Cream, Sh-Boogie Bop
First off....OK, we got creamed. There was nothing pretty about the Calgary/Detroit game last night. Detroit made Calgary look like the Charlestown Chiefs without the hitting. I still firmly believe that Calgary is the better team and just need to settle into it. Let's leave this topic for now.
I would like to extend my hellos to my Scandinavian readers. It seems that a significant portion of the hits to my blog here come from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark; partly because of my travels there and journals about it and partly because the Hamar music festival has a link to this site on their homepage (http://www.musicfest.no). I guess they read about some of my time there with Soulstream last summer and included me on their site. So hei to everyone in Norway.
In music news, I been having fun with a few books lately. One of my favorites for harmony and chord scale theory is The Chord Scale Theory by Barrie Nettles. Barrie wrote a lot of the harmony and theory textbooks while I was at Berklee and I loved the way he organized things. I have obsessed over chord scales all of my life and I'm sure for any non-geek, this would be the driest book in the universe, but I love this stuff and Barrie has left no stone unturned. Another book that I've been enjoying is Up The Neck by Janet Davis, which is a banjo book that explores doing "breaks" and improvising up the neck. Banjo has always been a fun hobby and this book is revealing a little of the mystery of the second chorus in bluegrass playing. Beware though, banjo will take points off of your IQ and make you attracted to family members. I'm also going nuts with the Kurt Rosenwinkel book and my transcription book of the Pat Metheny Trio Live album.
Speaking of which....
I saw Metheny live two weeks ago with Brad Mehldau, Larry Grenedier, and Jeff Ballard at the Orpheum. I've heard a lot of mixed reviews from people about this show. First of all, I thought it was awesome. Everyone played their asses off and it was cool to hear Metheny outside of the Pat Metheny Group. You could tell it was still early in the tour as it seemed like the soundman was still working out some bugs in the volume of the instruments, but eventually everything settled in. Brad Mehldau really played the snot out of the piano in a situation that would have been easy for Metheny to railroad him a bit. Pat is such a strong force that even though it was Brad's working trio, it was definitely Metheny's show. There was a point in a blues of Pat's that I'm convinced that the whole band was lost during Brad's solo.....except Brad. And he just egged them on, going deeper and deeper into rhythmic abyss with absolute confidence and at the end threw them all a bone so that they could find their place with him. Pretty sweet.
I have also recently bought "Fearless Leader: John Coltrane on Prestige 1957 - 1958". 6 discs of Coltrane's albums as a leader in the period after those classic Miles Quintet albums (Workin', Cookin', Steamin', etc) and before things like Kind of Blue, Blue Train, and Giant Steps. I love these albums like I love those Miles albums. They played such a part in my formative years. They essentially taught me what jazz is: how to play standards, tone, etiquette, swing, etc. Listening to these albums I now realize what a crucial part of my development that they were. Red Garland, Arthur Taylor, and Paul Chambers were such an amazing team of musicians and provided such a great backdrop to what Coltrane was doing. These sessions were so cool too because they were more based on quantity rather than quality. I think Trane pumped out 8 albums of standards on Prestige in a year. That's unheard of now and although the playing and intros and ending could have probably been more polished, it's fun to hear them "wing it".
I also recently aquired a bunch of the Paul Motian Electric Bebop albums which I totally digging. Some with Kurt, Brad Schoeppach, Ben Monder, and/or Steve Cardenas. These are so much fun. I'm now waiting on Amazon to deliver me Mark Turner's Yam Yam and Joe Pass' classic Intercontinental. Both are huge classics that I've been looking for forever.
The pedal board is now under construction and perhaps the next blog will be for geeks only and I'll discuss all of my gear. I'm almost genuinely happy about my set up now that I have the Vox AC-30 and I'm finally satisfied with my distortion sound. Boy that took a long time....I think the last piece of the tone puzzle is a Lexicon LXP-1 reverb and a Vox Clyde McCoy wah. If anybody is looking to unload either/or, let me know.
OK I'll shut up with the geek talk for now.
I would like to extend my hellos to my Scandinavian readers. It seems that a significant portion of the hits to my blog here come from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark; partly because of my travels there and journals about it and partly because the Hamar music festival has a link to this site on their homepage (http://www.musicfest.no). I guess they read about some of my time there with Soulstream last summer and included me on their site. So hei to everyone in Norway.
In music news, I been having fun with a few books lately. One of my favorites for harmony and chord scale theory is The Chord Scale Theory by Barrie Nettles. Barrie wrote a lot of the harmony and theory textbooks while I was at Berklee and I loved the way he organized things. I have obsessed over chord scales all of my life and I'm sure for any non-geek, this would be the driest book in the universe, but I love this stuff and Barrie has left no stone unturned. Another book that I've been enjoying is Up The Neck by Janet Davis, which is a banjo book that explores doing "breaks" and improvising up the neck. Banjo has always been a fun hobby and this book is revealing a little of the mystery of the second chorus in bluegrass playing. Beware though, banjo will take points off of your IQ and make you attracted to family members. I'm also going nuts with the Kurt Rosenwinkel book and my transcription book of the Pat Metheny Trio Live album.
Speaking of which....
I saw Metheny live two weeks ago with Brad Mehldau, Larry Grenedier, and Jeff Ballard at the Orpheum. I've heard a lot of mixed reviews from people about this show. First of all, I thought it was awesome. Everyone played their asses off and it was cool to hear Metheny outside of the Pat Metheny Group. You could tell it was still early in the tour as it seemed like the soundman was still working out some bugs in the volume of the instruments, but eventually everything settled in. Brad Mehldau really played the snot out of the piano in a situation that would have been easy for Metheny to railroad him a bit. Pat is such a strong force that even though it was Brad's working trio, it was definitely Metheny's show. There was a point in a blues of Pat's that I'm convinced that the whole band was lost during Brad's solo.....except Brad. And he just egged them on, going deeper and deeper into rhythmic abyss with absolute confidence and at the end threw them all a bone so that they could find their place with him. Pretty sweet.
I have also recently bought "Fearless Leader: John Coltrane on Prestige 1957 - 1958". 6 discs of Coltrane's albums as a leader in the period after those classic Miles Quintet albums (Workin', Cookin', Steamin', etc) and before things like Kind of Blue, Blue Train, and Giant Steps. I love these albums like I love those Miles albums. They played such a part in my formative years. They essentially taught me what jazz is: how to play standards, tone, etiquette, swing, etc. Listening to these albums I now realize what a crucial part of my development that they were. Red Garland, Arthur Taylor, and Paul Chambers were such an amazing team of musicians and provided such a great backdrop to what Coltrane was doing. These sessions were so cool too because they were more based on quantity rather than quality. I think Trane pumped out 8 albums of standards on Prestige in a year. That's unheard of now and although the playing and intros and ending could have probably been more polished, it's fun to hear them "wing it".
I also recently aquired a bunch of the Paul Motian Electric Bebop albums which I totally digging. Some with Kurt, Brad Schoeppach, Ben Monder, and/or Steve Cardenas. These are so much fun. I'm now waiting on Amazon to deliver me Mark Turner's Yam Yam and Joe Pass' classic Intercontinental. Both are huge classics that I've been looking for forever.
The pedal board is now under construction and perhaps the next blog will be for geeks only and I'll discuss all of my gear. I'm almost genuinely happy about my set up now that I have the Vox AC-30 and I'm finally satisfied with my distortion sound. Boy that took a long time....I think the last piece of the tone puzzle is a Lexicon LXP-1 reverb and a Vox Clyde McCoy wah. If anybody is looking to unload either/or, let me know.
OK I'll shut up with the geek talk for now.
posted by Hammer at 10:07 AM
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