Holiday Music Favorites III (2009)

This is another all-new arrangement, Hark the Herald Angels Sing.  The arrangement is — as usual nowadays — for guitar, bass and drums. On this recording the guitar is again the 1949 L-4C about which I recently posted on the blog.

Here are the links to listen:

Stream

MP3

A Cool New Pickup

I have this L4-C that I bought in September, 2004. It’s very cool, and has a clean, well articulated tone that is yet a little darker than my Orchid archtop, though not as dark as my L4-CES. 1949 was the first year for the cutaway L-4. The standard construction for an L-4 (even today) is a carved spruce top, laminated maple back and sides, and a one-piece mahogany neck. This one seems to have mahogany sides, which is interesting.

Pro Tools

I have finally gotten on the mainstream digital music production bandwagon. I am in the process of converting my home recording studio to Digidesign’s market-leading Pro Tools.

My First Music Videos

The first three are tracks from my album, “Just the Three of Us”, which features all trio performances.  I have previously posted all of the tracks as audio here on the blog.

What Inspires You to Play?

A day or two ago, this question was posted on a listserve to which I subscribe. My response was so lengthy it reminded me of a blog post. So here it is:

A New Guitar — Guild Starfire III-90

The Guild Guitar Company is a USA-based guitar manufacturer founded in 1952. The first Guild workshop was located in New York City, but production was later moved to Westerly, Rhode Island. All Guild production was moved to a factory in Corona, California after Guild was purchased by the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation in 1995. In 2004, FMIC acquired the assets of Washington-based Tacoma Guitar Company and all American Guild acoustic production has since been moved to Tacoma, Washington, while production of Guild electric guitars was discontinued.

Holiday Music Favorites (2008)

Every year I try to make at least one new arrangement of a holiday/Christmas song. This year the first new arrangement is of “In the Bleak Midwinter”, which has music by British composer Gustav Holst of “The Planets” fame. This year is the first time I became aware of this hymn, so it seemed an appropriate choice.

The style is based on my “Vintage Instrumentals” approach — a guitar, bass drums trio with a rockabilly guitar sound and something of a reggae feel.

Click to stream “In the Bleak Midwinter”

Click for MP3 of “In the Bleak Midwinter”

The second arrangement is a flat-out rockabilly version of “Angels We Have Heard on High”. Instrumentation is also guitar, bass drums trio.

Click to stream “Angels We Have Heard on High”

Click for MP3 of “Angels We Have Heard on High”

Smooth Jazz Origins: George Benson’s Breezin’

In prior posts I have tangentially noted my increasing dislike of recent Smooth Jazz releases. They have seemed ever more mechanical, formulaic, and lacking in musical depth. This has been frustrating, as the genre has been one that I work in myself, and I have listened with much pleasure to many different artists that have helped define the genre over the past thirty years or so.

I therefore decided to revisit some of the albums in my vinyl collection and see if I still found them to be as compelling now as I did in the past. While this certainly cannot be an objective review – the music is in most cases far too ingrained in my long term memory – I still think this will be a worthwhile listening project.

One More Vintage Instrumental

“Wonderful Land”

This tune was a hit for Hank Marvin and the Shadows in 1962. It was written by Jerry Lordan, who also wrote “Apache” and “Atlantis” for the Shadows. More about the Shadows in my post here.

Much like the other two, this is a very evocative tune. My arrangement follows the same approach as all the others in the Vintage Instrumentals series — a guitar, bass, drums trio with no overdubs.

• stream
• mp3

New Recording with a New Guitar

I haven’t done any recording for awhile, having recently wrapped up my revised fusion project and released a CD on CD Baby with those tracks.

CD Cover

Revisiting Some Jazz Fusion Tunes – Part II

I have revised and recorded three more of these numbers:

C-Note	Stream	MP3
I Need to Know	Stream	MP3
Gladstone Cog	Stream	MP3

To make things a bit easier for those who might want access to more of this material, my Vintage Instrumentals or Christmas arrangements, I have added a link that connects to everything. Under “Links” click on “Free Music”.

The Zombies – addendum

Well, I decided to make an arrangement of “She’s Not There” as well:

She’s Not There

Stream

Mp3

The Zombies

The British invasion of the early 1960’s saw an incredible number of English musical artists attain considerable popularity in the United States. The list is huge – the following British artists all had a song make it to number one between 1964 and 1966: The Beatles, The Animals, Peter and Gordon, Cilla Black, The Dave Clark Five, Petula Clark, Donovan, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits, The Kinks, Manfred Mann, The New Vaudeville Band, The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, The Who, and The Yardbirds.

There were also an even larger number who didn’t quite make it to number one, but still enjoyed great success, like Gerry & the Pacemakers, The Searchers, Georgie Fame, the Hollies, Freddie &the Dreamers, Dusty Springfield, Marianne Faithful, Chad &Jeremy and the Tremeloes.

Included in the latter group are the Zombies. Led by Rod Argent on piano and Colin Blunstone on vocals, the band scored US hits in the mid- and late-1960s with “She’s Not There”, “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season.” Like the Yardbirds, the Zombies material was more progressive and sophisticated than many of their peers. The Zombies songs were characterized by interesting rhythmic interplay and jazzy harmonies.

Sally’s Midnight Blues

I have always loved the rhythm and blues recordings from the Stax and Atlantic labels, featuring artists like Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding, etc. These classic tracks featured outstanding, soulful vocalists backed up by the best session players in the business – like Booker T. and the MGs, and the Muscle Shoals house band. One of the many admirable things about this music is the color-blind nature of the musicians involved. Booker T. and MGs had two black and two white members.

Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass

Any examination of 1960’s instrumental popular music has to include a review of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. The only recording artists who outsold them in the 1960s were Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles. Alpert was born March 31, 1935. He is also famous for being a recording industry executive – he is the “A” of A&M Records (a recording label he and business partner Jerry Moss founded and eventually sold). Alpert’s musical accomplishments include four top ten hits, thirty-six hot-100 singles, twenty-eight albums on the Billboard charts, eight Grammy Awards, fourteen Platinum albums and fifteen Gold albums.