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Contact: For tuition, bookings or to order the new CD: Mobile 0777 97 95 989 benjblackmore@hotmail.com Latest Updates: 15/02/03: My mum’s birthday. Peace march in London was a massive success - a day of good vibes. 11/02/03: More links, added to the favourite books bit. Jim Mullen’s CD arrived today - it’s pretty wicked. Bigups. Now I won’t labour the point anymore. *grins*. 10/02/03 : Bit of a red letter day: Jim Mullen phoned me up today (I met him at the Stafford jazz festival) and said he was very impressed with my début CD, gave me some encouraging advice and is sending me one of his in the post “in exchange”. I have a lot of respect for that kind of thing. Nice one jazz guitar crew! It’s so nice to have a bit of support from senior musicians. I’m updating all the time you know, so keep checking back. Forthcoming Gigs: -Bit of a hiatus after getting back from Italy, but this is what I’ve got organised so far: Feb 26th: The Old Brown Jug, Newcastle Under Lyme. Tenor player John Watson’s quintet, not my gig, but should be good. Feb 27th: The Shoulder of Mutton, Lichfield. John Watson’s quintet, really nice group. March 1st: The Old Duke, Bristol. Ben Waghorn Quintet. Jerry Crozier-Cole depped me into this one, and it should be ace. 9-11pm. Cracking band: Ben Waghorn - Tenor, Jim Blomfield - Keys, Jim Barr - Bass and Andy Tween - Drums. Looking forward to this one. March 20th: Cancer Research UK benefit at Le Chateau, Park St, Bristol. Ben Blackmore Quintet. Entry £3. 9-12 in the evening. April 1st: The Bell, Walcot St, Bath. Funk til 1am - it’s a party gig. April 29th: Quiet American Trio. Le Château, Park St, Bristol. 9-11pm. June 8th: Quiet American Trio. The Wookey Inn, Wookey Hole, Somerset. NB: this is a lunchtime gig: 1-3pm. June 9th: Ben Blackmore/Gary Alesbrook West Coast Quartet. The Bell, Walcot St, Bath. 9-11pm. Current Jazz Projects: Outside of Bristol or Birmingham I am more than happy to travel and play with house rhythm sections. Nearer the two cities these are the groups I most commonly work with. Bristol/South West. Ben Blackmore Quintet: Ben - Guitar Craig Crofton - Tenor sax Gary Alesbrook - Trumpet & Flugelhorn Anders Olinder/Jonny Henderson - Hammond Organ or Dave Griffiths/Jim Barr - Bass Andy Tween - Drums Hard driving bebop rooted quintet playing material by Monk, Stanley Turrentine, Sonny Rollins and other Blue Note greats, standards and blues. Craig Crofton is well known in the South-West for his fiery Coltrane inspired approach, and Gary in contrast, has a nice cool Miles Davis/Chet Baker-esque sound. In the rhythm section, I stick to a Jim Hall style supporting role adding some bluesy solo work. A special mention must go to the Guildhall graduate Andy Tween, who left the London scene to settle in the South West - which is our gain as he is an unbelievably good drummer. Along with Anders, he gigs and tours Europe regularly with Pee-Wee Ellis. Gary’s main gig is with Welsh rock group Super Furry Animals, while Craig is well known for his work with Dance duo Monk & Canatella and his own project CCQ. Famous “deps” include Jim Barr (Portishead) and Jonny Henderson (Otis Grand Blues Band) not forgetting the wonderful bassist Dave Griffiths, who when not working on the jazz scene, runs a mandolin quartet. Ben Blackmore/Gary Alesbrook West Coast Quartet: Gary Alesbrook - Trumpet/Flugelhorn Ben - Guitar Dave Griffiths/Dave Goodier - Bass Trevor Davies/Scott Hammond - Drums Very relaxed quartet session playing some of the Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker related repertoire in a mellow West Coast style, plus the odd Birth of the Cool tune. Chet Baker is Gary’s favourite trumpeter, so we put this group together to play a few of the tunes that everyone associates with him - nice quiet ballads, carefully selected bossas and some nice standards. We also work as a trumpet/guitar/bass trio similar to the one that Baker had in Europe with the guitarist Philip Catherine. The Quiet American Trio: Ben - Guitar Dave Griffiths - Bass Trevor Davies - Drums Conceived as a tribute to the great American guitarist Jim Hall, playing a few of his compositions, a few associated with Bill Evans, standards, Ellingtonia and some original pieces, plus a little bit of free association playing, if appropriate. Ben Blackmore Trio: Ben - Guitar Anders Olinder - Hammond Organ Andy Tween - Drums Classic organ trio doing lots of soul-jazz Blue Note numbers and a lot of blues. Inspired by the Kenny Burrell-Jimmy Smith collaborations as well as early Wes Montgomery and the more modern Larry Goldings Trio. This format is particularly popular with promoters as a hammond player as good as Anders can fill in for a bassist and provide a keyboard role too - watching him play basslines with one hand and solo with the other is also quite an entertaining experience for an audience. Birmingham/Midlands. Ben Blackmore Quartet: Ben - Guitar Tom Jurkiewicz/Keith Bill - Piano Ron Thomas/Zoltan - Bass Roy Adams or Delroy Brown - Drums Swinging quartet playing equal parts Kenny Burrell/Jim Hall inspired material and some Bill Evans numbers. Tom and I also do a nice Bill & Jim “Undercurrent” style ballad feature as a duo. Tom and I also occasionally work as a trio with a bassist, which is a nice format as it leaves a lot of space to explore. I also hope to start playing in Birmingham with pianist Tim Amaan and trumpeter Bryan Corbett. Current Funk Projects: Bristol funk all stars or some such other name: Craig Crofton - Tenor Sax James Morton - Alto Sax (Gary Alesbrook - Trumpet) (Trudi Mosiamo - Vocals) Ben - Guitar Anders Olinder - Hammond/Keys Andy Tween - Drums In various combinations we’ve all been working together quite a lot - most recently at Level in Bristol. Anders and Andy are the foundation of this group and they obviously know what they’re doing as they often get the call to back James Brown’s sax player Pee Wee Ellis around Europe. Up front Craig and James smoke on tenor and alto, and when Gary’s playing too it takes things up another level: he does some nice stuff by putting the trumpet through a guitar amp and playing with a wah wah pedal like Miles used to do in the 70s. I get the chance to play some loud Hendrixy psychedelic guitar as well as some funky rhythm stuff and jazzy Ronny Jordan style solos. When Trudi does the gig she gets a crowd moving nicely and sings really nicely too. Material is mostly Maceo Parker/James Brown tunes plus a few other well known jazz funk tunes by people like Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard, and plenty of improvising. Latin Projects: La Heijira: 7 piece latin band with a revolving personnel of shit hot latin players. Lots of salsa, Tito Puente numbers etc, but also some more unusual stuff like tunes by Jaco Pastorius and Weather Report plus a bit of Afrobeat influenced stuff. Mini Biography: I've lived in Bristol for about a year now, and have worked with some of the best musicians in the South-West and beyond, including Andy Tween (Pee Wee Ellis & Fred Wesley) and Anders Olinder (Pee Wee Ellis), Jim Barr (Portishead), Gary Alesbrook (Super Furry Animals), Hannah Porter (DJ Suv), plus other Bristol jazz players such as Dave Goodier, Simon Gore, and Jonathan Taylor, who back guys like Andy Sheppard when he’s in town. As a sideman I am a member of pianist Joe Blanc’s quartet and various groups fronted by tenor player Craig Crofton. I have played in most of the good venues in the area, including the Bebop Club, The Prom, Le Chateau (Bristol), The Bell, Green Park Brasserie, The Old Farmhouse (Bath), The Wookey Inn (Somerset), The Royal Oak (Corsham), Café Jazz (Cardiff) as well as various festivals including Glastonbury 2002. My most recent UK booking was for The Welsh Jazz Society in Cardiff. Before moving to Bristol, I lived in Paris, then Rennes in Brittany, where I put in a lot of playing with a gypsy jazz guitar trio. I've worked a little bit on the British folk scene, recording with Fairport Convention's Ric Sanders and the well known electric bassist Fred Thelonious Baker. As a DJ I hosted the show “Travellers” on Bristol’s Burst FM which won an award from Bristol University for best and most diverse musical selection. I play regularly at the Locus night (see links) and have appeared on the same bill as DJs such as Goldie, Photek and Klute, among many others. In terms of influences I try to listen to as many different people as I can (see recommended albums section below), but a few jazz favourites are Jim Hall, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Burrell. If there is a word to describe my playing it would probably be something like “restrained” or, to a certain extent “minimalist”. I have had problems with RSI (repetitive strain injury) in both hands since my teenage years, which has meant that two things have happened: firstly I have been unable to practice regularly or at great length due to the discomfort this causes, and have consequently devoted the time I have would have spent on practice on other aspects of music - heavy listening, reading and thinking about the subject. Secondly my playing style has turned into something quite sparse, with a lot of emphasis on space and atmosphere, and obviously I try to be melodic. In a way, my medical condition has been a kind of blessing in disguise, as I have learnt to focus on many different aspects of music, rather than simply improving my technique. Meanwhile when DJing I usually end up being some kind of offspring (bastard, obviously) of Gilles Peterson, Andy Kershaw and Julian Joseph. New trio CD "3, 2, 1", featuring Dave Griffiths (bass) and Trevor Davies (drums) out now - to order please use the e-mail address below. The disc has received lots of airplay on BBC Bristol and Eagle FM and there has been a very positive response to it so far. The repertoire on the disc is mainly standards, plus a couple of blues tunes and a bit of Ellingtonia. Local Press: I haven't been on the British jazz scene that long given that I’m 24 years old, but I've had a couple of really favourable reviews from jazz writer Tony Benjamin. Here are some excerpts: “With a couple of trio gigs on the horizon, here’s another chance to catch this excellent young guitarist playing solo. Nicely cool and technically dazzling, his playing is a great accompaniment to a Sunday afternoon.” (Venue Magazine, 12th April, 2001) “Really tasty jazz guitar...Ben Blackmore is a disgracefully talented young player with a disarmingly unassuming manner”. (29th March 2001) The Tao of Jazz and Improvised Guitar: The idea behind this resource is a fairly simple one: whereas many instructional books will endlessly tell the student that in order to be a fluent improviser, they must master all their scales, arpeggios etc - ie: the “how” of improvisation - very few discuss the less identifiable subject of where said student might find inspiration to improvise - how to stimulate the imaginative and creative part of their brain. In other words, the “why” of being an improvising musician. Sadly, this is not something that can generally be discovered through endless practising. Happily, it is a lot more fun than endlessly practising, although I would not claim to consistently attain absolute musical nirvana myself, nor would I pretend to know an enormous amount about music: this is simply my experience so far. I am writing as a guitarist rather than as a musician, as I make no pretence of being able to play and understand other people’s instruments, but hopefully there will be some aspects of what I have written that apply to other things. What I hope to do is to try and find a few ways for the improviser to inspire themselves. I am open to any ideas readers might have (you can email me at the above address), and hope that this site will be of some help if you ever feel stuck in a rut. I plan to expand it as I go along. At the moment there are a few mini essays on various subjects in progress and a handy musos’ (and other artists’) quotes section, which at the moment is a bit too guitar-biased: this will change with time. I have also recently added a “favourite albums” and “favourite books” section, and welcome contributions if you have one that you find particularly inspirational. Time and space: While seemingly every instruction book will tell you that you must practise your scales and arpeggios every day, I have not seen many that extol the virtues of having good time. In my opinion good time is what really sets the pros and amateurs apart in terms of sound. The most intricately structured fast bebop run will not sound good if the timing is wrong, and a lyrical melodic phrase will lose a lot of its power. How can I improve my sense of time? Who has good timing? Musicians, drummers and bassists especially, obviously. Try people like Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Paul Motian, Billy Higgins etc, who not only have razor sharp micro-time, but can bend and stretch the beat at will. Have a close listen to a few of the best bass players like Paul Chambers, Ray Brown or Ron Carter. Outside of music however, there are many other sources of inspiration: a good actor, athlete or comedian often has an amazing sense of timing: not timing in the sense of rhythm, but as in when to deliver a certain line or action, how long to wait, how much tension to create, when to move. Good time is not necessarily playing to a perfectly symmetrical beat, but of knowing where the beat is, then playing around it to create different kinds of tension or release. It’s a combination of rhythmic sharpness and patience - don’t rush into phrases. So in a sense this refers as much to space as anything. Listen to some Monk records and you’ll find that he often leaves several bars - sometimes even a whole section - completely empty. When he comes back in the effect is striking. It’s a very surreal experience, which is of course the effect that he wants to create. If you are a guitarist or pianist, solo gigs can help you find your own internal beat, rather than relying on a rhythm section to supply it for you. If you're a horn player, go busking on your own. The classic playing along with a metronome is also a great way to internalise rhythm: set the bell to beats 2 & 4 (you have to work out for yourself where these beats are) and choose a set of chords such as rhythm changes (I Got Rhythm, Oleo, Rhythm-a-ning etc) or a standard (All The Things You Are, is a good one as you are exploring the cycle of fifths at the same time), and play scales, arpeggios or lines over the top, trying to pin each note to a beat on the metronome and the beats in between. As ever, Jamey Aebersold playalongs, or practising to your favourite records are dependable routines, but not as good as having a gig: one hour's performance is worth about 20 hours practising. Furthermore, in my opinion, one hour’s listening is worth three hours practising. Sing along to the melodies or basslines in the music - it might feel odd at first but it is great for your relative pitch. Listening: Ask any bandleader what kind of musicians s/he hires and they will inevitably say “ones who listen”. This golden rule will probably crop up a lot at various points, but everything comes from listening: check out lots of different players, styles of jazz and other music of all types etc etc: be as broad minded as you can, and take other people’s advice when they recommend an album to you: basically the more ideas you absorb - consciously or unconsciously - the more interesting, original and imaginative your playing will be. Or, conversely, “rubbish in, rubbish out.” Regular listening to music at home/work pays off on the gig too: you become more aware of the other players, which harmonies they are using, what cross rhythms can be applied, simply because your brain is much more familiar with the situation. Similarly, sitting down with your instrument and copying lines off a favourite album is a great way to improve technique, phrasing and time. As you progress as a listener, you may well find your relative pitch and your sense of time improve, and that you might start to find everyday noises - the wind through the trees, a train going past etc, very interesting. I try and do a minimum of two hours of listening a day, many different styles of music, and if I go out at night I try to go somewhere that plays good music, be it a drum and bass night or a beard folk club. As a jazz musician, the worst thing you can do is to become preoccupied with jazz. Jazz in various forms - don’t forget as a genre of music jazz is extremely varied - makes up the bulk of my listening, but I try and incorporate Brazilian & African music, folk, various singer-songwriters/bands and so on, not forgetting good old Radio 3. Vibraphonist Stefon Harris said in a recent interview that he likes to go to busy restaurants, parks or other public places and try and eavesdrop on three or four different conversations at the same time, try and find the essence of each topic of discussion. I would imagine that this is great for spatial awareness and in a musical context, this ability to distill what you hear and reproduce it is very useful, especially as jazz is such a conversational music. Living in Italy, I listened to a lot of talk shows etc on local radio. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I’m interested in the speech patterns and the way people pitch their voices, both of which are different to the sounds that we use to produce words in English. Gigs: This is the important bit in musical development: being on a gig teaches you loads of stuff that you cannot get from practising: not only how to solo and for how long, but how to interact in a rhythm section, how to accompany a soloist etc etc. Take any gig you can get, because regardless of whether you like the music or rate the other players, you will always learn something. However, always make sure you get paid. Pub landlords seem to see live music as a form of entertainment somewhat similar to a fruit machine - it’s there if people want it, but if not, hopefully it won’t cost them too much money. No. If you work for cheap or for free you are putting other musicians out of business and making it more difficult for everyone. After all, the bar staff and management aren’t docked their wages if they have a quiet night: why should you be? Ask for a flat fee, and if you think the gig needs a push to be a success, do some promotion: put some posters up around town, contact the local newspaper & radio and ask if they can give you a mention. People are inherently lazy, so if you love music enough, it’s up to you to do their job for them. Never assume that a venue will be organised enough to do promotion locally or organise press, because if the gig is empty, you can bet that they won’t blame themselves. Try and avoid putting on gigs on dead nights of the week, as they can be pretty inconsistent in terms of attendance. Leader vs Sideman: Pros & Cons. As a guitarist, you might find that the majority of your gigs could be as a leader, as sadly, most horn players prefer to hire a piano player. This is understandable as, either due to the nature of the instrument, the familiarity with written music or the repertoire of the piano, the average piano player is much more musical than the average guitarist. The solution: get good. Music is not a competition, but versatility and competence equals work, and if as an accompanist you inspire a soloist or lead a rhythm section well, you might well get the call next time. Both of the above roles have their nice aspects: As a leader you get to pick the tunes, arrangements and tempos, so you can choose stuff that you like and that you won’t get tripped up on. You also get the chance to really express what you are about as a musician and a person. On the other hand, being a leader is much more of a responsibility: not only do you have to get the gigs, make all the phone calls and deal with other musicians showing up late, complaining about the tunes, the money etc, but you have to be more of a public figure on the bandstand, although this is jazz, so it’s ok to not speak to the audience. Sideman gigs are nice: turn up, play, often get to test yourself on new tunes and difficult tempos/feels etc. You don’t have to play any of the heads, there’s no dealing with idiotic venue management, you can just sit in the background, relax and get on with the music. I have to say I generally prefer being a sideman, if the gig is with good players - although obviously we can’t all play with people who are better than us all the time. It’s an opportunity to learn, and to go to places you wouldn’t normally go, and it’s also much less stressful. However there are certain things that it’s important to take care of: make sure you act in a professional way. Musicians are understandably sensitive about the music that they are making: if you do something to disrupt the atmosphere at a gig (eg: arriving late, not bringing a fake book or a music stand and asking to share someone else’s which means you might both have to lean over awkwardly to read the changes, getting a bit too drunk - guilty - complaining about the repertoire or other aspects of the gig etc) then you might put the other players in a bad mood and spoil the vibe and rapport that everyone else is trying hard to create. Being disorganised in everyday life is ok - in fact I would positively encourage it - but it’s not cool to do it on a gig, it’s just irritating. Even if you are the world’s most scatterbrained person, the above faults are easy to avoid. Visual ideas: shape and form: How can the player express, for example, a square through sound? How about a circle, triangle or a curve? I often find myself thinking of particular shapes or images when listening to music. It’s no coincidence that artistic vocabulary is often used when music is discussed: describing a piece as “impressionistic” for example. In Thelonious Monk’s playing it is particularly easy to hear ideas of geometry and mathematics. His concept has been referred to as Cubist, which I think is a good description. Visiting art galleries can be stimulating, as can reading arty books, but you can probably find plenty of inspiration in your everyday environment. What are the buildings like where you live? What’s the weather like? Do you have any open green spaces nearby that you can visit? Can you climb to the top of a hill and get a view of the place where you live? - And so on. I am basically doing what I do as an improviser: trying to create or look at shapes or images that evoke sensations and feelings, memories, optimism for the future etc. For interesting and inspiring use of space it’s a good idea to explore developments in visual arts like Cinema, painting, photography and then of course literature, whether in the form of good books or good press. When you’re watching a film, ignore the dialogue and try and focus on its visual aspects: the colours the director favours will obviously affect the mood: how much space is there on the screen? Watching something visually spectacular like 2001 is obviously very different to watching Police Academy, but both directors are using visual imagery to put us in a certain frame of mind. On the same tip, it’s an interesting exercise to read something for the sake of enjoying the way the words look and work together, ignoring the story: with favourite texts that you have read many times this is pretty easy. You can do it with records too: listen to Kind Of Blue and concentrate solely on Paul Chambers’ bass playing for example. Is there a huge difference between a well played musical phrase and a well written one in a book or newspaper? They both have a particular arch that they follow, a beginning, middle and end, no unnecessary detail clouding the conception, simply; introduction, story and conclusion. In short: a direct inner logic. As Dizzy Gillespie said “start well and end well” Obviously in our particular respective realities, we generally perceive things chronologically, and many things have a beginning, middle and end. Think of a journey you have been on, what kind of situations you encountered and what these situations made you feel. Sometimes when looking down at the straight metal of guitar strings I am reminded of a railway line running from one destination to another, particularly as you might perceive the frets as sleepers, the fingertips as passengers. What does this tell us? Well, in the main, probably that I’m a bit of a space cookie, but why not use one’s imagination? There is a trend which seems to be prevalent in a lot of circles to dismiss anything which cannot be quantified as being “hippy talk”. All well and good if we’re talking about unrealistic extreme political views perhaps, which in my view are no more attainable than many forms of religious idealism - “we’re all going to Heaven lads, wahey” - but the key is that these ideas stimulate the imagination, and that in pursuit of one impossible or implausible thing we might stumble across many other interesting experiences, meet good people and find out a lot about life. I suppose the key as a musician is “what do you want to express?” A teacher must set targets for their students to learn, and by the same token a performer or music maker must decide which feelings are most important to them, how they want their music to affect people, and how these goals can be achieved. I have recently begun to teach myself to read music, and this is inspiring. I like the notes: they look like little people. Mirrors: Thelonious Monk used to have a huge mirror fixed to the ceiling above his piano at home. I imagine he used it to watch his hands at the keys from another angle, or to look at the movement of the hammers inside the piano. Or maybe he just felt it really tied the room together. It’s a cool idea though - looking at the instrument we play from a new perspective. Following the same idea of symmetry, Bach would take a written melody line on a score, and turn it upside down, then move the notes an octave down, giving him instant contrary motion and a counterpoint line without even trying! Obviously one or two note clashes would need to be fixed but by and large he got away with it. It’s funny to think that a man revered as a musical genius “cheated” in this way, but also kind of cool - it takes a lot of the pressure off the rest of us, and proves that making good music isn’t about being serious, and that all approaches can be valid. Short cuts are not necessarily unproductive. Truth: “I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth....” “..... and they’ve got to be, because saying a musical thing is a truth. If you play a musical statement and it’s a valid statement, that’s a truth right there in itself, you know. All musicians are striving for as near certain perfection as they can get, and that’s truth there, you know. So in order to play these things, these truths, you’ve got to live as much truth as you possibly can.....and if a guy is religious and if he’s searching for good and he wants to live a good life - he might call himself religious or he might not.” - John Coltrane. I agree with this. Perhaps the reason so many musicians were and are anti-establishment is because there are still many injustices in modern society, and they feel that they don’t want to contribute to a system that can be racist, mysogynistic, economically repressive and - most commonly - just plain stupid. In a lot of respects, I’m not an Englishman: I’m a Musician, and my countrymen are spread all over the world, working towards the same goal: vibe. If I have a role to play in society, it’s to get people out of the “look after number one” mentality, and the only way I can do this is to live the truth so that I can try and play and create the truth. I wouldn’t say I am particularly religious, but I appreciate the fact that people who do follow a faith often spend their time trying to make a positive contribution and help other people instead of themselves. As an individual it’s up to each person to decide what truth is, and what they can do to get people closer to this mindset. One thing I have noticed out of all the musicians and DJs I have met (this particularly applies to DJs) is that the ones that make the best music tend to be the friendliest, and the ones who are arrogant or argumentative or extremely opiniated (I sometimes get people using opinions or knowledge to start arguments or assert musical/social superiority - I wouldn’t try that mate, I’m a jazz musician) generally make pretty mediocre or even shit music. The Guitar: It’s quite difficult to work out what the guitar is: it’s not a string instrument in the way that a violin or double bass is, and it’s not a frontline instrument like a trumpet is. Equally we are not dealing with a chordal instrument as complex as a piano. The good news is that the guitar can be the best of all these worlds - it’s just a question of finding and exploiting the strengths of the instrument, rather than being limited by its weaknesses. One of the things I love most about the jazz archtop guitar is its appearance. Read this: it’s from an interview with Andrés Segovia: “There exists a legend regarding the origin of the guitar that is more beautifully suggestive than historic fact: Apollo was running in pursuit of a beautiful nymph, gallantly repeating to her all the while: “Don’t tire yourself, don’t tire yourself. I promise not to catch up with you.” When, finally, he did succeed in taking her in his arms, she called out to her semidivine father, who instantly changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo made the first guitar from the wood of this tree and gave it as form the graceful, curved contours that forever reveal its feminine origin.” “That is why the guitar is of a reserved and changeable nature, even hysterical at times: but that is why it is sweet and smooth, harmonious and delicate. When it is played with love and skill, there issues from its melancholy sounds a rapture that holds us fast to it forever.” -All spectacularly sexist of course and I don’t necessarily agree with the sentiment of what he says here, but it does highlight the fact that the guitar is a delicate instrument, and it can be used to produce gentle and beautiful sounds. One of the hardest things to do as a jazz musician is to think as a guitarist, rather than subconsciously viewing oneself as a combination of horn player and pianist. What are the strengths of my chosen instrument? Apart from delicacy, there is the fact that guitarists (try Wes for this one) can produce a certain kind of slinky groove that nothing else can touch if you get it right. If your time is good, lines on guitar can swing in a really unique way. It can get very funky. Listen to the guitar on James Brown, Bob Marley and Fela Kuti records - it’s a drum. There are also, of course, many different kinds of guitar. Electric to me is a little bit like television or cinema, jazz archtop guitar and acoustic feel purer, like a beautiful blank canvas. There are aspects of both that I like. Sometimes you’re in the mood for purity, sometimes, something synthetic can feel beautiful. Practicing Strategies: Cellist Jaqueline DuPré would choose a note on the instrument and spend 2 or 3 minutes trying to play the same note with as many different feels as possible. Eg: with/without vibrato, long, short, pizzicato or bowed and so on. A friend watching her practice said that it seemed as though she put more emotion into those two minutes than some people put into an entire concert performance. It’s an important point: when practicing: we shouldn’t only revise the mechanical side of the instrument, but also the things that have an emotional impact: tone, the feel and look of the guitar, the different ways of striking a string and so on - how many are there? Given that these things have an emotional impact, we should find emotions that they connect to: happiness, sadness, love etc. Rather than trying to force your instrument to work for you, try and work with it instead. Kickstarting a solo: Sometimes when I’m playing, if I’m not happy with what I am coming up with, I will select a note at random on the fretboard and play a phrase starting from this point, meaning that I have to use my ear and intuition to resolve the phrase to the corresponding chord(s). Many tutors warn against falling into the trap of relying on the visual patterns of scales that we find on the guitar - a resource that a sax player or trumpeter doesn’t have - but why not turn this idea on its head? In the course of a solo, what would happen if we tried to spell out visually (for example) the letter x or a square, circle etc on the fretboard? You are left with a sound that might not be initially musically very logical, but with a bit of fine tuning can sound very fresh and interesting. The key is to take the risk and jump into the unknown: it creates a sink or swim situation and finding your way back to dry land can be a very interesting and educational journey, as well as sharpening your reflexes. Also, as your ear develops, you will probably broaden your notion of what is harmonically acceptable, particularly if you are listening to a wide variety of music. Air: A concept that I have found interesting for quite a while is the idea of air: when playing an acoustic instrument or amplified electric one, the movement of air is what gives us the sound in the first place, but in the artistic sense, air is a very interesting element, and relates closely to time and space: in fact these elements all relate to atmosphere. Self-expression: One of the dangers in learning to improvise and play jazz or other forms of improvised music is that the student will probably model their playing on an established “great”. Copying the lines of players like - for example - Coltrane can definitely be an educational and inspiring thing to do, but take care not to overdo it. Remember that as a human being, you are not John Coltrane any more than he is you, and there are things that you can play that he couldn’t, melodies and rhythms that you have heard that he hasn’t. We now live in a different era, so logically we are experiencing a different way of living and different emotions, although obviously our basic feelings are the same. It’s good to listen to all types of music from all eras: the more influences you put into the pot, the more original your cooking will taste, provided that you get the right measures of each style. Brasil: My dogs on acid internet buddy from Brasil, Akzel, posted me some advice of Brasilian cats to look out for: “Milton Nascimento is great great great, I dunno if you speak Portuguese, but his lyrics are a kind of poetry of a unique style, simple and pure, although touchy. He's a favourite of Bjork. Elis Regina was another brilliant mind!!! The obvious, like Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, the 'fathers' of bossa nova, and Jorge Ben Jor, from the samba-rock tip, well known (sampled) by Marky, Xerxes, Drumagick, etc. There are many kinds of brazilian music: On the "modern" tip: Adriana Calcanhoto: Soft vocal, "urban" lyrics, "90's MPB", she's very popular, I like her!!! Samba: Beth Carvalho, althought I'm not much in samba myself, she's a "queen of samba", also search for Cartola, he's dead, but he made the most beautiful samba ever, "As Rosas não falam" ['Roses can't speak' in a bad English haha]. I really dig Chico Buarque too, he's a quite clever man, his lyrics and his songs are great! From the north east of Brasil comes Dorival Caymmi, he's the "father" of most artists from that region of the country, they have a unique style of music. Also search for Djavan, he's a great singer. I'm not sure, but I guess there are some partnership of him + Milton Nascimento. There's the "diva" Elza Soares, she's gotta a kind of voice very unusual, a must listen. [she doesn't sing like a diva] Fafá de Belém got a powerful voice and she got an accent from the north of the country, she comes from Belém, in the borderline of the Amazon jungle. Another powerful voice is Gal Costa!! Maria Bethânia too [she's Veloso's sister]. There's also Gilberto Gil, he just finished a partnership with Xerxes. In the romantic-carioca style check for Ivan Lins, with good lyrics, nice piano and cool vocal. I cannot forget João Gilberto if I'm talking about MPB!!!! In more a 70's style, you can find Mutantes, in their psychedelic 70's style, it was the former band of Rita Lee, the "mother" of brazilian rock'n'roll and Ney Matogrosso, one of the greatest voices from Brasil.” Anyone else know anything about Brasil? I’m particularly keen to find some kind of book on the history (musical and social) of the country. Quotes from musicians and other sources: -I don’t necessarily agree with all of these statements, but find them all interesting perspectives on music. They don’t necessarily tie in with a “musical philosophy” or any of that. I picked them because they sound inspiring, contain interesting ideas, and in some cases just because they’re funny. I freely admit that most of these quotes were er liberated from Guitar Player, Downbeat, Q and Mojo magazines, plus whatever music or art books I happen to be reading at the time. I just hope these guys don’t sue me. I also accept no responsibility for insult or injury sustained when following the advice of any of these people. “You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.” - Miles. “The reason I don’t play ballads anymore is because I love playing ballads so much.” - Miles to Keith Jarrett. It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note - it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong. - Miles. “I’ve been electrocuted so many times now. It’s quite a buzz actually!” - Keith Richards. “The things I'm after musically are clarity, emotional communication on a not-too-obvious level, the kind of form in a chorus that doesn't hit you over the head but is there if you look for it, humor, and construction that sounds logical in an unexpected way. That and a good, dependable high F-sharp and I'll be happy.” - Paul Desmond. “I can’t understand why people would want to play scales when they could be playing a tune.” -Pat Metheny on practising. “After we’d settled down a bit, songs started coming out. I don’t write them, I wait for them to come to me. I think they all floated through the air, and if you were alert enough or around at the right time of day, you’d sit down with an instrument and you’d pick up one or two. As long as the antenna’s up, they can transmit.” - Keith Richards. “Don’t play the first thing that comes into your head: play the second.” - Miles. “See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that-but he’s got to think differently in order to do it. I’ve always told the musicians in my band to play what they know, and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that’s where great art and music happens.” - Miles. “I am much more than a guitarist: I am a man. Before everything I feel that I am a man. And possibly a good man. I always say that my life has been a line without interruption, ascending always. I gave my life to the guitar.” - Segovia. “There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.” - Miles. “Guitar players seem so clannish: they only listen to each other. I really don’t care about the guitar. I mean, I’m glad I chose it, but I’m interested in making music.” - Jimmy Raney. “I’d tell Trane to begin in the middle because that’s the way his head worked anyway.” - Miles. “My stage fright was less than my wish to do well”. - Segovia. “I worked out the concept that every minute of my life was valuable. So if I got the chance to play with Art Tatum or Roy Eldridge, I made the time, even if I didn’t get much sleep.” - Les Paul. “I don’t think too many people on 11 September listened to J-Lo or Britney Spears for comfort and solace. The world of manufactured pop music almost seemed like an insult.” - Moby. “I think the most important thing about playing is to walk out with confidence and look the people right in the eye. As soon as they know you’re confident, they’re confident.” - Les Paul. “John used to tell me how to listen to the music, so that I could get the most out of it. He would say things to me like, “You listen to a song, five times, Cecilia. Listen to it instrument by instrument. Play that song and listen to the bass all the way through. Listen to it again and listen to the saxophone.” - Cecilia Foster (Frank Foster’s wife) on John Coltrane. “The words themselves on Kid A are kind of empty because they’re leaving room for the music.” - Thom Yorke. 
“As water is a fish's element and the air a bird's, music was Django's.” - Charles Delauney. “He who is impatient mostly arrives at his goals late. Step by step is the only way.” - Segovia. “I hate the way he writes. I kind of like the way he lives, though.” - Paul Desmond on Jack Kerouac. “I believe simplicity is the greatest, but it’s the toughest thing to get sometimes”. - Les Paul. “The musicians were giving me tunes with chords all the time, and at that time I didn’t want to play them. The music was too thick.” - Miles. “I finally decided writing was like playing jazz-it can be learned, but not taught.” - Paul Desmond. “See the beauty of uncarved wood. See the beauty of raw silk.” - Laotse. “All the sounds of the guitar are feminine because it’s very soft and very, very delicate. They arrive with such subtlety that it is almost impossible to hear it. It is as if you thought of that sound rather than heard it.” - Segovia. “I was transported to a place that I’d been willing myself to be in for months on end. I’d finally made the transition. Now you might only be in that place for three minutes and forever more life will never be as good. But that’s fine by me.” - Thom Yorke. “Hang on to your eccentricities, because they will give you a style.” - John Scofield. “When a man’s faith is never tried, I don’t think he’ll ever learn anything. You have to have trial and tribulation, or what are you going to learn?” - McCoy Tyner. “Sometimes a producer is someone who just creates the right atmosphere for things to happen.” - Thom Yorke. “I don’t really see myself as a songwriter or a guitarist or a singer or a lyricist or even a film producer. All of those are me, in a way - just like I like gardening, digging holes and sticking trees in.” - George Harrison. “Finding the right guys, I think, is really the hardest part of being a leader. The rest gets to be largely routine and resigning yourself to being a bad guy part of the time.” - Paul Desmond. “There’s a thing about empathy between musicians. The great bands were the ones in which the majority of the people were good people, morally good people; I call them real people. In jail they call them regulars.” - Art Pepper. “A good musician can do more to change society than 30 average mayors.” - Howard Roberts. “Avoid root notes.” - Wynton Marsalis. “I don’t know one musician who’s stuck to his guns, who was good in the early days, that hasn’t come through now with recognition from everybody.” - Jimmy Page. “So much great music has already happened that catching up is a hell of a job.” - Jerry Garcia. “The selfish or shallow person might be a great musician technically, but he’ll be so involved with himself that his playing will lack warmth, intensity, beauty and won’t be deeply felt by the listener.” - Art Pepper. “It’s not the note that you play that’s the wrong note: it’s the next note you play that makes it right or wrong.” -Miles. “The conventional thing is to use the hi-hat for the after-beat and use the bass drum for the underlying 4/4 or 3/4 rhythm to keep the steady pulsation....But I just think you have to use all of the drum set all the time.” - Elvin Jones. “Each player must decide for himself.” - Cecil Taylor. The guitar, as I’ve always said, is a little orchestra.” - Segovia. “What knocks me out about Coltrane is that he’s the most harmonically static player and the most harmonically adventurous at the same time.” - Steve Reich. “Musical notation can be used as a point of reference, but the notation does not indicate music, it indicates direction.” - Cecil Taylor “- I don’t know what I mean by saying that.” - Cecil Taylor. “He had already plotted five seconds ahead of time what he was going to do, and you could hear it in his music. It looked like he was a very slow player, but in fact he was making quick decisions, and because he understood his craft so well his music has this kind of air of easyness about it. What you heard had been edited completely, only the essence remained. Desmond understood how to get to the point quicker than most players ever learn.” - Anthony Braxton on Paul Desmond. “You play a couple of notes and say “That sounds like Eric Clapton” or “That sounds like George Benson”. But then you play two or three notes and say “Man, that’s me”. And you concentrate on those ones.” - Carlos Santana. “The whole point of making music is to get something across”. - Thom Yorke. “It’s like a beautiful city, but we don’t enter, because we have to go through the portals, the corridor, and then we reach the entranceway. When that chord hits, that E major, the doors start to open. That’s what it’s like for me - the very first invitation to this beautiful place that’s here, that’s in our heart and spirit.” - Alice Coltrane on the opening piece of A Love Supreme. “I really feel that you can’t avoid finding your voice if you keep playing.” - Jerry Garcia. “The piano has no vibrato. But trying for it affects what comes before it in the phrase.” - Bill Evans. “Scales and modes are mechanical and uninteresting.” - Herb Ellis. “If I could do it all again, I’d learn how to read.” - Tal Farlow. “Dizzy Gillespie and Lalo Schifrin were in Erroll Garner’s hotel room Erroll was putting golf balls into a cup against the wall. Dizzy asked if he might try it, took Erroll’s putter, and sank one ball after another, to the amazement of Erroll and Lalo, who asked if he had played a lot of golf. He said he had never done it before. How then, was he doing it? ‘I just imagine,’ Dizzy said, ‘that I’m the ball and I want to be in the cup’.” 
“I never approached the piano as a thing in itself but as a gateway to music. Rather than “the instrument that plays jazz”, it’s “the mind that thinks jazz” that interests me.” - Bill Evans. “The darkest hour is before dawn.” - Paulo Coehlo (The Alchemist). “I practiced piano three hours a day in childhood, about six hours a day in college, and at least six hours now. With that, I could afford to develop slowly.” - Bill Evans. “Keep things simple. Don’t fill your head with theory and numbers that have little to do with music.” - Joe Pass. “The guitar is an instrument of nuances: not the force, not the strength, but the nuance.” - Segovia. “It gets to the point where the player, if he’s going to be any kind of serious player, teaches himself.” - Bill Evans. “It’s hard to play music: it’s not like falling off a log.” - John Scofield. “Making good records has very little to do with all the possibilities you’ve got. It’s, can you make a decision?” - Keith Richards. “People are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive, but we’re powerless because we can’t name it.” - Thom Yorke. “Parker used to play a lot on the upper parts of the chords. Sometimes he’d start a phrase two beats late and run it into the next chord. Even if it didn’t fit the chord, the phrase was so nice it didn’t matter.” - Tal Farlow. “I caught up on listening to music, which to me is maybe the greatest art.” - Keith Richards. “You can only take from the guitar what you put into it.” - Wes Montgomery. 
“I tried to be Jim Hall when I was a kid and I couldn’t become him. In the early 70’s I tried to imitate John McLaughlin, and I couldn’t become him. In the end I discovered that you have to become what you are, and play that.” - John Abercrombie. “Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned with feeling being the generating force.” - Bill Evans. “A lot of the 80s has been toytown music, because of the advance of technology: everybody is tryin to figure out what to do with all these toys.” - Keith Richards “We had this whole thing about Amnesiac being like getting into someone’s attic, opening a chest and finding their notes from a journey they’d been on. There’s a story, but no literal plot, so you have to keep picking out fragments. You know something really important has happened to this person that’s ended up completely changing them, but you’re never told exactly what it is.” - Thom Yorke. “I’ve never really had any guitar heroes.” - Edge. “For me, I think the only danger is being too in love with guitar playing.” - Jerry Garcia. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” - Monk. “You must keep things moving, and have a narrative flow. The fundamental principles are the same: The idea is to tell a story.” - Pat Metheny. “Investigating open tunings wasn’t really a conscious thing, but a necessary one, maybe. Sometimes the subconscious bits come up front and say ‘in order to save you, we’re taking you over for a bit’.” - Keith Richards. “When you have a strong vocation, everything is easy. Even if it is too hard to learn, it is easy because you have patience. Vocation is what the very religious man says is the inspiration from heaven.” - Segovia. "The word 'bebop' doesn't mean a thing to me. It's about trying to play clean, and looking for the pretty notes." - Charlie Parker. “Rhythm is a hard subject to put into words.” - Keith Richards. “In the long run I think it’s more important to look at paintings than study the way somebody plays bebop lines.” - Jim Hall. “When you compare music, you lose the joy of listening to it.” - John Scofield. "Just play it like you don't know how to play guitar." - Miles to John McLaughlin when recording In a Silent Way. “MONK = KNOW” - Monk. “Whenever I start working on a song, I immediately try to forget everything, to empty my head. I try to approach it like, “This is the first time I’ve ever played a guitar. What am I going to do?”. That’s one way of getting straight through the conscious mind into the subconscious layer where the true creative spirit lies.” - Edge. “Music is my voice to God.” - John McLaughlin. “Playing slightly out of tune...we’re talking about a certain tension that’s created by jarring the nerve just a little.” - Keith Richards. "I want to paint atmosphere." - Monet. “When you're not sure what to play, lay out. In other words, don't just do something - sit there.” - Jim Hall. “It’s always night, otherwise you wouldn’t need the light!” - Monk. “I do know the older I get, the more I'm referencing music I heard as a kid.” - Bill Frisell. “Well of course I’m a pretty sharp pool player, but the guitar is a hard instrument.” - Wes Montgomery. “I’m still working on my sound. It’s really about finding the right guitar with the right amp.” - Keith Richards. “Jazz is vital, living music that should be about life.” - John McLaughlin. 
"Listening is still the key." - Jim Hall. 
“Never ask for a job, just be on the scene and be ready!” - Monk to Steve Lacy. “Why dirty up the arrangement by randomly whacking a couple of chords or a couple of extra tweezy notes just because that’s what everybody else would do?” - Frank Zappa. “On the piano I may come across something I wouldn’t have done on guitar.” - Keith Richards. “It bugs me when people try to analyse jazz as some kind of intellectual theorem. It's not: it's feeling.” - Bill Evans. “Any chord can follow any chord in my book.” - John McLaughlin. “That state of living where one can say, with no regrets, 'I reached the point of pride and the elegance of being a human being'. It's so elegant to be a human being - elegant meaning good fortune. We are very fortunate to be born as human beings. So if we realise that fortune, why not strive to be the most elegant in everything we do?” - Wayne Shorter. “I always feel funny when somebody comes up to me and says “what kind of modes do you use?” To me that’s the equivalent of someone asking “what kind of verbs do you use?” - Pat Metheny. “My name is John Francis Pastorius III, and I’m the greatest bass player in the world.” - Jaco meets Joe Zawinul for the first time. “There are times when an acoustic guitar will make a track.” - Keith Richards. “Socrates was wise because he realized how little he knew.” - Bill Evans. “Football is a game that you play with your brain.” - Johann Cruyff. “Jazz is the most advanced thing in the universe - that’s why we gotta do it.” - Barry Harris. “Live your life. Don’t lock yourself in your room eight hours a day and think of nothing but playing guitar. Learn how to live well, to appreciate flowers. You have to have a human side.” - Vernon Reid. “We used to just go and jam, actually. We’d say ‘rehearsing’ just to make it sound, you know, official.” - Hendrix. “Me and Jimi Hendrix built the World Trade Centre towers by ourselves - with our bare hands!” - Jaco Pastorius. “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another’s.” - William Blake. “I’m different”. - Frank Zappa. “When you’re inspired, you can do anything.” - John McLaughlin. “You can do anything. If you want to walk through a wall you can walk through a wall.” - Jaco. “Every day you wake up in pain like death, then you go out and score, and that is transfiguration. Each day becomes all of life in microcosm.” - Bill Evans on addiction. NB: I do NOT endorse drug use. I reckon this comment illustrates how destructive drug addiction can be. “It gets to me when technique becomes the featured item. It’s like somebody spending hours polishing a tap thinking that it’s going to make the water purer or tastier. It doesn’t work like that. I’ve never sat down and worked on technique - it just takes care of itself as you become a better musician.” - Pat Metheny. “I think of all harmony (....) as an expansion from and return to the tonic.” - Bill Evans. 
“Players get to that intermediate level where they can already play pretty good, and that’s kind of a dangerous period because they tend to start playing only the things that they can play, rather than the things they can’t.” - Pat Metheny. “Try to listen to a lot of music to keep a perspective. If you don’t, what you bring to your own playing will become really shallow.” - Vernon Reid. “I became obsessed with The Urantia Book. It got to the point where we would sit on the roof of my place and meditate and wait for UFOs to come and pick us up. We were both totally convinced it was a real possibility. And Jaco believed that he was such a special person the aliens would want to check him out.” - Bobby Econoumou. “If I make an attempt to construct a great solo, the craftsman in me can do that, but that’s the last thing I want to happen as an improvisor.” - Pat Metheny. “Titles are important. Some pieces are program music, you know, the tune tells a story - like Duke's 'Tattooed Bride' and 'Harlem Airshaft'.” - Billy Strayhorn. “One reason why I always felt good about growing up in a fairly isolated town is that there was no way to know what was ‘happening’.” - Pat Metheny. 
“When you love a woman, it’s the God in her that you see”. - George Harrison. “Whenever I encounter great art, I don’t feel a sense of discovery, but rather one of confirmation, as if I had already been thinking the same idea without knowing it.” - Brad Mehldau. “I like the sound of the flugelhorn - I play it all the time”. - Harry Beckett. “This world is really paradise, but we’ve forgotten, that’s all. Obviously the world cannot change - it is people who have to change. If I can bring some comfort into someone’s life then I won’t have lived in vain.” - John McLaughlin. “Just because I wrote the song it doesn’t necessarily mean I know any better than anyone else what it’s about.” - Lou Reed. “I like the idea of a party in your mind that you hope will never stop. I think of people in a situation where they have to be straight, but in their heads they’re losing it completely. That duality really appeals to me.” - Vernon Reid. “The song ‘Alabama’ came from a speech. John said there was a Martin Luther King speech about the four girls getting killed printed in the newspaper. And so John took the rhythmic patterns of his speech and came up with ‘Alabama’.” - Elvin Jones. 
“When playing a solo or a tune, you have the opportunity to construct something: a stone wall or maybe an archway. The wall is the easier of the two. An arch however has tension and drama and contains the possibility that it may fall in on itself and become a pile of rocks again. Go for the shape or feeling: the form.” - Jim Hall. “When you walk on to a stage, you take your whole self with you. The more of you there is, the better.” - Jim Hall. “The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.” - William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene I. “(Pop Idol) Will Young’s in the Guinness Book of Records for fuck’s sake! But so what? So is a bloke who jumps off the Eiffel Tower and lands in a fucking tea cup. Did he write strawberry fields forever? No.” - Noel Gallagher on the manufactured pop industry. “Spiritual and artistic levels are the same - there’s no difference.” - John McLaughlin. 
“I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth.” - John Coltrane. “..... and they’ve got to be, because saying a musical thing is a truth. If you play a musical statement and it’s a valid statement, that’s a truth right there in itself, you know. All musicians are striving for as near certain perfection as they can get, and that’s truth there, you know. So in order to play these things, these truths, you’ve got to live as much truth as you possibly can.....and if a guy is religious and if he’s searching for good and he wants to live a good life - he might call himself religious or he might not.” - Trane. “Your humanity is your instrument.” - Wayne Shorter. “At home in California I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds.” - Eric Dolphy. “It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception”. -Albert Einstein, speaking about his theory of relativity. “I feel that we have every reason to face the future optimistically.” - ‘Trane. “If there is a new invention, a new gas, it has to be given the chance to surface to be recognised before it can benefit the human race.” - Hendrix “You still hear musicians say the height of their ambition is to play in the Ellington band.” - Harry Carney. “I never know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want”. - Stanley Kubrick. “If I can abandon my own preconceived, silly notions of what I think I am, then the music can really use me. It’s selfish to impose myself on the music.” - John McLaughlin. “I was at Birdland one night, the quartet was playing and I finally got up courage enough to go up and talk to one of them, because Elvin Jones was sitting just two tables away. I told him how much I loved their music, and he said “Oh, we just finished an album called A Love Supreme, I think you’ll really like it.” - Producer Michael Cuscuna. “I would like to see more colour on the streets, probably.” - Hendrix. “It's interesting that some of the letters Monk gets thank him for just being himself. He couldn't be any other way.” - Nellie Monk. “I taught myself guitar from Charlie Christian’s records. I listened to them real good and I knew that everything done on his guitar could be done on mine, because he had a six-string, so I just determined that I would do it.” - Wes Montgomery. “Ideally a group should be in an evolving state like a mobile, with each player acting and reacting as the music takes shape.” - Jim Hall. “Sometimes I get so deep that I feel like I’m walking around on the bottom of the sea watching the sunset.” - Hendrix. “Nothing under the sun is new.” - Aristotle. “You can't make anything go anywhere; it just happens.” - Monk “It’s feeling.” - Bill Evans on music. “It’s the spontaneity onstage which is of paramount importance, because how I feel now, I never felt before and I’ll never feel again.” - John McLaughlin “I try to make myself ignorant, and go by sound and feeling. When things are going right, it feels like the music is happening because you finally got out of the way.” - Jim Hall. “I felt like I was turning my brain inside out to where my subconscious was becoming my conscious.” - John Frusciante. “I just box on account it makes you graceful.” - Miles. “When we played gigs in Utah, the people were really listening: they were really tuned in some kind of way or another. I think it was the air.” - Hendrix. “We always solo and we never solo” - Joe Zawinul on Weather Report. “With jazz, you can't explain it to anyone without losing the experience. It's got to be experienced, because it's feeling, not words.” - Bill Evans. “I think the most powerful sound in the drum kit is silence.” - Trevor Davies “Monk stood still and listened to tin cans rattling in the wind in an empty lot: ‘Do you know what the loudest noise in the world is, man?’ He asked; ‘The loudest noise in the world is silence’.” “I was just bending reality to create a little fantasy. Now I’m doing things like Room Full Of Mirrors, which is about mental derangement and bits of broken glass in my brain and so forth. Are they psychedelic pieces? I don’t even know what the word means really. I just give them little bits to dream on, and dreams come from different moods.” - Hendrix. “You try to express a simple emotion - love, excitement, sadness - and often your technique gets in the way. I've always had good facility, and that worries me. I hope it doesn't get in the way.” - Bill Evans. “You are the one who has to learn guitar, because a teacher can only show you so much.” - Wes Montgomery. “I used to have a bunch of Hawk's records and a player with me all the time. I would wake up in the morning and listen to Hawk. One day, a guy said to me, 'Well, Ben, you finally did it.' I asked him what he meant. He said, 'You sound just like Hawk now.' I packed up the record player and took it to Kansas City for my folks. From then on, I developed on my own.” - Ben Webster. “I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.” - Billie Holiday. “It's kind of nice to play concerts, but I feel closer to the people when we play a club. They're more relaxed.” - Ben Webster “You’ll find more people against you than with you, until you get started. Then you’ll find more with you than against you”. - Wes Montgomery. Some favourite records: These are my standard issue records - in that I think children should be issued with all of them at birth. Fairly reasonable in my opinion. Everybody Digs Bill Evans: Probably my favourite record ever. The atmosphere is very similar to the one on Kind Of Blue, which is a very rare feel. Everything about this record is perfect: it swings really hard, it’s powerfully emotional, the lines Bill plays are brilliantly structured, and the cover is cool. See also: You Must Believe In Spring, The Paris Concert (1 & 2), Sunday At The Village Vanguard/Waltz for Debby, Undercurrent. There really isn’t a Bill Evans record without merit. Wynton Kelly Trio + Wes Montgomery: Smokin at the Half Note: The best Wes playing I have heard on any record anywhere. Also worth a listen to hear how Wes and Wynton interact when comping - they never clash with voicings, which is very difficult to do. I could probably sing you all of Wes’s solos on this. Definitely one for the guitar practice massive. Joe Zawinul & The Zawinul Sydicate: World Tour: The percussion on this record (Paco Sery - drums, Manolo Badrena, percussion) is amazing. I really like this band because they have a lot of the best aspects of Weather Report but they groove about 5 times as hard. Larry Goldings Trio: As One: Some of the best contemporary jazz around at the moment - very diverse, swings, grooves, very lyrical...Peter Bernstein is a fantastic guitarist, Bill Stewart is a really wicked drummer and I think Larry must be the Bill Evans of the Hammond organ. His website is worth a look too. See also: Sweet Science, Moonbird. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: Not much I need to say about this one. If you’ve never heard it, go and buy it now, silly. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue: See above. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds: See above. The Beatles: Revolver: See above. Miles Davis - other notables: In A Silent Way, l’Ascenseur Pour l’Echafaud, Miles In The Sky, Miles Smiles, Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, ESP, We Want Miles, Relaxin’ With The Miles Davis Quintet, The Classic Concert 1964: My Funny Valentine + Four & More, Filles de Kilimanjaro, Miles In Berlin, Birth Of The Cool. You can’t go wrong with Miles, although some of the 80s stuff sounds very 80s. It’s still good in its own way though....... John Coltrane - other notables: Crescent, Coltrane’s Sound, Giant Steps, Live at The Village Vanguard, My Favourite Things.... Jimi Hendrix: Axis Bold As Love. This has got a few of my Hendrix favourites on it, like Spanish Castle Magic, Little Wing, Castles Made of Sand etc. I remember watching the Hendrix Woodstock video when I was about 14 - blew my mind. One of the first things that got me seriously practising rather than just messing about. Read interviews with Hendrix when you see ‘em, they’re usually really funny. John Scofield: Works For Me: I think this is Sco’s best record. The rhythm section (Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Billy Higgins) is incredible, and Sco and Kenny Garrett up front play really nice stuff. And the compositions are really good too. Brad Mehldau: Art of the Trio 4: Back at the Vanguard: Great trio, great tunes, great playing. So the summary then: great. Bjork: Début. Amazing variety of styles on this album and yet it all fits into a perfectly coherent whole. Obviously I recommend all Bjork stuff, but this is a particular favourite. I think she’s the most sophisticated modern artist I’ve heard, and probably the cat of the 90s. See also: Post, Homogenic. Van Morrison: Astral Weeks: I like this record a lot - it sounds like nature. Jaco Pastorius: Jaco. A difficult choice, because all Jaco’s records contain tunes that are musically just absolutely perfect, but I think this is his strongest album overall. There are some wicked Latin grooves on this. Check out his biography by Bill Milkowski - a great read for any musician, not just bass players. Various: Blue Brazil: Blue Note in a Latin Groove. Lots of mad Brazilian tunes from the 60s and 70s. I really like the Edu Lobo stuff on here - his tunes are pretty hard to track down. John McLaughlin Trio: Live at Royal Festival Hall, November 1989: McLaughlin was one of my first influences, and this is one of my favourite albums. I remember I ordered my mate Chris to buy a copy - virtually frogmarched him to the till - and he went on to study jazz at uni, which is cool - done my bit for society. There’s a lot of variety on this album. All three of them play some lovely stuff. McLaughlin on this nice nylon-string thing that can also turn into a guitar synth - crazy. Trilok Gurtu obviously does some ace percussion and Kai Eckhardt is kind of their secret weapon. Apparently the weekend after this was recorded he was playing bass on a wedding gig for 50 quid. Makes me wonder what chance the rest of us have. Charles Lloyd: The Water Is Wide & Hyperion With Higgins: If only to hear some of the great Billy Higgins’ final performances. His touch on drums is unique, and his swing: I’ve never heard anything like it. The rest of the rhythm section isn’t so bad either: Larry Grenadier on bass, Brad Mehldau, John Abercrombie and Lloyd playing some great stuff up front. Nitin Sawney: Beyond Skin: Very powerful album documenting the guy’s experiences growing up in Britain. Musically great - lots of variety. He’s a bit of a Rennaissance man is Mr Sawney - plays great guitar, his piano playing is pretty cool and he also writes comedy for the telly, or at least he used to anyway. Weather Report: Heavy Weather. Everyone knows about side 1 of this album, but if you listen to side 2 it’s amazing. I think Zawinul and Shorter are two of the most important figures in 20th Century Music. See also: Mysterious Traveller, 8.30. Martial Solal Trio with Peter Erskine and Marc Johnson: Triangle. I think if Martial Solal was American and not French and was 30 instead of 60 odd, he’d be taken a lot more seriously by the jazz press, and be at least as popular as someone like Brad Mehldau. He’s one of the world’s best pianists and it’s a shame more people don’t know about him: his conception is quite unique and this record proves it. Johnson and Erskine are an ace rhythm section, the bassist especially doing some fine solos, really melodic. See also: Balade du 13 Mars, Just Friends... The Doors: The Doors. I find this a bit of a weird album, but I keep coming back to it, so it must be pretty good in some way. There’s a lot of different stuff going on at the same time. The End is mad - the lyrics are completely bananas - I wonder what inspired that, hmm. The music is groovy though. Afel Bocoum, Damon Albarn, Toumani Diabaté & friends: Mali Music: This is a nice idea - send the bloke from Blur on a trip to Mali, jam with local players, record it all then take it home and cut it up a bit, put some beats, bass, echo and piano parts on the tracks....Sort of a West African Buena Vista Social Club - in Dub. But some great ideas anyway. In spirit it’s the same kind of vibe as the U2 Passengers record. Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa. Fantastic very spiritual spacey modern classical music. Thanks to Hannah for lending me her copy, which I somehow keep forgetting to return. I must make a mental note to do that soon. Yes, definitely. Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Vol 1. Lovely analogue sounds and lots of echo and good beats. I can hear a lot of Weather Report influence in this. Nice one. Absolutely mental bloke though. Baaba Maal: Missing You. Ah really good Senegalese acoustic music, recorded at night outside in the bush apparently. The guy’s voice is really powerful. I lost my copy of this - silly me. Shakti: A Handful of Beauty: This is my favourite of the Shakti albums. I’m not too knowledgeable about Indian music, but this is brilliant. I love L.Shankar’s violin playing - it sounds very sad - and McLaughlin always sounds good on acoustic guitar: I think it makes his playing more percussive. Then there’s the rhythm section.....I think the recent Remember Shakti albums are really good too. The Indian ragas (scales) have got a real vibe to them. The Charlie Parker Quartet: (the purple one, on Verve). Some of the best Bird stuff, very well recorded, which was a rarity in that era. This is a great record to practise to, and to put on at parties. Underworld: Second Toughest In The Infants. I really love the artwork on the sleeve of this album. I think the music is cool. It’s quite warm and personal - it sounds beautiful. Some nice guitar on here too, interestingly enough. Ravel: Bolero. You might be a bit bored of hearing this tune, but it’s a real lesson on how to develop the accompaniment of a melody - it just builds and builds. Great melody too. As a guitarist it’s worth getting simple stuff like this under your fingers as much as learning really intricate phrases. Roni Size Reprazent: New Forms: I don’t care what people on the scene say about Roni Size - this is a wicked record. Well produced, good tunes and good (live) basslines and (live) drum sounds. I really love the track with Bahmadia on it. I like the fact that he put his Mercury Prize money into a community project too. Finley Quaye: Maverick A Strike. One of the classics of the 90s I reckon. A bit of everything and his lyrics are really funny. Jimmy Smith: Midnight Special. I bought this in Santa Monica and was pleased with my choice of holiday record. Stanley Turrentine, Kenny Burrell and Donald Bailey make up the quartet and they play ace. Really lovely recorded sound too. Buy any Jimmy Smith record with Mr Donald Duck on it because you can’t go wrong when those two are playing together. Jimmy Smith: Standards. Some of Kenny Burrell’s best playing on record - he’s so tasteful and melodic and really bluesy too - such an underrated guitarist. Just a nice mellow trio with Jimmy and Donald Bailey, and some choice tunes. Very atmospheric album. The liner notes call it a “black tie date-night smooth-as-silk affair” - cool. Some of the organ tones are really wurlitzer-esque, so you kind of get the odd free trip to the seaside, but I think that adds to the charm. This is fast becoming one of my favourite records. Jamiroquai: Return of the Space Cowboy: This is the funkiest album. Really nice songs etc, but the musical arrangements are amazing. I think this was when Stuart Zender was playing bass and I think him and the piano player (Toby Someone?) worked ace together. I’ve got to buy a copy of this. I had it on tape and it got lost - it’s probably in someone’s car. Talvin Singh: OK: I was so stoked when he won the Mercury prize. I think this record is a masterpiece. His tabla playing is ace, the programming is brilliant, it’s really melodic and it has loads of depth to it - there is a lot of detail in the way that this album is put together. Very intelligent music. Nice one Talvin. One of the albums of the 90s. Fela Kuti: Expensive Shit/He Miss Road: This is the sort of record that grooves in such a loose way that you can’t help nod your head to it - really hypnotic. Personable too because all the players make loads of mistakes, so it’s quite funny, but it doesn’t really matter when they can lay down a groove like this. Roots Manuva: Run Come Save Me: Good work, if only for the “Witness” tune (the video for that is a pisser too). The whole record is really good - great lyrics and really nice production and programming. Abercrombie, Johnson, Erskine, Surman: November. Really nice freeish ECM stuff - these are all great players and they complement each other so well. I well dig Marc Johnson’s bass playing. The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses: I think this is another contender for record of the 80s: really atmospheric, great and original guitar playing, beautiful songs. When they first appeared they were a wicked crew - they had a real concept - clothes, artwork and so on - do you remember all the t-shirts you used to be able to get? I remember all the lads in my school went mental for that stuff. I think Waterfall was one of the first things I learned to play on guitar. Stevie Wonder: Innervisions: Great stuff - a bit trippy and funky at the same time. And check out Stevie’s Moog bass playing! I left my copy at someone’s house, which was a bit stupid of me. Caetano Veloso: Omaggio a Federico e Giulieta. My mate Mark has got my copy of this. Give it back, Mark. I don’t know how you would describe Caetano Veloso, but he’s a great singer and songwriter, plus a nice guitar player. This is a really good live acoustic set, a tribute to Fellini. Beautifully sung, played and arranged, with an interesting choice of repertoire including “let’s face the music and dance”. Leftfield: Rhythm and Stealth: What an immense name for an album, and it doesn’t disappoint in my opinion. Roots Manuva is on it too. Cool. Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On. This record is a bit of a journey. Check out James Jamerson’s bass playing on here. There’s a massive vibe on this album. Paul Weller: Wild Wood: One of his best albums: I remember my girlfriend at the time bought it me for Christmas. Awww. Some great tunes on here, particularly the title track - nice acoustic stuff. Steely Dan: Aja. Very complex and deep record, lots of wicked studio cats on it and Becker and Fagen’s songs and lyrics are great. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette: The Cure. You can’t really go wrong with Jarrett, provided you can put up with the squeaky bits. This is a seamless live standards set, great fun. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette: Always Let Me Go. Another live album, but this is spread over two CDs and is completely improvised. Very free sounding, but some killer grooves on here too. Elis Regina: Vento di Maio: Wow, what an amazing record. Elis is kind of Brazil’s equivalent of Billie Holiday, and this is one of her best albums. I don’t know what it is about Brazil - maybe it’s just an incredibly musical place, but Brazilian music seems to be so ace: very emotional, very groovy, but also very sophisticated harmonically. I’m listening to this loads at the moment: it has a bit of everything on it. Wu-Tang Clan: Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). I dig this, it’s a hip-hop classic: tuff beats and ace samples from Kung-Fu films and stuff. Wu-Tang Forever is ace too. Where has my copy gone? Oh well... Esbjorn Svensson Trio: EST Plays Monk: Fantastic string arrangements on this, very sparse. Also an amazing version of the tune “Criss Cross”, and a sort of hip hop version of I Mean You. It’s nice to hear Monk’s stuff reworked. I think this is EST’s best album. Christian Escoudé: Holidays. Got this in a sale. This album comes from the French gypsy tradition of Maccaferris and moustaches, really nice stuff. No bass or drums, just guitars, accordion - I love accordions - a bit of percussion and a bit of keyboards (tastefully done) here & there. The gypsy players is an area that I really vibe with - maybe it’s from living in France so long. I need to find some more albums like this. Sonny Rollins: The Bridge: Jim Hall plays really well on this, and he’s a nice foil to Rollins too. Great atmosphere on these sessions. The Orb: UFORB: Towers of Dub on this is ace. Some mad basslines from Jah Wobble too. This is a really cool record to listen to in bed when you want to relax. “It’s a bit of a journey”. Junior Murvin: Police and Thieves. Couple of famous roots tunes on this, but also loads of other good ones and ace Lee Perry (I think) production. His voice is really unique too and I love the imagery in the lyrics. Beastie Boys: Ill Communication: This is a good record to play cards to. Some killer grooves on this and also loads of really funny moments. The Pharcyde: Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde: I’ve lost my copy of this which is a shame. It grooves really nice - lots of live instrumentation on there, and the lyrics are well funny. Stan Getz: Sweet Rain: One of Getz’s best. Really nice rhythm section (Chick Corea, Ron Carter, Grady Tate) and really nice tunes, slightly left of centre selection but Getz makes it all sound beautiful. See also: Dynasty. Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magik. It took ages for this record to catch on - I don’t understand why because it’s truly immense. John Frusciante and Flea’s playing is incredible. I learnt to play by copying the guitar parts from this album. They all lived together in a big house in the Hollywood hills when they were making this and there’s a really good video - Funky Monks - about the whole thing. Absolutely inspired. See also: By The Way, Mother’s Milk... Kenny Burrell: Guitar Forms. With tunes arranged by Gil Evans plus some really nice solo nylon string acoustic stuff. Kenny’s best under his own name I think - very melodic and singable. Public Enemy: Fear Of A Black Planet. Brilliant grooves, ace production, funny (Flavor Flav) and serious (Chuck D) lyrics. Not a weak tune on there. Takes me back to my youth, when rap and swearing were becoming fashionable. The Congos: Heart of The Congos: This is a mad album. On the surface it’s a really good roots album, great tunes and lyrics, but as you listen to it you realise there’s loads of weird noises and echoes going on in the background - essentially Lee Perry trying loads of crazy stuff out. I particularly like the tune where a cow starts mooing in the middle of one of the verses, and there’s another one that sounds like he’s just squirting an aerosol at the microphone. Nutcase. It’s brilliant though. The Jimmy Giuffre 3: I like this a lot - a really interesting concept, lots and lots of space, nice folky/mediaeval feeling. Jim Hall’s there again and Giuffre does a lot of interesting counterpoint stuff with him. The Abyssinians: Satta Massagana. They are in some mad way the reggae Beach Boys - fantastic 3 part vocal harmony and great grooves, plus lovely tunes and consciousness lyrics. Radiohead: OK Computer: I’ve kind of heard it a bit too much, but it’s still brilliant, especially from a guitarist’s perspective. And the guy’s voice is amazing. The Exit Music tune in particular is incredible. Charlie Haden: The Montréal Tapes feat Gonzalo Rubalcalba & Paul Motian: This is great: I particularly like Paul Motian’s drumming on this and Rubalcalba plays out of his skin. Charlie Haden: The Montréal Tapes feat Paul Bley & Paul Motian: This one is like the evil twin of the above album. I’m just getting into Paul Bley - I find his playing very interesting and it really stimulates my imagination. This album gets quite free at times, but as it’s a piano trio it’s not too noisy. I find free jazz really interesting sometimes. Arild Andersen, Vassilis Tsabroupulis, John Marshall: Achirana: I don’t know quite what I mean here, but this sounds very Scandinavian - quite cold and spacious, but very lyrical too. I saw this trio live once and they were ace. Tony Allen: No Accomodation For Lagos: I’m just getting into the Afrobeat stuff, and this is the best record I’ve found so far. It’s a really cool thing - people in Nigeria hearing James Brown and coming up with their own interpretation of his sound. I would love to find some more records like this one. Bud Powell: A Portrait of Thelonious: Lovely sleeve on this. I think my copy cost me about 4 quid secondhand, nice one. Anyway, Bud burnin through Monk tunes and a couple of standards. See also: The Scene Changes. Joni Mitchell: Shadows and Light: Great songs on this, and an amazing band: Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Don Alias, The Brecker Brothers...I think all Joni’s 70s stuff is great, but then I grew up with it, so I suppose that’s to be expected. De La Soul Is Dead: Their second album and there is some mad stuff on this and some really funny moments. The beats are amazing, from before hip-hop went all basic, which I personally found very boring. Blur: The Great Escape. I think this is my favourite Blur album, especially the Specials tribute tune. I really like Graham Coxon’s guitar playing in general: one of the cats of the 90s. The lyrics are cool too, trying to sum up what things were like at the time. Thelonious Monk Quartet: Monk’s Dream: The classic Monk quartet with Thelonious paired with Charlie Rouse. Some great tunes on this, in particular Bye-Ya and Monk’s Dream. See also: It’s Monk’s Time. Thelonious Monk Quartet: Thelonious in Action (Live at the 5 Spot): Another great quartet, with Johnny Griffin up front and Roy Haynes on drums. Lots of classic Monk tunes like Rhythm-a-ning and Epistrophy (which they do as a theme - there’s an idea that I’ve nicked). Harry Beckett & Pierre Dorge: Echoezz of... This is a lovely album. Harry plays beautifully, uses the flugelhorn a lot, and Pierre Dorge is a great guitar player, has an almost African feel to a lot of what he does. Really beautiful compositions and great drumming from Marilyn Manzur. Goldie: Timeless. Amazing drum programming on this, especially for the era, but also because it’s a lot more complex than a lot of drum n’ bass is nowadays in terms of rhythm, and the melodic side is a lot more clever too. Hangs together as an album really well which is very rare - a real trip. Charlie Hunter Quartet: Natty Dread. Mad idea: let’s do a jazz version of a Bob Marley album. But if you do this you have to make sure that it’s a very funky interpretation. And he does. Even freakier, Charlie Hunter plays this mad 8-string guitar that he uses to do basslines & melodies simultaneously, and bust out some organ sounds. You have to hear it to believe it. Ahmad Jamal: The Essence parts 1, 2, & 3: Great series of albums these. Ahmad Jamal’s stuff is really groovy and there are some ace basslines on here. I really love the third album with Othello Molineaux playing steel pans. Squarepusher: Hard Normal Daddy. Crazy production and beats on this, some mad electric bass playing too. I saw Squarepusher at Glastonbury and it was one of the most mental gigs I’ve ever seen: equal parts brilliant and crazy. The Verve: A Northern Soul. The one to buy if you are looking for a ROCK record to listen to. But there are some nice ballads on here as well. Michael Brecker: Time is of the Essence: I normally find Brecker a bit tasteless, but he hired an amazing rhythm section for this one: Larry Goldings, Pat Metheny and three different drummers: Elvin Jones, Bill Stewart and Jeff “Tain” Watts. A hot one I think. Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A Changin’. Best Bob stuff I’ve heard, but then I’m not really much of a connoisseur of his music as yet. Great though: Just him and his guitar, harmonica and some wicked lyrics. see also: Highway 61 Revisited Billie Holiday: Lady In Satin: A bit of a heartbreaker this one. Really nice string arrangements and a very depressed sounding Billie. A great album to break up with your girlfriend to (!) as it’s gut-wrenchingly sad. See also: Songs For Distingué Lovers. Tori Amos: Boys for Pelé: Tori Amos is one of those people who has a cult following rather than being particularly mainstream. Which is cooler - she’s a brilliant pianist. This is my favourite album of hers. Massive Attack: Blue Lines & Protection: Makes you proud to be a Bristol player when you hear this and the Portishead crew’s stuff. Some of the best music of the 90s. I bought my guitar (see photo at top of page) off the guy who did the guitar parts for Blue Lines - I’d like to think it might carry over a bit of vibe from that album into my playing over the years to come. Michael Hedges: Aerial Boundaries: I haven’t seen this on CD anywhere, but I’ve got it on tape somewhere. Just one guy on acoustic guitar in some mad tunings, recorded inside a massive empty grain silo for echo. His playing is sensational - God knows how he did it all. I would have loved to have seen him live, it’s a real pity that he died (car crash). Ralph Towner: Solo Concert. Really nice solo classical and 12-string guitar pieces, beautifully recorded too. I keep nicking this off my dad and he keeps nicking it back. Wynton Marsalis: J-Mood. Putting aside the pretentious liner notes and Wynton’s alleged political views, this is wicked. Everyone’s on one and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums swings like a bastard. See also Wynton Marsalis: Wynton Marsalis. Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man: Out of Season. Now this is fantastic. Imagine Portishead doing Astral Weeks and you’re halfway there. That reminds me I must put Astral Weeks up here. But great anyway, and nice to see Beth smiling in the photos inside! I had been worried about her, it’s great to see her look so happy. I think one of the ones of 2002 and possibly of the nows or the 2000s or whatcha wanna call it. Duke Ellington: ...And his Mother Called Him Bill: The best Ellington album I’ve heard with a poignant emotional context: it’s a tribute to Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s writing partner, who had recently died. I think you can feel that in the music too. Check out Johnny Hodges on the ballad “Blood Count” which a lot of musicians seem to play if they think they’re going to die (Getz played it a lot before he died). See also: Such Sweet Thunder. Greg Osby: Banned in New York. This is an ace record. Really hard swinging but at the same time surreal and scary. Note the pun in the title too. Hmm...Anyway, very modern, lots of new ideas. This might be where jazz is going you know. Jimmy Raney Trio: Wisteria. Nice group: Raney on guitar + Tommy Flanagan, piano and George Mraz on bass. Raney is really melodic and swinging but has quite a modern sound. I listen to this one a lot, looking for stuff I can nick. Portishead: Dummy & Portishead: Two great albums, in particular for the way they sound, the tones of the instruments and voice. Great concept, mixing up hip-hop with 60s film noir John Barry-esque stuff and a bit of jazz. And of course Beth Gibbons’ singing is amazing. Even the samples are cool. Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section. Nice mellow west coast vibe to these sessions. Apparently Pepper hadn’t played for about 6 months and was completely out of his tree when this was recorded. Still, it sounds as if he got away with it. With Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones as your rhythm section, who wouldn’t? Neil Young: Harvest Moon. Nice bit of folky Americana stuff to listen to. Great production too. One of those night-time albums. I lost my copy, duh. Ravel: Complete works for solo piano. My version is played by Anne Quéffelec. Really interesting to hear his compositional style develop from purely melodic into something quite avant garde - one of the roots of modern classical music. It’s pretty similar to how Monet’s painting developed at around the same time. You have to be an amazing pianist to play this stuff. Count Basie Orchestra: The Complete Atomic Basie. It’s the one with the photo of the Bomb going off on the cover. Powerhouse band, Eddie Lockjaw Davis is the featured soloist and plays ace, and the whole record is a lesson as to how much you can do with the blues format. Buju Banton: Voice of Jamaica. Wicked ragga album, really slick early 90s production and beats. He was accused of homophobia at the time, and rightly condemned for that, and now I think he’s grown up - I read that one of his best mates died in a shooting - and is singing about consciousness and positivity. His voice is cool too: Ruff. See also: Til Shiloh. Jeff Buckley: Grace: Wow, wicked. Unique guitar playing - he’s one of those Telecaster geezers - and singing. He has a very ghostly voice - his music sounds very pure. It reminds me of Arvo Pärt and people like that sometimes. Passengers: Original Soundtracks Vol 1: U2/Brian Eno side project where they decided to only half complete the writing for an album and go off on a trip on the tunes. Each one is supposed to be for an imaginary film. This is ace if only for the track with Pavarotti singing on it, but there’s loads of immense stuff on here. I think Edge’s solo on Your Blue Room is the best guitar solo I’ve ever heard. John Martyn: Bless The Weather: My mate Tom taped me this but I’ve lost the tape: when I get some cash together I will buy this I reckon. Some classic songs, great original guitar playing and trippy echoplex stuff. Danny Thompson’s bass playing on this is great too. Solid Air is another nice John Martyn album, with a good title. Erykah Badu: Baduizm. Class. Erykah Badu is a very modern person and this album has some killer grooves on it plus ace singing. Jim Hall: By Arrangement: Normally I find records with string sections on them a bit pompous and that the orchestration tends to swamp the rest of the music. But I think this one is really good. There’s a really nice gentle duet with a viola player, sounds very classical, and all the writing for the strings is intelligently done and used very sparingly. It’s got Jim’s trademark quiet thing going on. See also: Jim Hall Trio: Circles + virtually anything with Jim Hall on really. Dexter Gordon: Our Man in Paris: Some really nice swinging straightahead stuff, with Bud Powell & Kenny Clarke in the rhythm section. Dexter’s sound is huge on this record. See also: Go. The Police. Regatta de Blanc. No not about yachting. A really well produced record, diverse material, very nice overall sound and they all play great. Don’t try and play Andy Summers’ guitar parts though - you’ll mash your hands up. Supergrass: I Should Coco. Their first album and it’s great, really happy silly music (although there are some nice sad songs on it), but a real grower too. Just the record to cheer yourself up with if things are not going well, or if you fancy a giggle. Hank Mobley: Soul Station: Another nice Blue Note record. His sound is really nice, very well recorded and Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Art Blakey isn’t a bad rhythm section hey. D’Angelo: Brown Sugar. Really soulful 90’s R&B, a lot of depth to this record and some great vocals and lovely grooves. Someone nicked my copy: bastard. Paul Desmond: Easy Living: Jim’s in the rhythm section for this one and he plays very nice, but I think Desmond is the star: he is incredibly lyrical and melodic, everything he plays sounds as though it was composed beforehand, but it’s all spontaneous. His tone on alto is beautiful too. Somebody once called it “the sound of a dry Martini” which I thought was a bit stupid. The Black Crowes: Armorica: Cool sleeve, cool tunes, cool lyrics: 70s retro cool vibes. The Black Crowes are supposed to be ace live. Joe Henderson: Inner Urge. Nice to hear Joe with the Coltrane rhythm section. This is a hard driving album all the way through, beautiful take on Night and Day at the end - ace. See also: Live In Tokyo. Marc Johnson: The Sound of Summer Running: Nice concept on this record, lots of rootsy Americana stuff, and some great players: Johnson on bass, Joey Baron on drums, Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny on guitars, which is an interesting concept in itself. Some beautiful compositions. Guns N Roses: Appetite for Destruction: Another guitar teaching regular. It is a groovy record though - great production, great tunes and great RIFFS and SOLOS. Dana Bryant: Wishing From The Top. Nice Hip-Hop beats and wicked spoken word poetry over it - the lyrics are ace. I can’t find it anywhere at the moment. Anyone got any ideas? Nick Drake: Five Leaves Left. River Man on this is an absolute classic tune. I really like Nick Drake’s playing, it’s quite unique. Pat Metheny: Trio 99-00: I think bits of quite a few Metheny trio albums are brilliant, but my two other favourites - Trio: Live and Rejoicing both have nasty guitar synth bits on. Guitar synth isn’t really my thing, sorry. Anyway, this one features Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart (ace) and has loads of good tunes. Fantastic guitarist, mental technique and lovely tone on acoustic especially. See also: Question and Answer (with Dave Holland + Roy Haynes). Joao Gilberto: Live at Umbria Jazz. I really love this. Just Joao’s voice and his guitar playing and nothing else, and he has the audience in the palm of his hand. See also: Joao Gilberto: Joao Gilberto. The Streets: Original Pirate Material. Everyone loves this, and it’s easy to see why. The beats are basic but really good and the bloke’s a bit of a case - his lyrics are dead funny. It’s the same sort of spirit as the Supergrass record. Galliano/Portal: Two French geezers - one playing accordion, the other soprano, clarinet and bass clarinet, doing some originals, some French standards and some (Astor Piazzola) Tango tunes. They are both real virtuosos and really tear it up. The combination of instruments works really well too. Penguin Café Orchestra. Really nice childlike Balkan-esque folky/modern classical music. I don’t know much about this stuff. Mad artwork too - what the hell is going on there? This music is also quite scruffy and not too perfectionist, which is a nice change. One of those records that you keep going back to without knowing why. Lee “Scratch” Perry: Super Ape. Really good dub, nice coherent album of it too, rather than just another Scratch compilation. Disappointingly no cows mooing on this one though. Joe Pass: Virtuoso: Some fantastic solo guitar. Joe Pass has incredible technique which can be a problem, because if you put him with a rhythm section sometimes he overplays (in my opinion), but when he’s playing on his own he’s a lot more musical. For Django is supposed to be a really good album too, but I haven’t heard it. I’ll let you know when I hear it. Joe Pass is a cool bloke - he’s got a lot of attitude. Jane’s Addiction: Ritual De Lo Habitual. If Nirvana hadn’t blown up at this time, I think Jane’s Addiction would have had massive exposure because this is a brilliant rock album, with amazing guitar playing from Dave Navarro, but everyone on it plays ace. Another one of those albums that taught me to play by copying all the guitar and bass parts. Really diverse styles in play here too - from the usual Californian funk rock to Led Zep-esque stuff and some crazy Middle-Eastern sounding bits as well as the odd love song - awww. See also: Nothing’s Shocking, which might well be album of the 80s. Manu Chao: Clandestino: Everyone on “the continent” knows about this guy, but sadly he’s not that popular here yet, which is a shame because this record is groovy, and sung in three different languages. Nice Latin/European (in a good way) vibe. Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges: Clube Da Esquina: Some more Brazilian craziness. I think what happened here was that these guys had grown up with the previous bossa generation of Joao Gilberto etc and crossed that sort of stuff with the really psychedelic Beatles’ late 60’s ideas. It’s a lovely record anyway. Milton’s voice has a really unique character to it. REM: Automatic for the People. Tedious chart hit and guitar teaching stalwart aside, this is one of the best acoustic based albums. Like all the great records it’s got a very special vibe to it. I also remember that my cassette copy had a transparent lemon yellow tape which is well cool. Mos Def: Black on Both Sides. Some real consciousness hip-hop, very very musical and melodic, but wicked lyrics too. A classic in any genre, if that doesn’t sound too pompous. “It does a bit actually Ben”. Oh - sorry. See also: Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Introducing Ruben Gonzalez: “Well it’s amazing to be making your début album at the age of 87 etc etc” said all the straights when the Buena Vista stuff got big, but this is the best record that the Cuban crew have made so far. Ruben’s piano playing is beautiful, especially on the ballads. Favourite books: The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD: Indispensable. If I want to hear (for example) some Kenny Garrett stuff, I can look him up in here, find a 4 star album and get it, or see what records he’s on as a sideman, rather than chancing my arm on stuff without any idea of what I’m buying. My only criticism is that the editors can be a little biased towards free jazz, which isn’t a style I enjoy massively, so check the description of an album before you buy if free isn’t your er bag. Otherwise though, great. I’ve found some brilliant records through this book. Broadens the mind. Rough Guides to: World Music (Vols 1 & 2), Jazz, Reggae (other Rough Guides subject to investigation soon). Really good if you’re not too sure about a particular genre and you want to find out which are the best albums, plus a bit of the history of a particular style or scene. How My Heart Sings: Peter Pettinger: The best Bill Evans’ biog I’ve seen - well worth a read: I don’t think many people really understand quite the depth of Bill Evans’ artistry or know about his many personal problems, but after you’ve read this you hear a lot of new things in his playing. Also the book is not too sensationalist and focuses primarily on his music rather than too many of the gory details of his private life. Bird Lives! Ross Russell. Ah the high life and hard times of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. Very sad in places, brilliantly written and often really funny. This is an ace read, especially the introduction. Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece: Ashley Kahn. + A Love Supreme: The Making of John Coltrane’s Classic Album: Ashley Kahn. Well A.K. should be able to pay the milk bill for a few months after writing these. Beautifully put together and really well written. I wonder what album he’s going to do next? I suggest “Heavy Weather”. Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King: Lloyd Bradley. Great read - ties the history of Jamaica since independence in really neatly with the development of the music. I think they made a tv series based on this book. Monet: Carla Rahman. Cool, and not too expensive as it’s not a massive picture book, just a nice concise biog although with some nice plates in it as well. Jim Hall: Exploring Jazz Guitar: Fantastic - really opened my mind up about music and life in general. Jim Hall is my role model as a guitarist. Not only for the way he plays, which I would not like to emulate exactly, but for his obvious depth of knowledge about music and his way of looking at the instrument. Mark Levine: The Jazz Theory Book: This books lays out all the aspects of jazz harmony and how they work, some common chord structures and how to navigate them, and Levine also refers the reader to albums which relate to whatever the subject in question happens to be. Not bad - lots to digest. John Le Carré: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Probably my favourite novel. Great plot, very subtle humour in the writing, and it evokes a lot of memories for me, don’t know why. Camus: The First Man: The closest thing he did to his autobiography. It’s mostly about his childhood growing up in Algeria and is a lot more personal and emotional than most of his novels. It contains some lovely imagery of life in the country at that time, as well as the later struggles for independence. Ian Carr: Miles Davis. The benchmark jazz biography really. Miles was such an interesting person with so many contradictions to his personality, that Carr has a lot to work with. Guitar Player Magazine: Secrets From The Masters: Fascinating collection of interviews with guitarists from right across the spectrum of music, and full of great ideas. Much more inspiring than practising your scales for three hours every night. Philip French: Malle on Malle: Biography via interview of the film director. I first heard of him because he made L’ascenseur pour l’échafaud (lift to the scaffold) which featured Miles on the soundtrack. But I’ve seen quite a few of his films since and they’re very good, particularly Lacombe, Lucien which covers the thorny issue of collaboration during WWII. This book is really interesting: gives you an insight into film making - French cinema can be pretty intellectual too, you can watch it on loads of levels - and the strategies he uses to get the actors to perform in a certain way. You can try it on your rhythm section, haha. Benworld: links: Hope these are of interest, or funny, or useful....Now in new improved categorised form! (ish) Send me any links that might be appropriate. |
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Contact: For tuition, bookings or to order the new CD: Mobile 0777 97 95 989 benjblackmore@hotmail.com Latest Updates: 15/02/03: My mum’s birthday. Peace march in London was a massive success - a day of good vibes. 11/02/03: More links, added to the favourite books bit. Jim Mullen’s CD arrived today - it’s pretty wicked. Bigups. Now I won’t labour the point anymore. *grins*. 10/02/03 : Bit of a red letter day: Jim Mullen phoned me up today (I met him at the Stafford jazz festival) and said he was very impressed with my début CD, gave me some encouraging advice and is sending me one of his in the post “in exchange”. I have a lot of respect for that kind of thing. Nice one jazz guitar crew! It’s so nice to have a bit of support from senior musicians. I’m updating all the time you know, so keep checking back. Forthcoming Gigs: -Bit of a hiatus after getting back from Italy, but this is what I’ve got organised so far: Feb 26th: The Old Brown Jug, Newcastle Under Lyme. Tenor player John Watson’s quintet, not my gig, but should be good. Feb 27th: The Shoulder of Mutton, Lichfield. John Watson’s quintet, really nice group. March 1st: The Old Duke, Bristol. Ben Waghorn Quintet. Jerry Crozier-Cole depped me into this one, and it should be ace. 9-11pm. Cracking band: Ben Waghorn - Tenor, Jim Blomfield - Keys, Jim Barr - Bass and Andy Tween - Drums. Looking forward to this one. March 20th: Cancer Research UK benefit at Le Chateau, Park St, Bristol. Ben Blackmore Quintet. Entry £3. 9-12 in the evening. April 1st: The Bell, Walcot St, Bath. Funk til 1am - it’s a party gig. April 29th: Quiet American Trio. Le Château, Park St, Bristol. 9-11pm. June 8th: Quiet American Trio. The Wookey Inn, Wookey Hole, Somerset. NB: this is a lunchtime gig: 1-3pm. June 9th: Ben Blackmore/Gary Alesbrook West Coast Quartet. The Bell, Walcot St, Bath. 9-11pm. Current Jazz Projects: Outside of Bristol or Birmingham I am more than happy to travel and play with house rhythm sections. Nearer the two cities these are the groups I most commonly work with. Bristol/South West. Ben Blackmore Quintet: Ben - Guitar Craig Crofton - Tenor sax Gary Alesbrook - Trumpet & Flugelhorn Anders Olinder/Jonny Henderson - Hammond Organ or Dave Griffiths/Jim Barr - Bass Andy Tween - Drums Hard driving bebop rooted quintet playing material by Monk, Stanley Turrentine, Sonny Rollins and other Blue Note greats, standards and blues. Craig Crofton is well known in the South-West for his fiery Coltrane inspired approach, and Gary in contrast, has a nice cool Miles Davis/Chet Baker-esque sound. In the rhythm section, I stick to a Jim Hall style supporting role adding some bluesy solo work. A special mention must go to the Guildhall graduate Andy Tween, who left the London scene to settle in the South West - which is our gain as he is an unbelievably good drummer. Along with Anders, he gigs and tours Europe regularly with Pee-Wee Ellis. Gary’s main gig is with Welsh rock group Super Furry Animals, while Craig is well known for his work with Dance duo Monk & Canatella and his own project CCQ. Famous “deps” include Jim Barr (Portishead) and Jonny Henderson (Otis Grand Blues Band) not forgetting the wonderful bassist Dave Griffiths, who when not working on the jazz scene, runs a mandolin quartet. Ben Blackmore/Gary Alesbrook West Coast Quartet: Gary Alesbrook - Trumpet/Flugelhorn Ben - Guitar Dave Griffiths/Dave Goodier - Bass Trevor Davies/Scott Hammond - Drums Very relaxed quartet session playing some of the Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker related repertoire in a mellow West Coast style, plus the odd Birth of the Cool tune. Chet Baker is Gary’s favourite trumpeter, so we put this group together to play a few of the tunes that everyone associates with him - nice quiet ballads, carefully selected bossas and some nice standards. We also work as a trumpet/guitar/bass trio similar to the one that Baker had in Europe with the guitarist Philip Catherine. The Quiet American Trio: Ben - Guitar Dave Griffiths - Bass Trevor Davies - Drums Conceived as a tribute to the great American guitarist Jim Hall, playing a few of his compositions, a few associated with Bill Evans, standards, Ellingtonia and some original pieces, plus a little bit of free association playing, if appropriate. Ben Blackmore Trio: Ben - Guitar Anders Olinder - Hammond Organ Andy Tween - Drums Classic organ trio doing lots of soul-jazz Blue Note numbers and a lot of blues. Inspired by the Kenny Burrell-Jimmy Smith collaborations as well as early Wes Montgomery and the more modern Larry Goldings Trio. This format is particularly popular with promoters as a hammond player as good as Anders can fill in for a bassist and provide a keyboard role too - watching him play basslines with one hand and solo with the other is also quite an entertaining experience for an audience. Birmingham/Midlands. Ben Blackmore Quartet: Ben - Guitar Tom Jurkiewicz/Keith Bill - Piano Ron Thomas/Zoltan - Bass Roy Adams or Delroy Brown - Drums Swinging quartet playing equal parts Kenny Burrell/Jim Hall inspired material and some Bill Evans numbers. Tom and I also do a nice Bill & Jim “Undercurrent” style ballad feature as a duo. Tom and I also occasionally work as a trio with a bassist, which is a nice format as it leaves a lot of space to explore. I also hope to start playing in Birmingham with pianist Tim Amaan and trumpeter Bryan Corbett. Current Funk Projects: Bristol funk all stars or some such other name: Craig Crofton - Tenor Sax James Morton - Alto Sax (Gary Alesbrook - Trumpet) (Trudi Mosiamo - Vocals) Ben - Guitar Anders Olinder - Hammond/Keys Andy Tween - Drums In various combinations we’ve all been working together quite a lot - most recently at Level in Bristol. Anders and Andy are the foundation of this group and they obviously know what they’re doing as they often get the call to back James Brown’s sax player Pee Wee Ellis around Europe. Up front Craig and James smoke on tenor and alto, and when Gary’s playing too it takes things up another level: he does some nice stuff by putting the trumpet through a guitar amp and playing with a wah wah pedal like Miles used to do in the 70s. I get the chance to play some loud Hendrixy psychedelic guitar as well as some funky rhythm stuff and jazzy Ronny Jordan style solos. When Trudi does the gig she gets a crowd moving nicely and sings really nicely too. Material is mostly Maceo Parker/James Brown tunes plus a few other well known jazz funk tunes by people like Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard, and plenty of improvising. Latin Projects: La Heijira: 7 piece latin band with a revolving personnel of shit hot latin players. Lots of salsa, Tito Puente numbers etc, but also some more unusual stuff like tunes by Jaco Pastorius and Weather Report plus a bit of Afrobeat influenced stuff. Mini Biography: I've lived in Bristol for about a year now, and have worked with some of the best musicians in the South-West and beyond, including Andy Tween (Pee Wee Ellis & Fred Wesley) and Anders Olinder (Pee Wee Ellis), Jim Barr (Portishead), Gary Alesbrook (Super Furry Animals), Hannah Porter (DJ Suv), plus other Bristol jazz players such as Dave Goodier, Simon Gore, and Jonathan Taylor, who back guys like Andy Sheppard when he’s in town. As a sideman I am a member of pianist Joe Blanc’s quartet and various groups fronted by tenor player Craig Crofton. I have played in most of the good venues in the area, including the Bebop Club, The Prom, Le Chateau (Bristol), The Bell, Green Park Brasserie, The Old Farmhouse (Bath), The Wookey Inn (Somerset), The Royal Oak (Corsham), Café Jazz (Cardiff) as well as various festivals including Glastonbury 2002. My most recent UK booking was for The Welsh Jazz Society in Cardiff. Before moving to Bristol, I lived in Paris, then Rennes in Brittany, where I put in a lot of playing with a gypsy jazz guitar trio. I've worked a little bit on the British folk scene, recording with Fairport Convention's Ric Sanders and the well known electric bassist Fred Thelonious Baker. As a DJ I hosted the show “Travellers” on Bristol’s Burst FM which won an award from Bristol University for best and most diverse musical selection. I play regularly at the Locus night (see links) and have appeared on the same bill as DJs such as Goldie, Photek and Klute, among many others. In terms of influences I try to listen to as many different people as I can (see recommended albums section below), but a few jazz favourites are Jim Hall, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Burrell. If there is a word to describe my playing it would probably be something like “restrained” or, to a certain extent “minimalist”. I have had problems with RSI (repetitive strain injury) in both hands since my teenage years, which has meant that two things have happened: firstly I have been unable to practice regularly or at great length due to the discomfort this causes, and have consequently devoted the time I have would have spent on practice on other aspects of music - heavy listening, reading and thinking about the subject. Secondly my playing style has turned into something quite sparse, with a lot of emphasis on space and atmosphere, and obviously I try to be melodic. In a way, my medical condition has been a kind of blessing in disguise, as I have learnt to focus on many different aspects of music, rather than simply improving my technique. Meanwhile when DJing I usually end up being some kind of offspring (bastard, obviously) of Gilles Peterson, Andy Kershaw and Julian Joseph. New trio CD "3, 2, 1", featuring Dave Griffiths (bass) and Trevor Davies (drums) out now - to order please use the e-mail address below. The disc has received lots of airplay on BBC Bristol and Eagle FM and there has been a very positive response to it so far. The repertoire on the disc is mainly standards, plus a couple of blues tunes and a bit of Ellingtonia. Local Press: I haven't been on the British jazz scene that long given that I’m 24 years old, but I've had a couple of really favourable reviews from jazz writer Tony Benjamin. Here are some excerpts: “With a couple of trio gigs on the horizon, here’s another chance to catch this excellent young guitarist playing solo. Nicely cool and technically dazzling, his playing is a great accompaniment to a Sunday afternoon.” (Venue Magazine, 12th April, 2001) “Really tasty jazz guitar...Ben Blackmore is a disgracefully talented young player with a disarmingly unassuming manner”. (29th March 2001) The Tao of Jazz and Improvised Guitar: The idea behind this resource is a fairly simple one: whereas many instructional books will endlessly tell the student that in order to be a fluent improviser, they must master all their scales, arpeggios etc - ie: the “how” of improvisation - very few discuss the less identifiable subject of where said student might find inspiration to improvise - how to stimulate the imaginative and creative part of their brain. In other words, the “why” of being an improvising musician. Sadly, this is not something that can generally be discovered through endless practising. Happily, it is a lot more fun than endlessly practising, although I would not claim to consistently attain absolute musical nirvana myself, nor would I pretend to know an enormous amount about music: this is simply my experience so far. I am writing as a guitarist rather than as a musician, as I make no pretence of being able to play and understand other people’s instruments, but hopefully there will be some aspects of what I have written that apply to other things. What I hope to do is to try and find a few ways for the improviser to inspire themselves. I am open to any ideas readers might have (you can email me at the above address), and hope that this site will be of some help if you ever feel stuck in a rut. I plan to expand it as I go along. At the moment there are a few mini essays on various subjects in progress and a handy musos’ (and other artists’) quotes section, which at the moment is a bit too guitar-biased: this will change with time. I have also recently added a “favourite albums” and “favourite books” section, and welcome contributions if you have one that you find particularly inspirational. Time and space: While seemingly every instruction book will tell you that you must practise your scales and arpeggios every day, I have not seen many that extol the virtues of having good time. In my opinion good time is what really sets the pros and amateurs apart in terms of sound. The most intricately structured fast bebop run will not sound good if the timing is wrong, and a lyrical melodic phrase will lose a lot of its power. How can I improve my sense of time? Who has good timing? Musicians, drummers and bassists especially, obviously. Try people like Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Paul Motian, Billy Higgins etc, who not only have razor sharp micro-time, but can bend and stretch the beat at will. Have a close listen to a few of the best bass players like Paul Chambers, Ray Brown or Ron Carter. Outside of music however, there are many other sources of inspiration: a good actor, athlete or comedian often has an amazing sense of timing: not timing in the sense of rhythm, but as in when to deliver a certain line or action, how long to wait, how much tension to create, when to move. Good time is not necessarily playing to a perfectly symmetrical beat, but of knowing where the beat is, then playing around it to create different kinds of tension or release. It’s a combination of rhythmic sharpness and patience - don’t rush into phrases. So in a sense this refers as much to space as anything. Listen to some Monk records and you’ll find that he often leaves several bars - sometimes even a whole section - completely empty. When he comes back in the effect is striking. It’s a very surreal experience, which is of course the effect that he wants to create. If you are a guitarist or pianist, solo gigs can help you find your own internal beat, rather than relying on a rhythm section to supply it for you. If you're a horn player, go busking on your own. The classic playing along with a metronome is also a great way to internalise rhythm: set the bell to beats 2 & 4 (you have to work out for yourself where these beats are) and choose a set of chords such as rhythm changes (I Got Rhythm, Oleo, Rhythm-a-ning etc) or a standard (All The Things You Are, is a good one as you are exploring the cycle of fifths at the same time), and play scales, arpeggios or lines over the top, trying to pin each note to a beat on the metronome and the beats in between. As ever, Jamey Aebersold playalongs, or practising to your favourite records are dependable routines, but not as good as having a gig: one hour's performance is worth about 20 hours practising. Furthermore, in my opinion, one hour’s listening is worth three hours practising. Sing along to the melodies or basslines in the music - it might feel odd at first but it is great for your relative pitch. Listening: Ask any bandleader what kind of musicians s/he hires and they will inevitably say “ones who listen”. This golden rule will probably crop up a lot at various points, but everything comes from listening: check out lots of different players, styles of jazz and other music of all types etc etc: be as broad minded as you can, and take other people’s advice when they recommend an album to you: basically the more ideas you absorb - consciously or unconsciously - the more interesting, original and imaginative your playing will be. Or, conversely, “rubbish in, rubbish out.” Regular listening to music at home/work pays off on the gig too: you become more aware of the other players, which harmonies they are using, what cross rhythms can be applied, simply because your brain is much more familiar with the situation. Similarly, sitting down with your instrument and copying lines off a favourite album is a great way to improve technique, phrasing and time. As you progress as a listener, you may well find your relative pitch and your sense of time improve, and that you might start to find everyday noises - the wind through the trees, a train going past etc, very interesting. I try and do a minimum of two hours of listening a day, many different styles of music, and if I go out at night I try to go somewhere that plays good music, be it a drum and bass night or a beard folk club. As a jazz musician, the worst thing you can do is to become preoccupied with jazz. Jazz in various forms - don’t forget as a genre of music jazz is extremely varied - makes up the bulk of my listening, but I try and incorporate Brazilian & African music, folk, various singer-songwriters/bands and so on, not forgetting good old Radio 3. Vibraphonist Stefon Harris said in a recent interview that he likes to go to busy restaurants, parks or other public places and try and eavesdrop on three or four different conversations at the same time, try and find the essence of each topic of discussion. I would imagine that this is great for spatial awareness and in a musical context, this ability to distill what you hear and reproduce it is very useful, especially as jazz is such a conversational music. Living in Italy, I listened to a lot of talk shows etc on local radio. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I’m interested in the speech patterns and the way people pitch their voices, both of which are different to the sounds that we use to produce words in English. Gigs: This is the important bit in musical development: being on a gig teaches you loads of stuff that you cannot get from practising: not only how to solo and for how long, but how to interact in a rhythm section, how to accompany a soloist etc etc. Take any gig you can get, because regardless of whether you like the music or rate the other players, you will always learn something. However, always make sure you get paid. Pub landlords seem to see live music as a form of entertainment somewhat similar to a fruit machine - it’s there if people want it, but if not, hopefully it won’t cost them too much money. No. If you work for cheap or for free you are putting other musicians out of business and making it more difficult for everyone. After all, the bar staff and management aren’t docked their wages if they have a quiet night: why should you be? Ask for a flat fee, and if you think the gig needs a push to be a success, do some promotion: put some posters up around town, contact the local newspaper & radio and ask if they can give you a mention. People are inherently lazy, so if you love music enough, it’s up to you to do their job for them. Never assume that a venue will be organised enough to do promotion locally or organise press, because if the gig is empty, you can bet that they won’t blame themselves. Try and avoid putting on gigs on dead nights of the week, as they can be pretty inconsistent in terms of attendance. Leader vs Sideman: Pros & Cons. As a guitarist, you might find that the majority of your gigs could be as a leader, as sadly, most horn players prefer to hire a piano player. This is understandable as, either due to the nature of the instrument, the familiarity with written music or the repertoire of the piano, the average piano player is much more musical than the average guitarist. The solution: get good. Music is not a competition, but versatility and competence equals work, and if as an accompanist you inspire a soloist or lead a rhythm section well, you might well get the call next time. Both of the above roles have their nice aspects: As a leader you get to pick the tunes, arrangements and tempos, so you can choose stuff that you like and that you won’t get tripped up on. You also get the chance to really express what you are about as a musician and a person. On the other hand, being a leader is much more of a responsibility: not only do you have to get the gigs, make all the phone calls and deal with other musicians showing up late, complaining about the tunes, the money etc, but you have to be more of a public figure on the bandstand, although this is jazz, so it’s ok to not speak to the audience. Sideman gigs are nice: turn up, play, often get to test yourself on new tunes and difficult tempos/feels etc. You don’t have to play any of the heads, there’s no dealing with idiotic venue management, you can just sit in the background, relax and get on with the music. I have to say I generally prefer being a sideman, if the gig is with good players - although obviously we can’t all play with people who are better than us all the time. It’s an opportunity to learn, and to go to places you wouldn’t normally go, and it’s also much less stressful. However there are certain things that it’s important to take care of: make sure you act in a professional way. Musicians are understandably sensitive about the music that they are making: if you do something to disrupt the atmosphere at a gig (eg: arriving late, not bringing a fake book or a music stand and asking to share someone else’s which means you might both have to lean over awkwardly to read the changes, getting a bit too drunk - guilty - complaining about the repertoire or other aspects of the gig etc) then you might put the other players in a bad mood and spoil the vibe and rapport that everyone else is trying hard to create. Being disorganised in everyday life is ok - in fact I would positively encourage it - but it’s not cool to do it on a gig, it’s just irritating. Even if you are the world’s most scatterbrained person, the above faults are easy to avoid. Visual ideas: shape and form: How can the player express, for example, a square through sound? How about a circle, triangle or a curve? I often find myself thinking of particular shapes or images when listening to music. It’s no coincidence that artistic vocabulary is often used when music is discussed: describing a piece as “impressionistic” for example. In Thelonious Monk’s playing it is particularly easy to hear ideas of geometry and mathematics. His concept has been referred to as Cubist, which I think is a good description. Visiting art galleries can be stimulating, as can reading arty books, but you can probably find plenty of inspiration in your everyday environment. What are the buildings like where you live? What’s the weather like? Do you have any open green spaces nearby that you can visit? Can you climb to the top of a hill and get a view of the place where you live? - And so on. I am basically doing what I do as an improviser: trying to create or look at shapes or images that evoke sensations and feelings, memories, optimism for the future etc. For interesting and inspiring use of space it’s a good idea to explore developments in visual arts like Cinema, painting, photography and then of course literature, whether in the form of good books or good press. When you’re watching a film, ignore the dialogue and try and focus on its visual aspects: the colours the director favours will obviously affect the mood: how much space is there on the screen? Watching something visually spectacular like 2001 is obviously very different to watching Police Academy, but both directors are using visual imagery to put us in a certain frame of mind. On the same tip, it’s an interesting exercise to read something for the sake of enjoying the way the words look and work together, ignoring the story: with favourite texts that you have read many times this is pretty easy. You can do it with records too: listen to Kind Of Blue and concentrate solely on Paul Chambers’ bass playing for example. Is there a huge difference between a well played musical phrase and a well written one in a book or newspaper? They both have a particular arch that they follow, a beginning, middle and end, no unnecessary detail clouding the conception, simply; introduction, story and conclusion. In short: a direct inner logic. As Dizzy Gillespie said “start well and end well” Obviously in our particular respective realities, we generally perceive things chronologically, and many things have a beginning, middle and end. Think of a journey you have been on, what kind of situations you encountered and what these situations made you feel. Sometimes when looking down at the straight metal of guitar strings I am reminded of a railway line running from one destination to another, particularly as you might perceive the frets as sleepers, the fingertips as passengers. What does this tell us? Well, in the main, probably that I’m a bit of a space cookie, but why not use one’s imagination? There is a trend which seems to be prevalent in a lot of circles to dismiss anything which cannot be quantified as being “hippy talk”. All well and good if we’re talking about unrealistic extreme political views perhaps, which in my view are no more attainable than many forms of religious idealism - “we’re all going to Heaven lads, wahey” - but the key is that these ideas stimulate the imagination, and that in pursuit of one impossible or implausible thing we might stumble across many other interesting experiences, meet good people and find out a lot about life. I suppose the key as a musician is “what do you want to express?” A teacher must set targets for their students to learn, and by the same token a performer or music maker must decide which feelings are most important to them, how they want their music to affect people, and how these goals can be achieved. I have recently begun to teach myself to read music, and this is inspiring. I like the notes: they look like little people. Mirrors: Thelonious Monk used to have a huge mirror fixed to the ceiling above his piano at home. I imagine he used it to watch his hands at the keys from another angle, or to look at the movement of the hammers inside the piano. Or maybe he just felt it really tied the room together. It’s a cool idea though - looking at the instrument we play from a new perspective. Following the same idea of symmetry, Bach would take a written melody line on a score, and turn it upside down, then move the notes an octave down, giving him instant contrary motion and a counterpoint line without even trying! Obviously one or two note clashes would need to be fixed but by and large he got away with it. It’s funny to think that a man revered as a musical genius “cheated” in this way, but also kind of cool - it takes a lot of the pressure off the rest of us, and proves that making good music isn’t about being serious, and that all approaches can be valid. Short cuts are not necessarily unproductive. Truth: “I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth....” “..... and they’ve got to be, because saying a musical thing is a truth. If you play a musical statement and it’s a valid statement, that’s a truth right there in itself, you know. All musicians are striving for as near certain perfection as they can get, and that’s truth there, you know. So in order to play these things, these truths, you’ve got to live as much truth as you possibly can.....and if a guy is religious and if he’s searching for good and he wants to live a good life - he might call himself religious or he might not.” - John Coltrane. I agree with this. Perhaps the reason so many musicians were and are anti-establishment is because there are still many injustices in modern society, and they feel that they don’t want to contribute to a system that can be racist, mysogynistic, economically repressive and - most commonly - just plain stupid. In a lot of respects, I’m not an Englishman: I’m a Musician, and my countrymen are spread all over the world, working towards the same goal: vibe. If I have a role to play in society, it’s to get people out of the “look after number one” mentality, and the only way I can do this is to live the truth so that I can try and play and create the truth. I wouldn’t say I am particularly religious, but I appreciate the fact that people who do follow a faith often spend their time trying to make a positive contribution and help other people instead of themselves. As an individual it’s up to each person to decide what truth is, and what they can do to get people closer to this mindset. One thing I have noticed out of all the musicians and DJs I have met (this particularly applies to DJs) is that the ones that make the best music tend to be the friendliest, and the ones who are arrogant or argumentative or extremely opiniated (I sometimes get people using opinions or knowledge to start arguments or assert musical/social superiority - I wouldn’t try that mate, I’m a jazz musician) generally make pretty mediocre or even shit music. The Guitar: It’s quite difficult to work out what the guitar is: it’s not a string instrument in the way that a violin or double bass is, and it’s not a frontline instrument like a trumpet is. Equally we are not dealing with a chordal instrument as complex as a piano. The good news is that the guitar can be the best of all these worlds - it’s just a question of finding and exploiting the strengths of the instrument, rather than being limited by its weaknesses. One of the things I love most about the jazz archtop guitar is its appearance. Read this: it’s from an interview with Andrés Segovia: “There exists a legend regarding the origin of the guitar that is more beautifully suggestive than historic fact: Apollo was running in pursuit of a beautiful nymph, gallantly repeating to her all the while: “Don’t tire yourself, don’t tire yourself. I promise not to catch up with you.” When, finally, he did succeed in taking her in his arms, she called out to her semidivine father, who instantly changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo made the first guitar from the wood of this tree and gave it as form the graceful, curved contours that forever reveal its feminine origin.” “That is why the guitar is of a reserved and changeable nature, even hysterical at times: but that is why it is sweet and smooth, harmonious and delicate. When it is played with love and skill, there issues from its melancholy sounds a rapture that holds us fast to it forever.” -All spectacularly sexist of course and I don’t necessarily agree with the sentiment of what he says here, but it does highlight the fact that the guitar is a delicate instrument, and it can be used to produce gentle and beautiful sounds. One of the hardest things to do as a jazz musician is to think as a guitarist, rather than subconsciously viewing oneself as a combination of horn player and pianist. What are the strengths of my chosen instrument? Apart from delicacy, there is the fact that guitarists (try Wes for this one) can produce a certain kind of slinky groove that nothing else can touch if you get it right. If your time is good, lines on guitar can swing in a really unique way. It can get very funky. Listen to the guitar on James Brown, Bob Marley and Fela Kuti records - it’s a drum. There are also, of course, many different kinds of guitar. Electric to me is a little bit like television or cinema, jazz archtop guitar and acoustic feel purer, like a beautiful blank canvas. There are aspects of both that I like. Sometimes you’re in the mood for purity, sometimes, something synthetic can feel beautiful. Practicing Strategies: Cellist Jaqueline DuPré would choose a note on the instrument and spend 2 or 3 minutes trying to play the same note with as many different feels as possible. Eg: with/without vibrato, long, short, pizzicato or bowed and so on. A friend watching her practice said that it seemed as though she put more emotion into those two minutes than some people put into an entire concert performance. It’s an important point: when practicing: we shouldn’t only revise the mechanical side of the instrument, but also the things that have an emotional impact: tone, the feel and look of the guitar, the different ways of striking a string and so on - how many are there? Given that these things have an emotional impact, we should find emotions that they connect to: happiness, sadness, love etc. Rather than trying to force your instrument to work for you, try and work with it instead. Kickstarting a solo: Sometimes when I’m playing, if I’m not happy with what I am coming up with, I will select a note at random on the fretboard and play a phrase starting from this point, meaning that I have to use my ear and intuition to resolve the phrase to the corresponding chord(s). Many tutors warn against falling into the trap of relying on the visual patterns of scales that we find on the guitar - a resource that a sax player or trumpeter doesn’t have - but why not turn this idea on its head? In the course of a solo, what would happen if we tried to spell out visually (for example) the letter x or a square, circle etc on the fretboard? You are left with a sound that might not be initially musically very logical, but with a bit of fine tuning can sound very fresh and interesting. The key is to take the risk and jump into the unknown: it creates a sink or swim situation and finding your way back to dry land can be a very interesting and educational journey, as well as sharpening your reflexes. Also, as your ear develops, you will probably broaden your notion of what is harmonically acceptable, particularly if you are listening to a wide variety of music. Air: A concept that I have found interesting for quite a while is the idea of air: when playing an acoustic instrument or amplified electric one, the movement of air is what gives us the sound in the first place, but in the artistic sense, air is a very interesting element, and relates closely to time and space: in fact these elements all relate to atmosphere. Self-expression: One of the dangers in learning to improvise and play jazz or other forms of improvised music is that the student will probably model their playing on an established “great”. Copying the lines of players like - for example - Coltrane can definitely be an educational and inspiring thing to do, but take care not to overdo it. Remember that as a human being, you are not John Coltrane any more than he is you, and there are things that you can play that he couldn’t, melodies and rhythms that you have heard that he hasn’t. We now live in a different era, so logically we are experiencing a different way of living and different emotions, although obviously our basic feelings are the same. It’s good to listen to all types of music from all eras: the more influences you put into the pot, the more original your cooking will taste, provided that you get the right measures of each style. Brasil: My dogs on acid internet buddy from Brasil, Akzel, posted me some advice of Brasilian cats to look out for: “Milton Nascimento is great great great, I dunno if you speak Portuguese, but his lyrics are a kind of poetry of a unique style, simple and pure, although touchy. He's a favourite of Bjork. Elis Regina was another brilliant mind!!! The obvious, like Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, the 'fathers' of bossa nova, and Jorge Ben Jor, from the samba-rock tip, well known (sampled) by Marky, Xerxes, Drumagick, etc. There are many kinds of brazilian music: On the "modern" tip: Adriana Calcanhoto: Soft vocal, "urban" lyrics, "90's MPB", she's very popular, I like her!!! Samba: Beth Carvalho, althought I'm not much in samba myself, she's a "queen of samba", also search for Cartola, he's dead, but he made the most beautiful samba ever, "As Rosas não falam" ['Roses can't speak' in a bad English haha]. I really dig Chico Buarque too, he's a quite clever man, his lyrics and his songs are great! From the north east of Brasil comes Dorival Caymmi, he's the "father" of most artists from that region of the country, they have a unique style of music. Also search for Djavan, he's a great singer. I'm not sure, but I guess there are some partnership of him + Milton Nascimento. There's the "diva" Elza Soares, she's gotta a kind of voice very unusual, a must listen. [she doesn't sing like a diva] Fafá de Belém got a powerful voice and she got an accent from the north of the country, she comes from Belém, in the borderline of the Amazon jungle. Another powerful voice is Gal Costa!! Maria Bethânia too [she's Veloso's sister]. There's also Gilberto Gil, he just finished a partnership with Xerxes. In the romantic-carioca style check for Ivan Lins, with good lyrics, nice piano and cool vocal. I cannot forget João Gilberto if I'm talking about MPB!!!! In more a 70's style, you can find Mutantes, in their psychedelic 70's style, it was the former band of Rita Lee, the "mother" of brazilian rock'n'roll and Ney Matogrosso, one of the greatest voices from Brasil.” Anyone else know anything about Brasil? I’m particularly keen to find some kind of book on the history (musical and social) of the country. Quotes from musicians and other sources: -I don’t necessarily agree with all of these statements, but find them all interesting perspectives on music. They don’t necessarily tie in with a “musical philosophy” or any of that. I picked them because they sound inspiring, contain interesting ideas, and in some cases just because they’re funny. I freely admit that most of these quotes were er liberated from Guitar Player, Downbeat, Q and Mojo magazines, plus whatever music or art books I happen to be reading at the time. I just hope these guys don’t sue me. I also accept no responsibility for insult or injury sustained when following the advice of any of these people. “You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.” - Miles. “The reason I don’t play ballads anymore is because I love playing ballads so much.” - Miles to Keith Jarrett. It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note - it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong. - Miles. “I’ve been electrocuted so many times now. It’s quite a buzz actually!” - Keith Richards. “The things I'm after musically are clarity, emotional communication on a not-too-obvious level, the kind of form in a chorus that doesn't hit you over the head but is there if you look for it, humor, and construction that sounds logical in an unexpected way. That and a good, dependable high F-sharp and I'll be happy.” - Paul Desmond. “I can’t understand why people would want to play scales when they could be playing a tune.” -Pat Metheny on practising. “After we’d settled down a bit, songs started coming out. I don’t write them, I wait for them to come to me. I think they all floated through the air, and if you were alert enough or around at the right time of day, you’d sit down with an instrument and you’d pick up one or two. As long as the antenna’s up, they can transmit.” - Keith Richards. “Don’t play the first thing that comes into your head: play the second.” - Miles. “See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that-but he’s got to think differently in order to do it. I’ve always told the musicians in my band to play what they know, and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that’s where great art and music happens.” - Miles. “I am much more than a guitarist: I am a man. Before everything I feel that I am a man. And possibly a good man. I always say that my life has been a line without interruption, ascending always. I gave my life to the guitar.” - Segovia. “There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.” - Miles. “Guitar players seem so clannish: they only listen to each other. I really don’t care about the guitar. I mean, I’m glad I chose it, but I’m interested in making music.” - Jimmy Raney. “I’d tell Trane to begin in the middle because that’s the way his head worked anyway.” - Miles. “My stage fright was less than my wish to do well”. - Segovia. “I worked out the concept that every minute of my life was valuable. So if I got the chance to play with Art Tatum or Roy Eldridge, I made the time, even if I didn’t get much sleep.” - Les Paul. “I don’t think too many people on 11 September listened to J-Lo or Britney Spears for comfort and solace. The world of manufactured pop music almost seemed like an insult.” - Moby. “I think the most important thing about playing is to walk out with confidence and look the people right in the eye. As soon as they know you’re confident, they’re confident.” - Les Paul. “John used to tell me how to listen to the music, so that I could get the most out of it. He would say things to me like, “You listen to a song, five times, Cecilia. Listen to it instrument by instrument. Play that song and listen to the bass all the way through. Listen to it again and listen to the saxophone.” - Cecilia Foster (Frank Foster’s wife) on John Coltrane. “The words themselves on Kid A are kind of empty because they’re leaving room for the music.” - Thom Yorke.
“As water is a fish's element and the air a bird's, music was Django's.” - Charles Delauney. “He who is impatient mostly arrives at his goals late. Step by step is the only way.” - Segovia. “I hate the way he writes. I kind of like the way he lives, though.” - Paul Desmond on Jack Kerouac. “I believe simplicity is the greatest, but it’s the toughest thing to get sometimes”. - Les Paul. “The musicians were giving me tunes with chords all the time, and at that time I didn’t want to play them. The music was too thick.” - Miles. “I finally decided writing was like playing jazz-it can be learned, but not taught.” - Paul Desmond. “See the beauty of uncarved wood. See the beauty of raw silk.” - Laotse. “All the sounds of the guitar are feminine because it’s very soft and very, very delicate. They arrive with such subtlety that it is almost impossible to hear it. It is as if you thought of that sound rather than heard it.” - Segovia. “I was transported to a place that I’d been willing myself to be in for months on end. I’d finally made the transition. Now you might only be in that place for three minutes and forever more life will never be as good. But that’s fine by me.” - Thom Yorke. “Hang on to your eccentricities, because they will give you a style.” - John Scofield. “When a man’s faith is never tried, I don’t think he’ll ever learn anything. You have to have trial and tribulation, or what are you going to learn?” - McCoy Tyner. “Sometimes a producer is someone who just creates the right atmosphere for things to happen.” - Thom Yorke. “I don’t really see myself as a songwriter or a guitarist or a singer or a lyricist or even a film producer. All of those are me, in a way - just like I like gardening, digging holes and sticking trees in.” - George Harrison. “Finding the right guys, I think, is really the hardest part of being a leader. The rest gets to be largely routine and resigning yourself to being a bad guy part of the time.” - Paul Desmond. “There’s a thing about empathy between musicians. The great bands were the ones in which the majority of the people were good people, morally good people; I call them real people. In jail they call them regulars.” - Art Pepper. “A good musician can do more to change society than 30 average mayors.” - Howard Roberts. “Avoid root notes.” - Wynton Marsalis. “I don’t know one musician who’s stuck to his guns, who was good in the early days, that hasn’t come through now with recognition from everybody.” - Jimmy Page. “So much great music has already happened that catching up is a hell of a job.” - Jerry Garcia. “The selfish or shallow person might be a great musician technically, but he’ll be so involved with himself that his playing will lack warmth, intensity, beauty and won’t be deeply felt by the listener.” - Art Pepper. “It’s not the note that you play that’s the wrong note: it’s the next note you play that makes it right or wrong.” -Miles. “The conventional thing is to use the hi-hat for the after-beat and use the bass drum for the underlying 4/4 or 3/4 rhythm to keep the steady pulsation....But I just think you have to use all of the drum set all the time.” - Elvin Jones. “Each player must decide for himself.” - Cecil Taylor. The guitar, as I’ve always said, is a little orchestra.” - Segovia. “What knocks me out about Coltrane is that he’s the most harmonically static player and the most harmonically adventurous at the same time.” - Steve Reich. “Musical notation can be used as a point of reference, but the notation does not indicate music, it indicates direction.” - Cecil Taylor “- I don’t know what I mean by saying that.” - Cecil Taylor. “He had already plotted five seconds ahead of time what he was going to do, and you could hear it in his music. It looked like he was a very slow player, but in fact he was making quick decisions, and because he understood his craft so well his music has this kind of air of easyness about it. What you heard had been edited completely, only the essence remained. Desmond understood how to get to the point quicker than most players ever learn.” - Anthony Braxton on Paul Desmond. “You play a couple of notes and say “That sounds like Eric Clapton” or “That sounds like George Benson”. But then you play two or three notes and say “Man, that’s me”. And you concentrate on those ones.” - Carlos Santana. “The whole point of making music is to get something across”. - Thom Yorke. “It’s like a beautiful city, but we don’t enter, because we have to go through the portals, the corridor, and then we reach the entranceway. When that chord hits, that E major, the doors start to open. That’s what it’s like for me - the very first invitation to this beautiful place that’s here, that’s in our heart and spirit.” - Alice Coltrane on the opening piece of A Love Supreme. “I really feel that you can’t avoid finding your voice if you keep playing.” - Jerry Garcia. “The piano has no vibrato. But trying for it affects what comes before it in the phrase.” - Bill Evans. “Scales and modes are mechanical and uninteresting.” - Herb Ellis. “If I could do it all again, I’d learn how to read.” - Tal Farlow. “Dizzy Gillespie and Lalo Schifrin were in Erroll Garner’s hotel room Erroll was putting golf balls into a cup against the wall. Dizzy asked if he might try it, took Erroll’s putter, and sank one ball after another, to the amazement of Erroll and Lalo, who asked if he had played a lot of golf. He said he had never done it before. How then, was he doing it? ‘I just imagine,’ Dizzy said, ‘that I’m the ball and I want to be in the cup’.”
“I never approached the piano as a thing in itself but as a gateway to music. Rather than “the instrument that plays jazz”, it’s “the mind that thinks jazz” that interests me.” - Bill Evans. “The darkest hour is before dawn.” - Paulo Coehlo (The Alchemist). “I practiced piano three hours a day in childhood, about six hours a day in college, and at least six hours now. With that, I could afford to develop slowly.” - Bill Evans. “Keep things simple. Don’t fill your head with theory and numbers that have little to do with music.” - Joe Pass. “The guitar is an instrument of nuances: not the force, not the strength, but the nuance.” - Segovia. “It gets to the point where the player, if he’s going to be any kind of serious player, teaches himself.” - Bill Evans. “It’s hard to play music: it’s not like falling off a log.” - John Scofield. “Making good records has very little to do with all the possibilities you’ve got. It’s, can you make a decision?” - Keith Richards. “People are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive, but we’re powerless because we can’t name it.” - Thom Yorke. “Parker used to play a lot on the upper parts of the chords. Sometimes he’d start a phrase two beats late and run it into the next chord. Even if it didn’t fit the chord, the phrase was so nice it didn’t matter.” - Tal Farlow. “I caught up on listening to music, which to me is maybe the greatest art.” - Keith Richards. “You can only take from the guitar what you put into it.” - Wes Montgomery.
“I tried to be Jim Hall when I was a kid and I couldn’t become him. In the early 70’s I tried to imitate John McLaughlin, and I couldn’t become him. In the end I discovered that you have to become what you are, and play that.” - John Abercrombie. “Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned with feeling being the generating force.” - Bill Evans. “A lot of the 80s has been toytown music, because of the advance of technology: everybody is tryin to figure out what to do with all these toys.” - Keith Richards “We had this whole thing about Amnesiac being like getting into someone’s attic, opening a chest and finding their notes from a journey they’d been on. There’s a story, but no literal plot, so you have to keep picking out fragments. You know something really important has happened to this person that’s ended up completely changing them, but you’re never told exactly what it is.” - Thom Yorke. “I’ve never really had any guitar heroes.” - Edge. “For me, I think the only danger is being too in love with guitar playing.” - Jerry Garcia. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” - Monk. “You must keep things moving, and have a narrative flow. The fundamental principles are the same: The idea is to tell a story.” - Pat Metheny. “Investigating open tunings wasn’t really a conscious thing, but a necessary one, maybe. Sometimes the subconscious bits come up front and say ‘in order to save you, we’re taking you over for a bit’.” - Keith Richards. “When you have a strong vocation, everything is easy. Even if it is too hard to learn, it is easy because you have patience. Vocation is what the very religious man says is the inspiration from heaven.” - Segovia. "The word 'bebop' doesn't mean a thing to me. It's about trying to play clean, and looking for the pretty notes." - Charlie Parker. “Rhythm is a hard subject to put into words.” - Keith Richards. “In the long run I think it’s more important to look at paintings than study the way somebody plays bebop lines.” - Jim Hall. “When you compare music, you lose the joy of listening to it.” - John Scofield. "Just play it like you don't know how to play guitar." - Miles to John McLaughlin when recording In a Silent Way. “MONK = KNOW” - Monk. “Whenever I start working on a song, I immediately try to forget everything, to empty my head. I try to approach it like, “This is the first time I’ve ever played a guitar. What am I going to do?”. That’s one way of getting straight through the conscious mind into the subconscious layer where the true creative spirit lies.” - Edge. “Music is my voice to God.” - John McLaughlin. “Playing slightly out of tune...we’re talking about a certain tension that’s created by jarring the nerve just a little.” - Keith Richards. "I want to paint atmosphere." - Monet. “When you're not sure what to play, lay out. In other words, don't just do something - sit there.” - Jim Hall. “It’s always night, otherwise you wouldn’t need the light!” - Monk. “I do know the older I get, the more I'm referencing music I heard as a kid.” - Bill Frisell. “Well of course I’m a pretty sharp pool player, but the guitar is a hard instrument.” - Wes Montgomery. “I’m still working on my sound. It’s really about finding the right guitar with the right amp.” - Keith Richards. “Jazz is vital, living music that should be about life.” - John McLaughlin.
"Listening is still the key." - Jim Hall.
“Never ask for a job, just be on the scene and be ready!” - Monk to Steve Lacy. “Why dirty up the arrangement by randomly whacking a couple of chords or a couple of extra tweezy notes just because that’s what everybody else would do?” - Frank Zappa. “On the piano I may come across something I wouldn’t have done on guitar.” - Keith Richards. “It bugs me when people try to analyse jazz as some kind of intellectual theorem. It's not: it's feeling.” - Bill Evans. “Any chord can follow any chord in my book.” - John McLaughlin. “That state of living where one can say, with no regrets, 'I reached the point of pride and the elegance of being a human being'. It's so elegant to be a human being - elegant meaning good fortune. We are very fortunate to be born as human beings. So if we realise that fortune, why not strive to be the most elegant in everything we do?” - Wayne Shorter. “I always feel funny when somebody comes up to me and says “what kind of modes do you use?” To me that’s the equivalent of someone asking “what kind of verbs do you use?” - Pat Metheny. “My name is John Francis Pastorius III, and I’m the greatest bass player in the world.” - Jaco meets Joe Zawinul for the first time. “There are times when an acoustic guitar will make a track.” - Keith Richards. “Socrates was wise because he realized how little he knew.” - Bill Evans. “Football is a game that you play with your brain.” - Johann Cruyff. “Jazz is the most advanced thing in the universe - that’s why we gotta do it.” - Barry Harris. “Live your life. Don’t lock yourself in your room eight hours a day and think of nothing but playing guitar. Learn how to live well, to appreciate flowers. You have to have a human side.” - Vernon Reid. “We used to just go and jam, actually. We’d say ‘rehearsing’ just to make it sound, you know, official.” - Hendrix. “Me and Jimi Hendrix built the World Trade Centre towers by ourselves - with our bare hands!” - Jaco Pastorius. “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another’s.” - William Blake. “I’m different”. - Frank Zappa. “When you’re inspired, you can do anything.” - John McLaughlin. “You can do anything. If you want to walk through a wall you can walk through a wall.” - Jaco. “Every day you wake up in pain like death, then you go out and score, and that is transfiguration. Each day becomes all of life in microcosm.” - Bill Evans on addiction. NB: I do NOT endorse drug use. I reckon this comment illustrates how destructive drug addiction can be. “It gets to me when technique becomes the featured item. It’s like somebody spending hours polishing a tap thinking that it’s going to make the water purer or tastier. It doesn’t work like that. I’ve never sat down and worked on technique - it just takes care of itself as you become a better musician.” - Pat Metheny. “I think of all harmony (....) as an expansion from and return to the tonic.” - Bill Evans.
“Players get to that intermediate level where they can already play pretty good, and that’s kind of a dangerous period because they tend to start playing only the things that they can play, rather than the things they can’t.” - Pat Metheny. “Try to listen to a lot of music to keep a perspective. If you don’t, what you bring to your own playing will become really shallow.” - Vernon Reid. “I became obsessed with The Urantia Book. It got to the point where we would sit on the roof of my place and meditate and wait for UFOs to come and pick us up. We were both totally convinced it was a real possibility. And Jaco believed that he was such a special person the aliens would want to check him out.” - Bobby Econoumou. “If I make an attempt to construct a great solo, the craftsman in me can do that, but that’s the last thing I want to happen as an improvisor.” - Pat Metheny. “Titles are important. Some pieces are program music, you know, the tune tells a story - like Duke's 'Tattooed Bride' and 'Harlem Airshaft'.” - Billy Strayhorn. “One reason why I always felt good about growing up in a fairly isolated town is that there was no way to know what was ‘happening’.” - Pat Metheny.
“When you love a woman, it’s the God in her that you see”. - George Harrison. “Whenever I encounter great art, I don’t feel a sense of discovery, but rather one of confirmation, as if I had already been thinking the same idea without knowing it.” - Brad Mehldau. “I like the sound of the flugelhorn - I play it all the time”. - Harry Beckett. “This world is really paradise, but we’ve forgotten, that’s all. Obviously the world cannot change - it is people who have to change. If I can bring some comfort into someone’s life then I won’t have lived in vain.” - John McLaughlin. “Just because I wrote the song it doesn’t necessarily mean I know any better than anyone else what it’s about.” - Lou Reed. “I like the idea of a party in your mind that you hope will never stop. I think of people in a situation where they have to be straight, but in their heads they’re losing it completely. That duality really appeals to me.” - Vernon Reid. “The song ‘Alabama’ came from a speech. John said there was a Martin Luther King speech about the four girls getting killed printed in the newspaper. And so John took the rhythmic patterns of his speech and came up with ‘Alabama’.” - Elvin Jones.
“When playing a solo or a tune, you have the opportunity to construct something: a stone wall or maybe an archway. The wall is the easier of the two. An arch however has tension and drama and contains the possibility that it may fall in on itself and become a pile of rocks again. Go for the shape or feeling: the form.” - Jim Hall. “When you walk on to a stage, you take your whole self with you. The more of you there is, the better.” - Jim Hall. “The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.” - William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene I. “(Pop Idol) Will Young’s in the Guinness Book of Records for fuck’s sake! But so what? So is a bloke who jumps off the Eiffel Tower and lands in a fucking tea cup. Did he write strawberry fields forever? No.” - Noel Gallagher on the manufactured pop industry. “Spiritual and artistic levels are the same - there’s no difference.” - John McLaughlin.
“I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth.” - John Coltrane. “..... and they’ve got to be, because saying a musical thing is a truth. If you play a musical statement and it’s a valid statement, that’s a truth right there in itself, you know. All musicians are striving for as near certain perfection as they can get, and that’s truth there, you know. So in order to play these things, these truths, you’ve got to live as much truth as you possibly can.....and if a guy is religious and if he’s searching for good and he wants to live a good life - he might call himself religious or he might not.” - Trane. “Your humanity is your instrument.” - Wayne Shorter. “At home in California I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds.” - Eric Dolphy. “It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception”. -Albert Einstein, speaking about his theory of relativity. “I feel that we have every reason to face the future optimistically.” - ‘Trane. “If there is a new invention, a new gas, it has to be given the chance to surface to be recognised before it can benefit the human race.” - Hendrix “You still hear musicians say the height of their ambition is to play in the Ellington band.” - Harry Carney. “I never know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want”. - Stanley Kubrick. “If I can abandon my own preconceived, silly notions of what I think I am, then the music can really use me. It’s selfish to impose myself on the music.” - John McLaughlin. “I was at Birdland one night, the quartet was playing and I finally got up courage enough to go up and talk to one of them, because Elvin Jones was sitting just two tables away. I told him how much I loved their music, and he said “Oh, we just finished an album called A Love Supreme, I think you’ll really like it.” - Producer Michael Cuscuna. “I would like to see more colour on the streets, probably.” - Hendrix. “It's interesting that some of the letters Monk gets thank him for just being himself. He couldn't be any other way.” - Nellie Monk. “I taught myself guitar from Charlie Christian’s records. I listened to them real good and I knew that everything done on his guitar could be done on mine, because he had a six-string, so I just determined that I would do it.” - Wes Montgomery. “Ideally a group should be in an evolving state like a mobile, with each player acting and reacting as the music takes shape.” - Jim Hall. “Sometimes I get so deep that I feel like I’m walking around on the bottom of the sea watching the sunset.” - Hendrix. “Nothing under the sun is new.” - Aristotle. “You can't make anything go anywhere; it just happens.” - Monk “It’s feeling.” - Bill Evans on music. “It’s the spontaneity onstage which is of paramount importance, because how I feel now, I never felt before and I’ll never feel again.” - John McLaughlin “I try to make myself ignorant, and go by sound and feeling. When things are going right, it feels like the music is happening because you finally got out of the way.” - Jim Hall. “I felt like I was turning my brain inside out to where my subconscious was becoming my conscious.” - John Frusciante. “I just box on account it makes you graceful.” - Miles. “When we played gigs in Utah, the people were really listening: they were really tuned in some kind of way or another. I think it was the air.” - Hendrix. “We always solo and we never solo” - Joe Zawinul on Weather Report. “With jazz, you can't explain it to anyone without losing the experience. It's got to be experienced, because it's feeling, not words.” - Bill Evans. “I think the most powerful sound in the drum kit is silence.” - Trevor Davies “Monk stood still and listened to tin cans rattling in the wind in an empty lot: ‘Do you know what the loudest noise in the world is, man?’ He asked; ‘The loudest noise in the world is silence’.” “I was just bending reality to create a little fantasy. Now I’m doing things like Room Full Of Mirrors, which is about mental derangement and bits of broken glass in my brain and so forth. Are they psychedelic pieces? I don’t even know what the word means really. I just give them little bits to dream on, and dreams come from different moods.” - Hendrix. “You try to express a simple emotion - love, excitement, sadness - and often your technique gets in the way. I've always had good facility, and that worries me. I hope it doesn't get in the way.” - Bill Evans. “You are the one who has to learn guitar, because a teacher can only show you so much.” - Wes Montgomery. “I used to have a bunch of Hawk's records and a player with me all the time. I would wake up in the morning and listen to Hawk. One day, a guy said to me, 'Well, Ben, you finally did it.' I asked him what he meant. He said, 'You sound just like Hawk now.' I packed up the record player and took it to Kansas City for my folks. From then on, I developed on my own.” - Ben Webster. “I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.” - Billie Holiday. “It's kind of nice to play concerts, but I feel closer to the people when we play a club. They're more relaxed.” - Ben Webster “You’ll find more people against you than with you, until you get started. Then you’ll find more with you than against you”. - Wes Montgomery. Some favourite records: These are my standard issue records - in that I think children should be issued with all of them at birth. Fairly reasonable in my opinion. Everybody Digs Bill Evans: Probably my favourite record ever. The atmosphere is very similar to the one on Kind Of Blue, which is a very rare feel. Everything about this record is perfect: it swings really hard, it’s powerfully emotional, the lines Bill plays are brilliantly structured, and the cover is cool. See also: You Must Believe In Spring, The Paris Concert (1 & 2), Sunday At The Village Vanguard/Waltz for Debby, Undercurrent. There really isn’t a Bill Evans record without merit. Wynton Kelly Trio + Wes Montgomery: Smokin at the Half Note: The best Wes playing I have heard on any record anywhere. Also worth a listen to hear how Wes and Wynton interact when comping - they never clash with voicings, which is very difficult to do. I could probably sing you all of Wes’s solos on this. Definitely one for the guitar practice massive. Joe Zawinul & The Zawinul Sydicate: World Tour: The percussion on this record (Paco Sery - drums, Manolo Badrena, percussion) is amazing. I really like this band because they have a lot of the best aspects of Weather Report but they groove about 5 times as hard. Larry Goldings Trio: As One: Some of the best contemporary jazz around at the moment - very diverse, swings, grooves, very lyrical...Peter Bernstein is a fantastic guitarist, Bill Stewart is a really wicked drummer and I think Larry must be the Bill Evans of the Hammond organ. His website is worth a look too. See also: Sweet Science, Moonbird. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: Not much I need to say about this one. If you’ve never heard it, go and buy it now, silly. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue: See above. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds: See above. The Beatles: Revolver: See above. Miles Davis - other notables: In A Silent Way, l’Ascenseur Pour l’Echafaud, Miles In The Sky, Miles Smiles, Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, ESP, We Want Miles, Relaxin’ With The Miles Davis Quintet, The Classic Concert 1964: My Funny Valentine + Four & More, Filles de Kilimanjaro, Miles In Berlin, Birth Of The Cool. You can’t go wrong with Miles, although some of the 80s stuff sounds very 80s. It’s still good in its own way though....... John Coltrane - other notables: Crescent, Coltrane’s Sound, Giant Steps, Live at The Village Vanguard, My Favourite Things.... Jimi Hendrix: Axis Bold As Love. This has got a few of my Hendrix favourites on it, like Spanish Castle Magic, Little Wing, Castles Made of Sand etc. I remember watching the Hendrix Woodstock video when I was about 14 - blew my mind. One of the first things that got me seriously practising rather than just messing about. Read interviews with Hendrix when you see ‘em, they’re usually really funny. John Scofield: Works For Me: I think this is Sco’s best record. The rhythm section (Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Billy Higgins) is incredible, and Sco and Kenny Garrett up front play really nice stuff. And the compositions are really good too. Brad Mehldau: Art of the Trio 4: Back at the Vanguard: Great trio, great tunes, great playing. So the summary then: great. Bjork: Début. Amazing variety of styles on this album and yet it all fits into a perfectly coherent whole. Obviously I recommend all Bjork stuff, but this is a particular favourite. I think she’s the most sophisticated modern artist I’ve heard, and probably the cat of the 90s. See also: Post, Homogenic. Van Morrison: Astral Weeks: I like this record a lot - it sounds like nature. Jaco Pastorius: Jaco. A difficult choice, because all Jaco’s records contain tunes that are musically just absolutely perfect, but I think this is his strongest album overall. There are some wicked Latin grooves on this. Check out his biography by Bill Milkowski - a great read for any musician, not just bass players. Various: Blue Brazil: Blue Note in a Latin Groove. Lots of mad Brazilian tunes from the 60s and 70s. I really like the Edu Lobo stuff on here - his tunes are pretty hard to track down. John McLaughlin Trio: Live at Royal Festival Hall, November 1989: McLaughlin was one of my first influences, and this is one of my favourite albums. I remember I ordered my mate Chris to buy a copy - virtually frogmarched him to the till - and he went on to study jazz at uni, which is cool - done my bit for society. There’s a lot of variety on this album. All three of them play some lovely stuff. McLaughlin on this nice nylon-string thing that can also turn into a guitar synth - crazy. Trilok Gurtu obviously does some ace percussion and Kai Eckhardt is kind of their secret weapon. Apparently the weekend after this was recorded he was playing bass on a wedding gig for 50 quid. Makes me wonder what chance the rest of us have. Charles Lloyd: The Water Is Wide & Hyperion With Higgins: If only to hear some of the great Billy Higgins’ final performances. His touch on drums is unique, and his swing: I’ve never heard anything like it. The rest of the rhythm section isn’t so bad either: Larry Grenadier on bass, Brad Mehldau, John Abercrombie and Lloyd playing some great stuff up front. Nitin Sawney: Beyond Skin: Very powerful album documenting the guy’s experiences growing up in Britain. Musically great - lots of variety. He’s a bit of a Rennaissance man is Mr Sawney - plays great guitar, his piano playing is pretty cool and he also writes comedy for the telly, or at least he used to anyway. Weather Report: Heavy Weather. Everyone knows about side 1 of this album, but if you listen to side 2 it’s amazing. I think Zawinul and Shorter are two of the most important figures in 20th Century Music. See also: Mysterious Traveller, 8.30. Martial Solal Trio with Peter Erskine and Marc Johnson: Triangle. I think if Martial Solal was American and not French and was 30 instead of 60 odd, he’d be taken a lot more seriously by the jazz press, and be at least as popular as someone like Brad Mehldau. He’s one of the world’s best pianists and it’s a shame more people don’t know about him: his conception is quite unique and this record proves it. Johnson and Erskine are an ace rhythm section, the bassist especially doing some fine solos, really melodic. See also: Balade du 13 Mars, Just Friends... The Doors: The Doors. I find this a bit of a weird album, but I keep coming back to it, so it must be pretty good in some way. There’s a lot of different stuff going on at the same time. The End is mad - the lyrics are completely bananas - I wonder what inspired that, hmm. The music is groovy though. Afel Bocoum, Damon Albarn, Toumani Diabaté & friends: Mali Music: This is a nice idea - send the bloke from Blur on a trip to Mali, jam with local players, record it all then take it home and cut it up a bit, put some beats, bass, echo and piano parts on the tracks....Sort of a West African Buena Vista Social Club - in Dub. But some great ideas anyway. In spirit it’s the same kind of vibe as the U2 Passengers record. Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa. Fantastic very spiritual spacey modern classical music. Thanks to Hannah for lending me her copy, which I somehow keep forgetting to return. I must make a mental note to do that soon. Yes, definitely. Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Vol 1. Lovely analogue sounds and lots of echo and good beats. I can hear a lot of Weather Report influence in this. Nice one. Absolutely mental bloke though. Baaba Maal: Missing You. Ah really good Senegalese acoustic music, recorded at night outside in the bush apparently. The guy’s voice is really powerful. I lost my copy of this - silly me. Shakti: A Handful of Beauty: This is my favourite of the Shakti albums. I’m not too knowledgeable about Indian music, but this is brilliant. I love L.Shankar’s violin playing - it sounds very sad - and McLaughlin always sounds good on acoustic guitar: I think it makes his playing more percussive. Then there’s the rhythm section.....I think the recent Remember Shakti albums are really good too. The Indian ragas (scales) have got a real vibe to them. The Charlie Parker Quartet: (the purple one, on Verve). Some of the best Bird stuff, very well recorded, which was a rarity in that era. This is a great record to practise to, and to put on at parties. Underworld: Second Toughest In The Infants. I really love the artwork on the sleeve of this album. I think the music is cool. It’s quite warm and personal - it sounds beautiful. Some nice guitar on here too, interestingly enough. Ravel: Bolero. You might be a bit bored of hearing this tune, but it’s a real lesson on how to develop the accompaniment of a melody - it just builds and builds. Great melody too. As a guitarist it’s worth getting simple stuff like this under your fingers as much as learning really intricate phrases. Roni Size Reprazent: New Forms: I don’t care what people on the scene say about Roni Size - this is a wicked record. Well produced, good tunes and good (live) basslines and (live) drum sounds. I really love the track with Bahmadia on it. I like the fact that he put his Mercury Prize money into a community project too. Finley Quaye: Maverick A Strike. One of the classics of the 90s I reckon. A bit of everything and his lyrics are really funny. Jimmy Smith: Midnight Special. I bought this in Santa Monica and was pleased with my choice of holiday record. Stanley Turrentine, Kenny Burrell and Donald Bailey make up the quartet and they play ace. Really lovely recorded sound too. Buy any Jimmy Smith record with Mr Donald Duck on it because you can’t go wrong when those two are playing together. Jimmy Smith: Standards. Some of Kenny Burrell’s best playing on record - he’s so tasteful and melodic and really bluesy too - such an underrated guitarist. Just a nice mellow trio with Jimmy and Donald Bailey, and some choice tunes. Very atmospheric album. The liner notes call it a “black tie date-night smooth-as-silk affair” - cool. Some of the organ tones are really wurlitzer-esque, so you kind of get the odd free trip to the seaside, but I think that adds to the charm. This is fast becoming one of my favourite records. Jamiroquai: Return of the Space Cowboy: This is the funkiest album. Really nice songs etc, but the musical arrangements are amazing. I think this was when Stuart Zender was playing bass and I think him and the piano player (Toby Someone?) worked ace together. I’ve got to buy a copy of this. I had it on tape and it got lost - it’s probably in someone’s car. Talvin Singh: OK: I was so stoked when he won the Mercury prize. I think this record is a masterpiece. His tabla playing is ace, the programming is brilliant, it’s really melodic and it has loads of depth to it - there is a lot of detail in the way that this album is put together. Very intelligent music. Nice one Talvin. One of the albums of the 90s. Fela Kuti: Expensive Shit/He Miss Road: This is the sort of record that grooves in such a loose way that you can’t help nod your head to it - really hypnotic. Personable too because all the players make loads of mistakes, so it’s quite funny, but it doesn’t really matter when they can lay down a groove like this. Roots Manuva: Run Come Save Me: Good work, if only for the “Witness” tune (the video for that is a pisser too). The whole record is really good - great lyrics and really nice production and programming. Abercrombie, Johnson, Erskine, Surman: November. Really nice freeish ECM stuff - these are all great players and they complement each other so well. I well dig Marc Johnson’s bass playing. The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses: I think this is another contender for record of the 80s: really atmospheric, great and original guitar playing, beautiful songs. When they first appeared they were a wicked crew - they had a real concept - clothes, artwork and so on - do you remember all the t-shirts you used to be able to get? I remember all the lads in my school went mental for that stuff. I think Waterfall was one of the first things I learned to play on guitar. Stevie Wonder: Innervisions: Great stuff - a bit trippy and funky at the same time. And check out Stevie’s Moog bass playing! I left my copy at someone’s house, which was a bit stupid of me. Caetano Veloso: Omaggio a Federico e Giulieta. My mate Mark has got my copy of this. Give it back, Mark. I don’t know how you would describe Caetano Veloso, but he’s a great singer and songwriter, plus a nice guitar player. This is a really good live acoustic set, a tribute to Fellini. Beautifully sung, played and arranged, with an interesting choice of repertoire including “let’s face the music and dance”. Leftfield: Rhythm and Stealth: What an immense name for an album, and it doesn’t disappoint in my opinion. Roots Manuva is on it too. Cool. Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On. This record is a bit of a journey. Check out James Jamerson’s bass playing on here. There’s a massive vibe on this album. Paul Weller: Wild Wood: One of his best albums: I remember my girlfriend at the time bought it me for Christmas. Awww. Some great tunes on here, particularly the title track - nice acoustic stuff. Steely Dan: Aja. Very complex and deep record, lots of wicked studio cats on it and Becker and Fagen’s songs and lyrics are great. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette: The Cure. You can’t really go wrong with Jarrett, provided you can put up with the squeaky bits. This is a seamless live standards set, great fun. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette: Always Let Me Go. Another live album, but this is spread over two CDs and is completely improvised. Very free sounding, but some killer grooves on here too. Elis Regina: Vento di Maio: Wow, what an amazing record. Elis is kind of Brazil’s equivalent of Billie Holiday, and this is one of her best albums. I don’t know what it is about Brazil - maybe it’s just an incredibly musical place, but Brazilian music seems to be so ace: very emotional, very groovy, but also very sophisticated harmonically. I’m listening to this loads at the moment: it has a bit of everything on it. Wu-Tang Clan: Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). I dig this, it’s a hip-hop classic: tuff beats and ace samples from Kung-Fu films and stuff. Wu-Tang Forever is ace too. Where has my copy gone? Oh well... Esbjorn Svensson Trio: EST Plays Monk: Fantastic string arrangements on this, very sparse. Also an amazing version of the tune “Criss Cross”, and a sort of hip hop version of I Mean You. It’s nice to hear Monk’s stuff reworked. I think this is EST’s best album. Christian Escoudé: Holidays. Got this in a sale. This album comes from the French gypsy tradition of Maccaferris and moustaches, really nice stuff. No bass or drums, just guitars, accordion - I love accordions - a bit of percussion and a bit of keyboards (tastefully done) here & there. The gypsy players is an area that I really vibe with - maybe it’s from living in France so long. I need to find some more albums like this. Sonny Rollins: The Bridge: Jim Hall plays really well on this, and he’s a nice foil to Rollins too. Great atmosphere on these sessions. The Orb: UFORB: Towers of Dub on this is ace. Some mad basslines from Jah Wobble too. This is a really cool record to listen to in bed when you want to relax. “It’s a bit of a journey”. Junior Murvin: Police and Thieves. Couple of famous roots tunes on this, but also loads of other good ones and ace Lee Perry (I think) production. His voice is really unique too and I love the imagery in the lyrics. Beastie Boys: Ill Communication: This is a good record to play cards to. Some killer grooves on this and also loads of really funny moments. The Pharcyde: Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde: I’ve lost my copy of this which is a shame. It grooves really nice - lots of live instrumentation on there, and the lyrics are well funny. Stan Getz: Sweet Rain: One of Getz’s best. Really nice rhythm section (Chick Corea, Ron Carter, Grady Tate) and really nice tunes, slightly left of centre selection but Getz makes it all sound beautiful. See also: Dynasty. Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magik. It took ages for this record to catch on - I don’t understand why because it’s truly immense. John Frusciante and Flea’s playing is incredible. I learnt to play by copying the guitar parts from this album. They all lived together in a big house in the Hollywood hills when they were making this and there’s a really good video - Funky Monks - about the whole thing. Absolutely inspired. See also: By The Way, Mother’s Milk... Kenny Burrell: Guitar Forms. With tunes arranged by Gil Evans plus some really nice solo nylon string acoustic stuff. Kenny’s best under his own name I think - very melodic and singable. Public Enemy: Fear Of A Black Planet. Brilliant grooves, ace production, funny (Flavor Flav) and serious (Chuck D) lyrics. Not a weak tune on there. Takes me back to my youth, when rap and swearing were becoming fashionable. The Congos: Heart of The Congos: This is a mad album. On the surface it’s a really good roots album, great tunes and lyrics, but as you listen to it you realise there’s loads of weird noises and echoes going on in the background - essentially Lee Perry trying loads of crazy stuff out. I particularly like the tune where a cow starts mooing in the middle of one of the verses, and there’s another one that sounds like he’s just squirting an aerosol at the microphone. Nutcase. It’s brilliant though. The Jimmy Giuffre 3: I like this a lot - a really interesting concept, lots and lots of space, nice folky/mediaeval feeling. Jim Hall’s there again and Giuffre does a lot of interesting counterpoint stuff with him. The Abyssinians: Satta Massagana. They are in some mad way the reggae Beach Boys - fantastic 3 part vocal harmony and great grooves, plus lovely tunes and consciousness lyrics. Radiohead: OK Computer: I’ve kind of heard it a bit too much, but it’s still brilliant, especially from a guitarist’s perspective. And the guy’s voice is amazing. The Exit Music tune in particular is incredible. Charlie Haden: The Montréal Tapes feat Gonzalo Rubalcalba & Paul Motian: This is great: I particularly like Paul Motian’s drumming on this and Rubalcalba plays out of his skin. Charlie Haden: The Montréal Tapes feat Paul Bley & Paul Motian: This one is like the evil twin of the above album. I’m just getting into Paul Bley - I find his playing very interesting and it really stimulates my imagination. This album gets quite free at times, but as it’s a piano trio it’s not too noisy. I find free jazz really interesting sometimes. Arild Andersen, Vassilis Tsabroupulis, John Marshall: Achirana: I don’t know quite what I mean here, but this sounds very Scandinavian - quite cold and spacious, but very lyrical too. I saw this trio live once and they were ace. Tony Allen: No Accomodation For Lagos: I’m just getting into the Afrobeat stuff, and this is the best record I’ve found so far. It’s a really cool thing - people in Nigeria hearing James Brown and coming up with their own interpretation of his sound. I would love to find some more records like this one. Bud Powell: A Portrait of Thelonious: Lovely sleeve on this. I think my copy cost me about 4 quid secondhand, nice one. Anyway, Bud burnin through Monk tunes and a couple of standards. See also: The Scene Changes. Joni Mitchell: Shadows and Light: Great songs on this, and an amazing band: Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Don Alias, The Brecker Brothers...I think all Joni’s 70s stuff is great, but then I grew up with it, so I suppose that’s to be expected. De La Soul Is Dead: Their second album and there is some mad stuff on this and some really funny moments. The beats are amazing, from before hip-hop went all basic, which I personally found very boring. Blur: The Great Escape. I think this is my favourite Blur album, especially the Specials tribute tune. I really like Graham Coxon’s guitar playing in general: one of the cats of the 90s. The lyrics are cool too, trying to sum up what things were like at the time. Thelonious Monk Quartet: Monk’s Dream: The classic Monk quartet with Thelonious paired with Charlie Rouse. Some great tunes on this, in particular Bye-Ya and Monk’s Dream. See also: It’s Monk’s Time. Thelonious Monk Quartet: Thelonious in Action (Live at the 5 Spot): Another great quartet, with Johnny Griffin up front and Roy Haynes on drums. Lots of classic Monk tunes like Rhythm-a-ning and Epistrophy (which they do as a theme - there’s an idea that I’ve nicked). Harry Beckett & Pierre Dorge: Echoezz of... This is a lovely album. Harry plays beautifully, uses the flugelhorn a lot, and Pierre Dorge is a great guitar player, has an almost African feel to a lot of what he does. Really beautiful compositions and great drumming from Marilyn Manzur. Goldie: Timeless. Amazing drum programming on this, especially for the era, but also because it’s a lot more complex than a lot of drum n’ bass is nowadays in terms of rhythm, and the melodic side is a lot more clever too. Hangs together as an album really well which is very rare - a real trip. Charlie Hunter Quartet: Natty Dread. Mad idea: let’s do a jazz version of a Bob Marley album. But if you do this you have to make sure that it’s a very funky interpretation. And he does. Even freakier, Charlie Hunter plays this mad 8-string guitar that he uses to do basslines & melodies simultaneously, and bust out some organ sounds. You have to hear it to believe it. Ahmad Jamal: The Essence parts 1, 2, & 3: Great series of albums these. Ahmad Jamal’s stuff is really groovy and there are some ace basslines on here. I really love the third album with Othello Molineaux playing steel pans. Squarepusher: Hard Normal Daddy. Crazy production and beats on this, some mad electric bass playing too. I saw Squarepusher at Glastonbury and it was one of the most mental gigs I’ve ever seen: equal parts brilliant and crazy. The Verve: A Northern Soul. The one to buy if you are looking for a ROCK record to listen to. But there are some nice ballads on here as well. Michael Brecker: Time is of the Essence: I normally find Brecker a bit tasteless, but he hired an amazing rhythm section for this one: Larry Goldings, Pat Metheny and three different drummers: Elvin Jones, Bill Stewart and Jeff “Tain” Watts. A hot one I think. Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A Changin’. Best Bob stuff I’ve heard, but then I’m not really much of a connoisseur of his music as yet. Great though: Just him and his guitar, harmonica and some wicked lyrics. see also: Highway 61 Revisited Billie Holiday: Lady In Satin: A bit of a heartbreaker this one. Really nice string arrangements and a very depressed sounding Billie. A great album to break up with your girlfriend to (!) as it’s gut-wrenchingly sad. See also: Songs For Distingué Lovers. Tori Amos: Boys for Pelé: Tori Amos is one of those people who has a cult following rather than being particularly mainstream. Which is cooler - she’s a brilliant pianist. This is my favourite album of hers. Massive Attack: Blue Lines & Protection: Makes you proud to be a Bristol player when you hear this and the Portishead crew’s stuff. Some of the best music of the 90s. I bought my guitar (see photo at top of page) off the guy who did the guitar parts for Blue Lines - I’d like to think it might carry over a bit of vibe from that album into my playing over the years to come. Michael Hedges: Aerial Boundaries: I haven’t seen this on CD anywhere, but I’ve got it on tape somewhere. Just one guy on acoustic guitar in some mad tunings, recorded inside a massive empty grain silo for echo. His playing is sensational - God knows how he did it all. I would have loved to have seen him live, it’s a real pity that he died (car crash). Ralph Towner: Solo Concert. Really nice solo classical and 12-string guitar pieces, beautifully recorded too. I keep nicking this off my dad and he keeps nicking it back. Wynton Marsalis: J-Mood. Putting aside the pretentious liner notes and Wynton’s alleged political views, this is wicked. Everyone’s on one and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums swings like a bastard. See also Wynton Marsalis: Wynton Marsalis. Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man: Out of Season. Now this is fantastic. Imagine Portishead doing Astral Weeks and you’re halfway there. That reminds me I must put Astral Weeks up here. But great anyway, and nice to see Beth smiling in the photos inside! I had been worried about her, it’s great to see her look so happy. I think one of the ones of 2002 and possibly of the nows or the 2000s or whatcha wanna call it. Duke Ellington: ...And his Mother Called Him Bill: The best Ellington album I’ve heard with a poignant emotional context: it’s a tribute to Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s writing partner, who had recently died. I think you can feel that in the music too. Check out Johnny Hodges on the ballad “Blood Count” which a lot of musicians seem to play if they think they’re going to die (Getz played it a lot before he died). See also: Such Sweet Thunder. Greg Osby: Banned in New York. This is an ace record. Really hard swinging but at the same time surreal and scary. Note the pun in the title too. Hmm...Anyway, very modern, lots of new ideas. This might be where jazz is going you know. Jimmy Raney Trio: Wisteria. Nice group: Raney on guitar + Tommy Flanagan, piano and George Mraz on bass. Raney is really melodic and swinging but has quite a modern sound. I listen to this one a lot, looking for stuff I can nick. Portishead: Dummy & Portishead: Two great albums, in particular for the way they sound, the tones of the instruments and voice. Great concept, mixing up hip-hop with 60s film noir John Barry-esque stuff and a bit of jazz. And of course Beth Gibbons’ singing is amazing. Even the samples are cool. Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section. Nice mellow west coast vibe to these sessions. Apparently Pepper hadn’t played for about 6 months and was completely out of his tree when this was recorded. Still, it sounds as if he got away with it. With Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones as your rhythm section, who wouldn’t? Neil Young: Harvest Moon. Nice bit of folky Americana stuff to listen to. Great production too. One of those night-time albums. I lost my copy, duh. Ravel: Complete works for solo piano. My version is played by Anne Quéffelec. Really interesting to hear his compositional style develop from purely melodic into something quite avant garde - one of the roots of modern classical music. It’s pretty similar to how Monet’s painting developed at around the same time. You have to be an amazing pianist to play this stuff. Count Basie Orchestra: The Complete Atomic Basie. It’s the one with the photo of the Bomb going off on the cover. Powerhouse band, Eddie Lockjaw Davis is the featured soloist and plays ace, and the whole record is a lesson as to how much you can do with the blues format. Buju Banton: Voice of Jamaica. Wicked ragga album, really slick early 90s production and beats. He was accused of homophobia at the time, and rightly condemned for that, and now I think he’s grown up - I read that one of his best mates died in a shooting - and is singing about consciousness and positivity. His voice is cool too: Ruff. See also: Til Shiloh. Jeff Buckley: Grace: Wow, wicked. Unique guitar playing - he’s one of those Telecaster geezers - and singing. He has a very ghostly voice - his music sounds very pure. It reminds me of Arvo Pärt and people like that sometimes. Passengers: Original Soundtracks Vol 1: U2/Brian Eno side project where they decided to only half complete the writing for an album and go off on a trip on the tunes. Each one is supposed to be for an imaginary film. This is ace if only for the track with Pavarotti singing on it, but there’s loads of immense stuff on here. I think Edge’s solo on Your Blue Room is the best guitar solo I’ve ever heard. John Martyn: Bless The Weather: My mate Tom taped me this but I’ve lost the tape: when I get some cash together I will buy this I reckon. Some classic songs, great original guitar playing and trippy echoplex stuff. Danny Thompson’s bass playing on this is great too. Solid Air is another nice John Martyn album, with a good title. Erykah Badu: Baduizm. Class. Erykah Badu is a very modern person and this album has some killer grooves on it plus ace singing. Jim Hall: By Arrangement: Normally I find records with string sections on them a bit pompous and that the orchestration tends to swamp the rest of the music. But I think this one is really good. There’s a really nice gentle duet with a viola player, sounds very classical, and all the writing for the strings is intelligently done and used very sparingly. It’s got Jim’s trademark quiet thing going on. See also: Jim Hall Trio: Circles + virtually anything with Jim Hall on really. Dexter Gordon: Our Man in Paris: Some really nice swinging straightahead stuff, with Bud Powell & Kenny Clarke in the rhythm section. Dexter’s sound is huge on this record. See also: Go. The Police. Regatta de Blanc. No not about yachting. A really well produced record, diverse material, very nice overall sound and they all play great. Don’t try and play Andy Summers’ guitar parts though - you’ll mash your hands up. Supergrass: I Should Coco. Their first album and it’s great, really happy silly music (although there are some nice sad songs on it), but a real grower too. Just the record to cheer yourself up with if things are not going well, or if you fancy a giggle. Hank Mobley: Soul Station: Another nice Blue Note record. His sound is really nice, very well recorded and Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Art Blakey isn’t a bad rhythm section hey. D’Angelo: Brown Sugar. Really soulful 90’s R&B, a lot of depth to this record and some great vocals and lovely grooves. Someone nicked my copy: bastard. Paul Desmond: Easy Living: Jim’s in the rhythm section for this one and he plays very nice, but I think Desmond is the star: he is incredibly lyrical and melodic, everything he plays sounds as though it was composed beforehand, but it’s all spontaneous. His tone on alto is beautiful too. Somebody once called it “the sound of a dry Martini” which I thought was a bit stupid. The Black Crowes: Armorica: Cool sleeve, cool tunes, cool lyrics: 70s retro cool vibes. The Black Crowes are supposed to be ace live. Joe Henderson: Inner Urge. Nice to hear Joe with the Coltrane rhythm section. This is a hard driving album all the way through, beautiful take on Night and Day at the end - ace. See also: Live In Tokyo. Marc Johnson: The Sound of Summer Running: Nice concept on this record, lots of rootsy Americana stuff, and some great players: Johnson on bass, Joey Baron on drums, Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny on guitars, which is an interesting concept in itself. Some beautiful compositions. Guns N Roses: Appetite for Destruction: Another guitar teaching regular. It is a groovy record though - great production, great tunes and great RIFFS and SOLOS. Dana Bryant: Wishing From The Top. Nice Hip-Hop beats and wicked spoken word poetry over it - the lyrics are ace. I can’t find it anywhere at the moment. Anyone got any ideas? Nick Drake: Five Leaves Left. River Man on this is an absolute classic tune. I really like Nick Drake’s playing, it’s quite unique. Pat Metheny: Trio 99-00: I think bits of quite a few Metheny trio albums are brilliant, but my two other favourites - Trio: Live and Rejoicing both have nasty guitar synth bits on. Guitar synth isn’t really my thing, sorry. Anyway, this one features Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart (ace) and has loads of good tunes. Fantastic guitarist, mental technique and lovely tone on acoustic especially. See also: Question and Answer (with Dave Holland + Roy Haynes). Joao Gilberto: Live at Umbria Jazz. I really love this. Just Joao’s voice and his guitar playing and nothing else, and he has the audience in the palm of his hand. See also: Joao Gilberto: Joao Gilberto. The Streets: Original Pirate Material. Everyone loves this, and it’s easy to see why. The beats are basic but really good and the bloke’s a bit of a case - his lyrics are dead funny. It’s the same sort of spirit as the Supergrass record. Galliano/Portal: Two French geezers - one playing accordion, the other soprano, clarinet and bass clarinet, doing some originals, some French standards and some (Astor Piazzola) Tango tunes. They are both real virtuosos and really tear it up. The combination of instruments works really well too. Penguin Café Orchestra. Really nice childlike Balkan-esque folky/modern classical music. I don’t know much about this stuff. Mad artwork too - what the hell is going on there? This music is also quite scruffy and not too perfectionist, which is a nice change. One of those records that you keep going back to without knowing why. Lee “Scratch” Perry: Super Ape. Really good dub, nice coherent album of it too, rather than just another Scratch compilation. Disappointingly no cows mooing on this one though. Joe Pass: Virtuoso: Some fantastic solo guitar. Joe Pass has incredible technique which can be a problem, because if you put him with a rhythm section sometimes he overplays (in my opinion), but when he’s playing on his own he’s a lot more musical. For Django is supposed to be a really good album too, but I haven’t heard it. I’ll let you know when I hear it. Joe Pass is a cool bloke - he’s got a lot of attitude. Jane’s Addiction: Ritual De Lo Habitual. If Nirvana hadn’t blown up at this time, I think Jane’s Addiction would have had massive exposure because this is a brilliant rock album, with amazing guitar playing from Dave Navarro, but everyone on it plays ace. Another one of those albums that taught me to play by copying all the guitar and bass parts. Really diverse styles in play here too - from the usual Californian funk rock to Led Zep-esque stuff and some crazy Middle-Eastern sounding bits as well as the odd love song - awww. See also: Nothing’s Shocking, which might well be album of the 80s. Manu Chao: Clandestino: Everyone on “the continent” knows about this guy, but sadly he’s not that popular here yet, which is a shame because this record is groovy, and sung in three different languages. Nice Latin/European (in a good way) vibe. Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges: Clube Da Esquina: Some more Brazilian craziness. I think what happened here was that these guys had grown up with the previous bossa generation of Joao Gilberto etc and crossed that sort of stuff with the really psychedelic Beatles’ late 60’s ideas. It’s a lovely record anyway. Milton’s voice has a really unique character to it. REM: Automatic for the People. Tedious chart hit and guitar teaching stalwart aside, this is one of the best acoustic based albums. Like all the great records it’s got a very special vibe to it. I also remember that my cassette copy had a transparent lemon yellow tape which is well cool. Mos Def: Black on Both Sides. Some real consciousness hip-hop, very very musical and melodic, but wicked lyrics too. A classic in any genre, if that doesn’t sound too pompous. “It does a bit actually Ben”. Oh - sorry. See also: Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Introducing Ruben Gonzalez: “Well it’s amazing to be making your début album at the age of 87 etc etc” said all the straights when the Buena Vista stuff got big, but this is the best record that the Cuban crew have made so far. Ruben’s piano playing is beautiful, especially on the ballads. Favourite books: The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD: Indispensable. If I want to hear (for example) some Kenny Garrett stuff, I can look him up in here, find a 4 star album and get it, or see what records he’s on as a sideman, rather than chancing my arm on stuff without any idea of what I’m buying. My only criticism is that the editors can be a little biased towards free jazz, which isn’t a style I enjoy massively, so check the description of an album before you buy if free isn’t your er bag. Otherwise though, great. I’ve found some brilliant records through this book. Broadens the mind. Rough Guides to: World Music (Vols 1 & 2), Jazz, Reggae (other Rough Guides subject to investigation soon). Really good if you’re not too sure about a particular genre and you want to find out which are the best albums, plus a bit of the history of a particular style or scene. How My Heart Sings: Peter Pettinger: The best Bill Evans’ biog I’ve seen - well worth a read: I don’t think many people really understand quite the depth of Bill Evans’ artistry or know about his many personal problems, but after you’ve read this you hear a lot of new things in his playing. Also the book is not too sensationalist and focuses primarily on his music rather than too many of the gory details of his private life. Bird Lives! Ross Russell. Ah the high life and hard times of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. Very sad in places, brilliantly written and often really funny. This is an ace read, especially the introduction. Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece: Ashley Kahn. + A Love Supreme: The Making of John Coltrane’s Classic Album: Ashley Kahn. Well A.K. should be able to pay the milk bill for a few months after writing these. Beautifully put together and really well written. I wonder what album he’s going to do next? I suggest “Heavy Weather”. Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King: Lloyd Bradley. Great read - ties the history of Jamaica since independence in really neatly with the development of the music. I think they made a tv series based on this book. Monet: Carla Rahman. Cool, and not too expensive as it’s not a massive picture book, just a nice concise biog although with some nice plates in it as well. Jim Hall: Exploring Jazz Guitar: Fantastic - really opened my mind up about music and life in general. Jim Hall is my role model as a guitarist. Not only for the way he plays, which I would not like to emulate exactly, but for his obvious depth of knowledge about music and his way of looking at the instrument. Mark Levine: The Jazz Theory Book: This books lays out all the aspects of jazz harmony and how they work, some common chord structures and how to navigate them, and Levine also refers the reader to albums which relate to whatever the subject in question happens to be. Not bad - lots to digest. John Le Carré: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Probably my favourite novel. Great plot, very subtle humour in the writing, and it evokes a lot of memories for me, don’t know why. Camus: The First Man: The closest thing he did to his autobiography. It’s mostly about his childhood growing up in Algeria and is a lot more personal and emotional than most of his novels. It contains some lovely imagery of life in the country at that time, as well as the later struggles for independence. Ian Carr: Miles Davis. The benchmark jazz biography really. Miles was such an interesting person with so many contradictions to his personality, that Carr has a lot to work with. Guitar Player Magazine: Secrets From The Masters: Fascinating collection of interviews with guitarists from right across the spectrum of music, and full of great ideas. Much more inspiring than practising your scales for three hours every night. Philip French: Malle on Malle: Biography via interview of the film director. I first heard of him because he made L’ascenseur pour l’échafaud (lift to the scaffold) which featured Miles on the soundtrack. But I’ve seen quite a few of his films since and they’re very good, particularly Lacombe, Lucien which covers the thorny issue of collaboration during WWII. This book is really interesting: gives you an insight into film making - French cinema can be pretty intellectual too, you can watch it on loads of levels - and the strategies he uses to get the actors to perform in a certain way. You can try it on your rhythm section, haha. Benworld: links: Hope these are of interest, or funny, or useful....Now in new improved categorised form! (ish) Send me any links that might be appropriate. |
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