Relaxin' at Camarillo

Super 266.66 (recurring)

Last week, "Down the Street" wrote in, mentioning his 2/3rd size Super 400 custom built by Rick Turner of Santa Cruz. Now he's kindly sent a couple of photos of this nifty little instrument he tunes in fifths. Originally ordered in blond, the contractor who did the finish "could not, like, philosophically" see his way to do it in anything other than sunburst. Check it out in an embryonic stage in this article in Frets magazine.

 

Just for fun, here's his totally loopy five-string Les Paul mandolin in "psycho midnight blue":

Gypsy Jazz Sundays

Still feeling woozy, so best to look away:

1. Tons of free mp3's of old French jazz 45's - thanks, Guillaume!
2. Contrary to appearances, the programme for the 2007 Samois festival is up (click "programm").
3. Speaking of sick, Andreas Oberg is sick:

Attack of the Psycho-Squits

No, not another new band, but the sore and lamentable malady from which I've been suffering all week, hence no playing, posting, or much of anything. Today was the first day I even made it past 3 on the consciousness scale (it's out of 100 - the Dalai Lama scores 88 on a good day), and as it was also the day Le Massif were supposed to play their fatal gig, a vestigial sense of responsibility managed to coax me out of the house for ten minutes to check on the guys I'd passed it on to. Not only did they show up as promised, they sounded great - sickeningly good given how young they all are - and with their permission, here' s a little snippet of what we might have won. Great playing all round, an edgy blues-bop guitar solo, and especially killer drumming:  What Might Have Been

In other news: Floyd, my three year-old, got his first Ukulele this weekend. He's very taken with it and as soon as he's not watching, so am I. My ear is chronic, but with the help of this bad boy, it's gonna ripen quicker than a banana in the glove compartment. I picked out both "Ode to Joy" and "Here, There, and Everywhere" on it today. Don't mock. It worked for Joe Pass.

(Floyd and I playing "Smoke on the Water" in the kitchen of my apartment in Ronkonkoma on the day I came down with the shits.)

Gypsy Jazz Sundays

Enjoy the music while you surf Michael Dunn's gorgeous new website.

Great Leap Forward

The GLF convened last night to play through a few tunes, drink beer, and generally be reminded of how arse-kickingly difficult it is to play jazz even badly. I've also noted that even if I practice something diligently it won't manifest itself in my real-live playing until three months later at the very least. Like "tone suck," "aptitude suck" is a well-known phenomenon amongst musicians (even if they don't use that exactly that phrase, which they probably don't as I just made it up), meaning that when they play gigs or go live with other people, they generally find they can only do about 60-70% of what they can manage when they practice. Presumably, the conscious mind is so preoccupied with "shit! what's next?" that the only things that can be relied upon to come across are those that are so deeply engrained in the muscle memory that they're way beyond thinking.

Which is a roundabout way of saying here's me playing at 60% of my ability: "Just Friends" played by the Great Leap Forward. Talking of "tone suck," apologies for the awful hiss coming out of my amp. I thought it was because none of the outlets in Pete's ghetto flat are grounded, but it turns out I have one incredibly noisy lead. How does that happen? I thought it was just string in there. By the way, I recently bought an ART tube preamp from ebay. It only cost me $35, but I'm really loving it, and if the hiss wasn't so bad, I'd think you'd be able to hear its added warmth and depth. I'm also very excited to have bought an ebony bridge to replace the tune-o-matic on my D'angelico. I'll be hiring a professional for that little modification.

"Enough of this pointless, wife-beating gear talk," you say, "take us to the music!" Well it here it is. To my great embarassment, I completely miss the first note of the head and I never should've taken a third chorus, though if you can make it as far as the end, you'll still be able to hear me congratulating myself. The boundless vanity of the man!

Voice Leading by Example

I've been working on the voice-leading exercise I was given last week. To recap, as each note in a chord is a "voice," voice leading is the artful movement of voices between chords to create a seamless sense of momentum, melody and resolution in the progression. Voice leading can be used to create comps that sound fluid and harmonically consistent, paying attention to how one voice melts into another, rather than simply flying all over the neck, relying on a set of memorized grips that don't really belong.

As the basic principle is to use the least amount of movement possible from one chord to the next, this exercise helps one figure out where to find the chords in the absence of familiar shapes. The aim was to take a iii, vi dom, V, I progression like Em7-A7-Dm7-G7-Cmaj7, and, using the same basic inversion for the Em7, Dm7, and Cmaj7 chords, build a smooth, linear progression between all the chords by finding fingerings for the A7 and G7 chords that are as close as possible to the others. So far, I've done it for three different string sets - 1-2-3-4; 2-3-4-5; and 2-3-4-6 - with four inversions per set, each inversion placing the root note on a different string. Here's a (handwritten in pencil) PDF of the results. Some of the progressions are nice and seem like they'd be really useful, whereas some are a bit of a nightmare to finger, and don't sound that good anyway. Still, a very good exercise for opening up the fretboard. All examples are in Cmajor, and the chords are all unaltered unless noted.

Andrew Green's Jazz Guitar Comping is my favourite book at the moment (see the inching moss of commercialism on the sidebar). It's got a long chapter on voice leading with a ton of examples and is especially good on working with the upper voice - the highest note in the chord - which the above exercise doesn't really attend to. There are various different things you can do with this voice depending on what you're going for: chromatic motion, for example, where the top voice moves a half step at a time; stepwise motion, in which the voice moves a scale step at a time; melodic motion, where the voice echoes the melody (as in chord-melody playing); or common tones, where the top voice stays the same while the chord moves underneath. Green likes to heavily alter the V7 to achieve some really jarring sounds. It's a pleasantly knocky antitode to all that melodious fluidity.

Jazz Appreciation Month

April is Jazz Appreciation Month. Compel people to appreciate jazz with the help of the US Government and Smithosonian Institute.

What can you do to help with Jazz Appreciation Month? Start by downloading this poster, stick it in your window, then go and play "Another Hairdo" in your neighbour's face. JAM means that if they don't enjoy it, you can have them arrested.