's group was great, but suffered from a poor job on the sound man's part - the bass was almost inaudible, which my concert-going partner Dave Workman described as cutting off his -- errr, emasculating Golding's performance. The trio included guitarist Peter Bernstein and the fantastic drummer Bill Stewart.

Martino's group didn't have this problem - Tony Monaco's bass lines were clear, swinging, and had -- errrr, were virile. Drummer Jason Brown was the only player I had not heard of before, and he was excellent. They played for around an hour or so, playing many of Pat's tunes and a smattering of other stuff. Both Monaco and Alexander are very strong soloists in their own right, and Pat was in terrific form. It was a joy and a gift to hear such a great combo playing so well together.

HoBoLeMa at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Wed. 1/6/2010

2010-01-08T11:42:00.000-08:00

I left work early this Wednesday to pick up my pal John DeSilva and drive up and over the hill to Santa Cruz and take in the early show at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. We were there to see Allan Holdsworth (guitar), Tony Levin (bass and Chapman Stick), Terry Bozzio (drums), and Pat Mastelotto (drums).

The first noteworthy thing was the sheer visual presence of Terry Bozzio's drum set. You can get a gander at it from some of the photos on Tony Levin's website. I joked that perhaps he might have a trapeze rigged up to allow him to rapidly get from one side to the other... It occupied about 90% of the floor area of the small stage, leaving little room for the other players. If the stage was only slightly smaller they would not have been able to play the venue.

We had excellent seats, almost dead center and about six rows back from the stage (the Kuumbwa seats about 200). Shortly after 7 the lights dimmed, the announcer introduced the show, and out came the musicians. Almost immediately Mastellotto began hitting some parts of his very non-standard kit (which includes lots of electronic percussives and miscellaneous odd objects), and Bozzio started playing some bells... Tony Levin stood up with his Ned Steinberger electric upright and started playing some long tones... and Holdsworth started to play some intriguing harmonies on his custom Bill DeLap guitar... and so it began.

For the next hour they kept playing, constantly shifting between sparse, a tempo sections into dense grooves of various kinds. Mastelotto seemed to be leading the way a lot, but the interplay was astonishing (he and Bozzio recorded a CD of improvised duets in 2000). Levin alternated between his electric upright bass and the Chapman Stick. He has played quite a lot with both Mastelotto (in King Crimson) and Bozzio (two CDs from the trio Bozzio Levin Stevens, with Steve Stevens on guitar, from 1997 and 2000), and the three of them seemed very comfortable with everything, clearly delighting in the sonic tapestry that was being woven.

Holdsworth seemed to be the odd man out at times. It seemed like he wasn't very sure about what to add. He also seemed to have a bunch of effects that he hadn't quite set up and tweaked to his satisfaction. Occasionally he would seem to forget about it and fall into following something Levin was doing with washes of his signature dense, close voicings (chords that very few human beings can play - he has monstrous hands that twist into seemingly impossible spidery stretches), or start playing bursts of fluid lines in his inimitable way (nobody plays like Holdsworth... his note choice is so unusual and cliche-free, and his speed and fluency so powerful and astonishing), but too often he seemed to be unsure about what he should do. It didn't help that his sound was a bit too low in the mix all night. His first "solo," if you can call it that, was almost lost in the surging of the drums and growl of Levin's bass or Stick. Things got a little better each time he played a burst of lines, but never really got into proper balance, in my opinion.

Finally the evolving improvised music came to an end, to thunderous applause. Bozzio emerged from the structure and introduced everyone (as if anyone present didn't know who was on the stage) and spoke briefly about how none of this music was prepared, and about how it they were presenting a one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated musical experience, and how much fun it was to play with this group (he introduced Mastelotto as "my favorite drummer," Levin as "my favorite bass player," and Holdsworth as "everyone's favorite guitar player").

It was amusing to watch them leave the stage as Levin and Holdsworth both had to thread their way through the narrow space between Bozzio's and Mastelotto's kits - Holdsworth had particular trouble since he was carrying his guitar.

After a minute or two of clapping, hooting and hollering, they returned and played another improvised piece that lasted about ten minutes or so, this one exhibiting a bit more of Holdsworth's talents - it seemed as if he established the direction for this one.

Fascinating stuff! Not everyone's cup of tea - and very, very hard to pull off for mere mortals - but these four are not mere mortals.

Their tour continues tonight through Sunday at Yoshi's in Oakland, and then down south for a couple of dates before they go their separate ways for a while, regrouping in April for a brief tour of Europe.

It's a new year and a new decade

2010-01-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

... and it's starting off with a bang in the concert-going department, with two shows in the next 8 days:

Allan Holdsworth (guitar), Tony Levin (bass and Chapman Stick), Terry Bozzio (drums), and Pat Mastelotto (drums) at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz Wednesday, January 6. (Yup, you read right, two drummers.) I haven't seen Allan since he toured a couple of years ago with Alan Pasqua, Jimmy Haslip, and Chad Wackerman... the last time I saw Pat Maselotto was with King Crimson in 2003, I think... and I have not seen Terry Bozzio since he played with Jeff Beck in 1994 or so... and I have not seen Tony Levin since saw him with the mid-eighties version of King Crimson. I'm really curious what they will cook up for us... I suspect it will be highly improvisational.
Robben Ford (guitar) with Michael Landau (guitar), Jimmy Haslip (bass), and Gary Novak (drums) at Yoshi's in Oakland on Thursday, January 14. This will be the third time I've seen Robben since last February, each time in a different context.

Winter approaches...

2009-12-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

The atmosphere finally let us folks in the Bay Area know that it's almost mid-December, just a couple of weeks away from the winter solstice. Snow the other night on the high points - Mt, Hamilton, Mt. Diablo... frost all over everything the next couple of mornings. Now it's warmed up a little, but it's been raining for two days and it's supposed to continue to do so over the weekend.

The cover band I'm in, SNUG, is back in business with a new bass player, Mike Vargo. We've been rehearsing and hopefully will start booking some gigs very soon.

In recent weeks I added a couple of things to my musical toolbox:

I finally added a Fender Telecaster to my arsenal - a 1995 made-in-Mexico Telecaster Special, which has a humbucking pickup in the neck position instead of the standard single coil, and a five-position pickup switch that allows you to split the humbucker's coil and use it as a single coil pickup. Very versatile and a great-feeling, great-playing instrument. I love the way it looks too (see right).
I also bought a very nice effects toolbox called the M13 Stompbox Modeler from Line 6, makers of the famous POD guitar amp modelers. A fantastic a versatile unit, built like a tank, and full of terrific sounds. It should come in handy in SNUG.
Finally, I bought this amazing tiny amplifier called the Lunchbox, from ZT Amplifiers in Walnut Creek. There have been tiny amps before, some of which sound terrific, but none of which are usable in a live performance situation unless put through the PA system. But the Lunchbox actually is damn loud and cuts through a band just fine. It really is incredible.

Finally, I'm looking forward to a couple of exciting shows in early January. First is the combo consisting of guitarist Allan Holdsworth, bassist Tony Levin, and drummers Terry Bozzio and Pat Mastelotto. A week later guitarist Robben Ford is back in town, with Michael Landau on guitar, Jimmy Haslip on bass, and Gary Novak on drums.

Happy holidays to everyone, and may 2010 be a wonderful year for us all...

Adrian Belew Power Trio at Slim's, San Francisco

2009-11-03T10:46:00.000-08:00

On Sunday night, October 18, I drove up to San Francisco to see the Adrian Belew Power Trio at Slim's. I was alone - my usual concert-attending buddies were all unable to come. But as it turned out, I ran into my sister-in-law April, her husband Ted, Ted's brother Charles, and three other friends that they had come along with... so it turned into a party.

The opening act was a interesting acoustic guitar duet going by the name of Lapdance Armageddon.

Shortly after, Belew and his cronies came out on stage - the siblings Eric and Julie Slick on drums and bass respectively. The story of how he found the Slicks and came to employ them is interesting - here's a 2008 interview with Belew where he talks about it.

The music was wonderful, full of power and delicacy, dissonance and consonance, chaos and precision - sometimes all at once. Much of the show was taken up by bits of the new release e. On Belew's blog there's a good summary of what e is all about.

This was the first time I've seen Belew in his own setting since the early 90's (though I've seen him a couple of times this decade with King Crimson).

Autumn is underway

2009-10-14T09:17:00.001-07:00

Outside the ground is wet, thanks to "the biggest October storm since 1962" around these parts. That's a mixed blessing in the state that has had so many fires recently, with ridgetops burned bare and the potential for mudslides increased.

Meanwhile my musical endeavors continue on their slow and merry way:

SNUG is in a bit of a stand-by position, as we try to find a new bass player. We've been working on recording some better demos in the meantime, with yours truly playing bass as well as guitar, and I think they will probably see the light of day pretty soon.We'll also be doing a gig at the Shougun House Restaurant in early November as an acoustic act (which SiBon calls the GNUs rather than SNUG acoustic... don't ask me...).
I had two jazz gigs materialize out of the blue in September, one at a small restaurant in Foster City, another at Santana Row in San Jose. I've been mildly working myself back around to doing more playing of this nature, and while perhaps premature, it was a good to do them (and if I waited until I was "ready" in my mind, I might never get out there and play).
I have been to the Little Fox jam on Wednesdays and the Old Princeton Landing jam on Sundays as often as possible, as usual.
In my practice I've been trying to focus more on playing along with backing tracks. I tend to do that sporadically and I think it will be to my great advantage to do it as regularly as I can.

I also have a couple of music shows coming up that I'm excited about. Two of my favorite guitar players are coming to town. This coming Sunday I'm going into San Francisco to see Adrian Belew and his power trio at Slim's. On Friday, November 6, I'm also going to go into SF to see Pat Martino at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. 2009 continues to be a good year for guitar performances.

Handy new device

2009-09-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

I recently acquired a portable audio recorder, the ZOOM H4n Handy Recorder. It's a little bit bigger than a cigarette pack and sports a built-in pair of microphones, two universal inputs that take either XLR or 1/4 plugs so you can add external mics or take the line out of a mixer, and records to SD or SDHC cards. It has a USB 2.0 connection so you can transfer recordings to a computer, or even use it as a digital audio interface if you want to use it to record straight to a computer.

A couple of months ago at band rehearsal the keyboard player brought a CD recorder and spent many long minutes trying to set up a pair of mics running through the PA system to record the session. It worked OK but required a fair bit of effort. We were hoping to get a decent demo out of the experience. It was not fruitful, and it was painful enough that we didn't try again.

I brought a laptop to a duet gig in July and set it up to record off a stereo out from the PA, and that was fairly easy and gave good results, but was a bit cumbersome to set up. Enough so that I would think twice about doing it again.

With something like the H4n, though, the hassle factor is reduced so much that it's almost a no-brainer to drag it along anywhere. Just stick it in the guitar case or in the bag with the cables and bring a spare mic stand or a tripod to hold it (and a pair of spare AA batteries if you can't count on an AC outlet you can use)... set it up in a reasonable spot, make sure the levels are OK, and hit RECORD. It's dead easy to capture any rehearsal or performance, and the results are about as good as you could hope for.

The only downside is, when I get home from rehearsal or a gig, I've got a bunch of work ahead of me getting the files onto the computer, editing the recordings down to individual tracks, turning them into MP3s and/or burning CDs to share with the other band members.

Summer 2009

2009-09-01T17:34:00.000-07:00

This has been a pretty busy and interesting summer so far. The band I joined, SNUG, played our first few gigs. I played a duet gig with vocalist Janna Osborne (some recordings are on my website) at a restaurant in Redwood City, and a solo gig at a private party in San Mateo. In addition to going as often as I could to the Old Princeton Landing and the Little Fox jams, I jammed one night at Joe Lococo's jam at Peri's in Fairfax, and another time with Dave Workman's group at the Saloon in San Francisco.

Listening-wise, August saw the releases of Robben Ford's Soul On Ten, the (mostly) live CD taken from those two nights in April that he played at the Independent in San Francisco; Wayne Krantz's Krantz Carlock Lefebvre; and Mike Stern's Big Neighborhood.

March and April concerts, part 4 - Jeff Beck

2009-08-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, April 23, I bundled my wife Victoria and my two teenage sons David and Ian into the car and we drove across the bay to the Fox Theater in Oakland to see the amazing the wonderful the fantastic the phenomenal Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck has been one of my favorite guitar players as long as I've had favorite guitar players, and I've gone to see him practically every chance I had over the years (see below for a rundown). He's never been disappointing, but this night, the last night of a US tour, he was in particularly fine form. I also had the best vantage I've ever had, standing maybe twenty or thirty feet away from the center of the stage. The band was the same, and the setlist was very similar to that captured on the recent DVD release Jeff Beck Performing This Week at Ronnie Scott's. They played like they were having more fun than anyone else on Earth, and maybe they were. It must be a cool feeling to be able to play music at such a level. Drummer Vinnie Colaiuta was particularly on fire (he was also the drummer for the Five Peace Band concert a month earlier). (For a neat article on Vinnie, and some great anecdotes about his abilities, see this 2003 article from Drum! magazine.) And Tal Wilkenfeld is a phenomenal bassist, with amazing skill, musicality, and maturity from someone in their early twenties.

We all enjoyed it. It was the first time I'd taken my kids out somewhere to see live music with me since I dragged them to Yoshi's one Sunday afternoon many years ago to see Bill Frisell (they were bored stiff then, but this show they dug).

A word about the Fox Theater... it's an amazing facility, a revitalized 1920's movie theater that closed its doors in 1966 and stood there rotting and disintegrating for 42 years until it was remodeled and opened early this year. See the Fox Theater website for some photos and the history of the place.

My Jeff Beck shows prior to this:

I first saw Jeff Beck play with the second Jeff Beck Group, the one that recorded Rough and Ready, at Carnegie Hall in NY in the spring of 1972.
Next time was also in NY at the Academy of Music, with the Jan Hammer Group as his backing band, in the winter of 1976, I believe.
Next I saw him at the Greek Theater in Griffith Park in LA with the There and Back group with Tony Hymas on keys and Simon Phillips on drums (can't remember who the bass player was) in 1980.
There was a long gap until I next saw him, at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA with Tony Hymas on keys, Terry Bozzio on drums, and Pino Palladino on bass, in 1994, if I remember correctly.
Next was at the Paramount Theater in Oakland with Jennifer Batten on guitar, Randy Hope-Taylor on bass, and Steve Alexander on drums, in 1999.
Next, at the Concord Pavilion in Concord, CA with Tony Hymas on keys, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, and Pino Palladino on bass, in 2003.
Next, at the Warfield in San Francisco with Jason Rebello on keys, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, and Pino Palladino on bass, in 2006.

March and April concerts, part 3 - the Derek Trucks Band

2009-08-25T16:06:00.000-07:00

Spring guitar madness continued on Wednesday, April 15, when my wife Victoria and I saw the Derek Trucks Band in San Francisco at the Grand Ballroom of the Regency Center.

Derek and his band seem to be on tour almost constantly, and it shows in the quality of their playing - it seems as if anyone can have an idea and they all pick it up immediately like they all share the same nervous system.

What can I say about Derek Trucks? He's still in his twenties and he's been one of the world's best guitar players for about ten years already. His playing is as distinctive and recognizable as - oh, say, maybe Carlos Santana - who just so happened to show up and play the last two songs or so before the encore along with the band (his Dumble amp was on the stage from the start so it was no surprise).

The highlight of the night for me was the fifteen or twenty minute version of "My Favorite Things" patterned after the Coltrane version.

The Grand Ballroom of the Regency Center used to be the Avalon Ballroom back in the late 60's, a large part of the San Francisco music scene. It closed in '68 when they lost their lease, and then for years it was a movie theater, until 2001. I remember seeing The Nightmare Before Christmas there many years ago.

March and April concerts, part 2 - Robben Ford

2009-06-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, April 9th, I saw Robben Ford perform at the Independent in San Francisco. Reportedly they were going to be recording a live CD during the two nights he was there (Wednesday and Thursday). I went with my friend and fellow guitar player Vinnie Caminiti, and we grabbed a nice bite of Indian food a few doors east of Divisadero and a couple of blocks north of the venue.

There was an opening act, the Big Organ Trio, who were quite good. Usually "organ trio" means Hammond organ (filling the bass role too), guitar, and drums, but the Big Organ Trio was Hammond organ, bass, and drums.

Then Robben and his trio (Travis Carlton on bass and Toss Panos on drums) took the stage and launched into an absolutely incendiary set. If this is going to come out on CD, it's going to be killer. Robben was at the top of his form. He seems to really love working with Carlton and Panos - they are a superb rhythm section. Especially Panos, who was astonishingly good.

Here's a couple of raw video clips from the show:

"Cannonball Shuffle"
"There'll Never Be Another You" (I think that was this number; includes a bit of a drum solo)
"Supernatural"

In the second set the trio was joined by Neal Evans of Soulive on Hammond B-3, and everything kicked up a notch. Evans is a great player, and he fit right in, providing some nice harmonic underpinning for Robben's solos, and taking great solos himself.

The venue was also pretty fine, everything sounded rich and well-balanced. All in all a wonderful show.

March and April concerts - the Five Peace Band

2009-05-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

To begin my four weeks of Spring concert madness, on Friday, March 20, at the Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley, I saw the Five Peace Band - John McLaughlin: guitar; Chick Corea: keyboards; Kenny Garrett: saxophone; Christian McBride: bass; and Vinnie Colaiuta: drums. The tickets were my Christmas present from my lovely and wondrous wife Victoria Wolcott, who acompanied me to the show.

It's been a while since I was there and so a decent review is pretty impossible at this point. They played two long sets. The music was a mixture of mostly newer pieces, except for a fantastic cover of Jackie McLean's "Dr. Jackle" and a 40th anniversary rendition of Miles Davis' "In A Silent Way/It's About That Time." (It was 40 years ago that Corea and McLaughlin first worked together on the recording sessions for Miles' seminal In A Silent Way album.) The band were obviously having a great time playing together. The highlights for me - the aforementioned "Dr. Jackle;" a stupendous several minutes where Kenny Garrett and Vinnie Colaiuta played together in a duet passage that went from a simmer to a rolling boil to a seething maelstrom of sound; and hearing Christian McBride on electric bass for the first time. Wow!

Some music DVDs to watch

2009-04-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

Recently I have a passel of music DVDs on hand and a couple in the mail:

Robben Ford in Concert - Ohne Filter: Revisited was a birthday present from my little sister. It's from a music program on German TV, recorded in 1997, and it's an excellent performance, Robben is really on in this one. There's a keyboardist on this one, which give him a nice harmonic cushion to work over (he usually plays in a trio setting these days). I'm really looking forward to seeing him next week at the Independent with a Hammond B-3 player on hand...
Wayne Shorter Live at Montreux was a present from my older brother... have not yet had a chance to see it but am anticipating it -Wayne is one of my gods... From the description: "musician Wayne Shorter performs live at the 1996 Montreux Jazz Festival with the Wayne Shorter Quintet. In addition to playing tracks from his Grammy Award-winning High Life album, this release also features bonus footage from past appearances at Montreux, when he was joined onstage by the great Herbie Hancock."
Robben Ford: The Art of Blues Rhythm and The Art of Blues Solos are two instructional videos...
Jeff Beck Performing This Week at Ronnie Scott's is on its way in the mail...

Spring is sprung...

2009-03-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

Since my last time here:

Saw Robben Ford along with Ruthie Foster and Jorma Kaukonen at the Marin Center in San Rafael on February 27 and came away a total Ruthie Foster fan. If you don't know her, check her out.
Saw the Five Peace Band at the Zellerbach in Berkeley on March 20
Sat in at length with Dave Workman and his group at the Saloon in San Francisco on February 28 and again briefly on March 14.
Jammed a bunch of times as usual at the Little Fox, the Old Princeton Landing, and the 23 Club (the last of these jams is now sadly defunct with the closing of the venue, after a mere six weeks of existence) and ended up being YouTubed several times (you can see my "me at jams" playlist at my YouTube channel if you're interested).
Had a birthday.

Some cool stuff coming up too in April: the Derek Trucks Band on April 15 in San Francisco at the Grand Ballroom of the Regency Center, Jeff Beck on April 23 at the Fox Theater in Oakland, Robben Ford is going to play (and record a live CD) at the Independent in San Francisco, and my pal and Redwood City Blues Jam M.C., Vince Caminiti, is on this year's Blues Guitar Extravaganza bill along with René Solis, Steve Freund, and Chris “Kid” Andersen at the Little Fox Theatre.

Spring is indeed sprung, and springing!

More news from me soon about new projects, etc.

Some good things to look forward to

2009-02-26T15:40:00.000-08:00

Lots of neat stuff on the near horizon.

Tomorrow night I go see Robben Ford play at the Marin Civic Auditorium in a show called Guitar Blues, co-billed with Jorma Kaukonen and Ruthie Foster.
Saturday I hope to sit in with Dave Workman's group at the Saloon in San Francisco.
Tuesday Chris Cobb is standing in as jam host for Stan Erhart at the 23 Club blues jam in Brisbane.
Next Saturday is my birthday.
Friday, March 20, at the Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley, I'm seeing the Five Peace Band - John McLaughlin: guitar; Chick Corea: keyboards; Kenny Garrett: saxophone; Christian McBride: bass; and Vinnie Colaiuta: drums
Thursday, April 23, at the Fox Theater in Oakland, I'm seeing Jeff Beck, with David Sancious on keys, Tal Wilkenfeld on bass, and Vinnie Colaiuta on drums (Vinnie again!)
The DVDs of Jeff Beck's 2007 performances at Ronnie Scott's in London, and of Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood's 2008 performances at Madison Square Garden in New York, are coming out soon...

February is here

2009-02-03T15:56:00.000-08:00

Well, we're well into 2009 now... I'm no longer accidentally dating things with the old year.

This is just a quick note to keep too much dust from settling here. I've continued to spend time at the two blues jams I've been frequenting for a while. Tonight a new one starts up, this one also run by Stan Erhart, who does the Sunday night one at the Old Princeton Landing, so I'm going to drag my little fire-breathing amp and one of my guitars and check it out.

There was also the 3rd Anniversary Celebration of the Redwood City Blues Jam, held in the "big" Fox next door to the usual Little Fox. I volunteered to help with stuff backstage, passed the tip bucket a few times, and helped load a Hammond C-3 organ into a van in the rain in the early morning. It was an interesting and enjoyable way to spend an evening, but not the best way to enjoy the performers. That theater is really a remarkable place, one of those old movie palaces from the 1920's that's been restored to something like its former glory.

I also saw Rod Piazza and the Mighty Fliers at the Little Fox, first time I've been there for a regular show. Vince Caminiti's band Bluestate was the opening act. Two terrific bands - lots of fun. The week before, I saw Dave Workman play at The Saloon in San Francisco.

Oh, and January also saw the release of a great new CD by the Derek Trucks Band, Already Free. More about this later, but for now -- highly recommended.

Blasts from the past

2009-01-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

I fancy myself to be somewhat encyclopedic about musicians that I love... I seem to remember incredible minutiae about what their career arcs are, what guitars they played, what albums came out when, on what label, etc.

Imagine my surprise when, in the course of doing a little research into the first Tony Williams Lifetime band, I read the Wikipedia entry on them and discovered that, between the last of the Tony Williams Lifetime lineups in 1972 and the New Tony Williams Lifetime lineup in 1975 (whose first album, Believe It, introduced much of the world to the amazing guitar work of Allan Holdsworth), there was a version of the band called Wildlife that recorded tracks for an album that was never released. The band included Jack Bruce and Holdsworth.

Somehow, after 34 years had gone by, I had never know of this, despite otherwise knowing about virtually everything else Holdsworth ever did, not to mention Williams and Bruce.

Either I knew it and aliens erased this memory when they abducted me, or I really somehow never knew about it at all.

At any rate, bootlegs of the tapes (often referred to as the Stockholm Tapes) seem to exist, and recently someone posted them on YouTube with as a static, music-only video file. I've added them to my YouTube favorites if you want to check them out.

Very interesting stuff. I've never heard the prior Lifetime album, The Old Bum's Rush, so I don't know whether or not it's along those lines, but it's certainly very different than the New Tony Williams Lifetime material was in 1975-76.

Every so often something like this pops out of the woodwork. Usually it's somewhat disappointing - things left unreleased often were that way for a good reason.

End of last year, start of the next

2008-12-31T13:11:00.000-08:00

We often think of this time of year as the end of one period and the start of another, even though it's an artificial distinction. Like so many folks I tend to mull over what's gone on the last twelve months of my life, weigh the upsides and the downsides, and start thinking about what steps I might take in the coming year to improve the odds. Yes, folks, it's New Year's Resolution time!

So, aside from personal stuff, what am I going to resolve here on this last day of 2008?

continue the directed guitar practice I've been engaged in since October or so
find opportunities to perform more regularly and to get paid for it sometimes, maybe, even, already...
write some more music
record more music
learn to sing a bit

There, that should keep me busy!

Happy new year...

Playing solo

2008-12-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

A few years back I got it into my head that I should pursue solo jazz guitar playing... just to the level of being able to play background music for parties, restaurants, gallery openings, that kind of thing, and maybe make a little coin without having to have a band and all the trappings that brings. So I spent some time learning how to make up simple arrangements of suitable tunes, and worked on being able to play bass lines and chords and melody more-or-less simultaneously. A few years ago I recorded a couple of these and put them up on my website.

After I developed a bit of a repertoire, I played a handful of gigs like that. (I did not try very hard to find gigs, so of course there were only a handful.)

Mixed in during this time period was a related effort to work on being a decent accompanist in a duo, with singers or other instrumentalists, while also taking some classes at the JazzSchool in Berkeley and the Community School of Music and Art in Mountain View.

Time passed, it was late 2006 and I started getting antsy to plug a solidbody guitar in to something with a bit of a roar and play Albert King licks again, so I started directing my energies in that direction and dimmed my focus on solo and duet playing.

So anyway, we had a potluck at my place of work (a.k.a. the day job that musicians are always advised not to quit) yesterday, so I offered to play some music. I have four arrangements of Christmas carols more or less under my belt at the moment, so I figured I'd do those and maybe a couple of other simple chord-and-melody arrangements I've been playing forever.

I then proceeded to play about as poorly as I ever have. Flubbing notes, completely forgetting what comes next, stuff like that - just horrible. And it wasn't just the first number - each song was another exercise in mental excruciation.

Made me stop and think - what is so great about playing solo? For me the attraction was always something like this:

no band practice to arrange, schedule, coordinate
no splitting of the proceeds
it's really cool to be able to play in this style

But each time I've played solo, there is always the unalterable fact:

if you make mistakes, you are naked - there is nothing to hide them behind

In a band if you flub something you can usually cover it up without too much trouble. But alone, a nice fat mistake is just so glaringly obvious, hanging there in the air like a big sonic turd for all to audially whiff... whew...

Falling down all over in the safe environment of a party was embarrassing.

But I'm glad I did it. I haven't played solo in front of people for over a year and a half and have not kept up with it at all, really, so I shouldn't be at all surprised it was able to sink to such a level.

If I really want to pursue this kind of playing, I should just knuckle down and make sure I practice that type of playing more, and then get out there and do it more.

And also accept that there are always going to be mistakes and learn not to care that much about it... because if I worry about it, it just makes it worse when the inevitable happens. Mistakes that I clench over just beget more mistakes and lead to severe emotional distress.

Christmas is hurtling headlong upon us

2008-12-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season to be overwhelmed. Every year I swear I'm going to start my Christmas preparations in September next year but instead it seems that I start even later. Having relatives back east, which typically involves having to get a package in the mail by -- well, by, like, now -- adds extra pressure.

Anyway I thought I'd take a brief moment here before my wife Victoria spirits me off to Hillsdale Mall to rave about a new Christmas CD, Jingle All the Way, by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. It's just brimming with utter genius, both the playing and the arrangements. The centerpiece is a 5-and-a-half minute medley that centers on "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" but includes six other tunes threaded in and around each other in the most brilliant, inspired way. And there are three songs (I think it was three) featuring Tuvan throat singers (the Alash Ensemble), one a duet with one of them plus Béla. It's just brilliant. (Now, I know Tuvan throat singers are going to sound funny to the average American -- they sound a bit like Popeye humming in the shower might -- but seriously, give it a chance, it's amazing stuff.) Other guests on the CD include Edgar Meyer on double bass and Andy Statman on clarinet. The last cut is a "solo" rendition of Joni Mitchell's "River" on which Béla plays the banjo and piano simultaneously.

These guys are just amazing -- so brilliant, so gifted, so much fun... this just might be a Christmas album I'll be playing year round for the foreseeable future.

Late autumn update

2008-12-08T14:56:00.000-08:00

I've been hitting the local blues jams again. Lots of fun. Playing is of course the reason I go there, but listening to some of the folks that show up is usually a blast as well. Last week Mark Hummel appeared with Steve Freund at the Little Fox Theater. Last night Garth Webber sat in with Stan Erhart's band at the Old Princeton Landing.

Last week someone taped most of one of the numbers I played on, and so you can get to see and hear me play a solo on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih2Q4Y1D90Y

I was looking forward to seeing Robben Ford next month at the Great American Music Hall but the shows have been canceled. Next show coming down the pike is the Five Peace Band - Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride, and Vinnie Colaiuta (with Brian Blade filling in when Vinne goes back to work for Jeff Beck in February).

Speaking of Jeff Beck, his recently-released live CD, Performing This Week… Live At Ronnie Scott’s, came out in November. A DVD recorded during the same five nights last November was previewed on the BBC and is supposedly being released in February 2009. From the looks of it, it's going to be a fantastic DVD. The BBC ones were on YouTube but they seem to have been removed.

Last gasp of summer

2008-09-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

Haven't been to a single music show since February... but I'm getting back on track again and hope to soon be back on the blues jam scene and performing solo, duo, and otherwise.

On the guitar playing front, I've been working hard on my alternating picking, trying to get more precise and improve my articulation. Also been getting more and more comfortable with diminished and altered dominant sounds and hopefully they'll start surfacing in my playing soon. Learning lots of lines and always learning to play them in at least two fingerings/sets of strings, facilitating finding notes and intervals in multiple places along the neck. All somewhat dry and academic but I can feel my fluidity gradually improving. Working with some books: Robben Ford's Blues and Beyond, Pat Martino's Linear Expressions... also a CD-ROM set from Larry Carlton, 335 Blues.

Listening-wise, I've found several things that Wayne Krantz did in years past: a Jay Anderson CD, Next Exit, from 1992; Victor Bailey's Low Blow, from 1999; and Jasper van't Hof's Blue Corner from 1993. Great guitar playing... I was also impressed with John McLaughlin's latest, Floating Point.

Clapton and Winwood at Madison Square Garden

2008-07-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

Wow, thirteen months and change since I last blogged... seems a bit silly to bother but let's give it one more college try, now that my somewhat derailed life is back on the track...

I can still barely believe I allowed myself to say "sure, get me a ticket" to a friend that actually was insane enough to fly from California to NY just to to go see the Eric Clapton/Steve Winwood reunion concert at New York's Madison Square Garden in late February. As it turned out, it was the week of my mother's 90th birthday (you go, girl!) and I was going to fly back to NY that week anyway...

So there I found myself, inside that cavernous arena on a chilly Monday evening in February. I was more than half expecting to be somewhat disappointed, but as it turned out the show was as good as it could be -- the band was terrific, the principals were clearly enjoying it and in excellent form, they played a satisfactorily long time (a bit under two and a half hours), and even the sound was good inside that huge hockey barn.

They opened with the thundering riff of "Had To Cry Today," from the Blind Faith album, and then Winwood's magnificent voice came in with the first line of the song, and from there it was smiles and grins for the rest of the night. Throughout the night they played most of the rest of the Blind Faith material ("Can't Find My Way Home," "Well Alright," "Presence of the Lord," "Sleeping In the Ground"), a couple of Traffic songs, a couple of Derek and the Dominos songs, several songs from each of their solo careers, and a real surprise or two (notably the Buddy Miles tune, "Them Changes," and the Hendrix classic, "Voodoo Child"). Of particular note to me was how well their voices sounded together (when they were in Blind Faith Winwood did all the vocals), especially on the Dominos tune "Tell the Truth."

Anyway, if you're interested, this site has the set list, a bunch of photos, and reviews from attendees.

Spring approaches its end...

2007-06-01T14:50:00.000-07:00

February 9th was the last post, and here we are and it's June frickin' the first already. I continue to be very sporadic with this blogging thing, so I guess (so far at least) it has not engaged my energies very much...

Since my last post I found myself out of the band I spoke about after our one lined-up gig had been played. It was a bit surprising but what the heck. I've continued to seek a slot somewhere but with limited success. I played a few duet gigs with the singer from the band, the terrific Janna Mordan, and hope to continue doing that whenever possible. I now seem to be in a rock band but I'm not going to say another word about it until I really am. I've continued to show up whenever I can manage at the Redwood City Blues Jam (2nd, 3rd, and 4th Wednesdays each month at the Little Fox Theatre, soon to be every Wednesday) and at the Sunday night jams at the Old Princeton Landing; the Domenico Winery jams are now only the first Sunday each month and I've not been there since January...

I took a guitar lesson in March or April from Dave Workman which was very helpful, I've been digesting some nuggets from that since that have helped me over some humps...

Music I've seen: the earlier-mentioned Ford Brothers Blues Band with Robben Ford at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz was terrific... and last week I saw the amazing stupendous phenomenal Richard Bona at Yoshi's in Oakland again, this time leading his own group.

More DVDs, live performances, and other news

2007-02-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've done this...

Since last writing I rented The Complete Monterey Pop Festival DVD set from Netflix. It was fun to watch the original movie again. The Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who segments really hold up, and the Ravi Shankar one is just stunning.

The extra disks were good too. One was the complete Otis Redding set and the complete Hendrix set, both of which had been released as separate theatrcical releases in the 80's, if I'm not mistaken. The third has some of the outtakes from the movie, and I'm still working through that disk. Hoped to see something cool in the Electric Flag performance but it was rather disappointing.

Since I last wrote I've seen a couple of good live shows too... in mid-December I saw Mike Stern with Richard Bona, Bob Franchesini, and Dennis Chambers at Yoshi's in Oakland, and last Saturday, February 3, I saw the great Wayne Shorter quartet (Danilo Perez-piano; John Pattituci-bass; Brian Blade-drums) at the Marin Center in San Rafael. Next Saturday I'm going to see Robben Ford play with his brothers, The Ford Blues Band, at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz.

I've also been going to blues jams in Redwood City, Pacifica, and Princeton-by-the-Sea, and some jazz jams at the Domenicao Winery Tasting Room in San Carlos, as part of an effor to find other people to play with... and posting "guitarist seeking" ads on Craig's List. Last week I finally joined a band, and we'll be playing our first gig next Wednesday, Valentine's Day, at a place in the Santa Cruz Mountains called the Brookdale Lodge, which apparently has an actual brook running through the center of the dining room, and supposedly is haunted.

Bruford DVD

2006-10-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

Continuing the most recent theme, here, there's another soon-to-be-released DVD of an old performance of a short-lived but well-loved musical group. This time it's Bill Bruford's eponymous group Bruford, featuring Allan Holdsworth on guitar, Jeff Berlin on bass, Dave Stewart on keyboards, Annette Peacock on vocals, and Bruford on drums. It was recorded at Oxford Polytechnic, England, on March 7th, 1979 (my birthday) for a TV program called "Rock Goes to College." The group in this basic form released two albums, Feels Good to Me (1977) and (without Peacock) One of a Kind (1978) before Holdsworth left to form his own group.

Blind Faith DVD!

2006-09-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

I was flipping through a Best Buy ad in the Sunday paper yesterday when my eyes were caught by one of the DVDs being released this Tuesday, September 19th... "Blind Faith Live?" I said, "how can that be, if there was any footage of these guys it would have surfaced long before now.

Well, it can be, and it comes out tomorrow in the USA (I gather it's already out in the UK). Find out more if you're interested: http://www.blindfaithdvd.com/blindfaithus/index_us.html

Clapton's soaring solo on "Had To Cry Today" from the Blind Faith album remains to this day one of my favorite things guitaristic and is arguably the best thing he ever recorded.

Are we blogging now?

2006-09-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

Please forgive me, I signed up here for a blog spot on a spur-of-the-moment, will-o-the-wispy whim, so here I am.

We'll see if this becomes something that I spend any time and energy on... or not...