Tag: guitar

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Two gigs this week (watched) and two days at LGS.

LGS being the London Guitar Show. I was there Friday to meet up with the nice peoples at Bass Guitar Magazine to chat about me writing a column for them, which I now need to sketch out a plan for, and then get writing. Caught up with a few other friends. Went back Saturday to see more friends, and was hoping to check out the Celinder basses which are amazing (Lowell brought one to my workshop in Cupertino , California back in January, and I wanted to see more), but the noise was so loud it was pointless.

However through the din I did get to listen to Laurence Cottle, jamming with guitarist Paul Stacey, and despite the noise and Paul having to play through a bass amp, they made a glorious noise. Fab musicians. Caught up with more friends. It wasn’t a bad show for bass stuff – the Bass Centre had a stand with all manner of bargains on it, EBS, GB Guitars, MarkBass, Celinder, the re-born Trace Elliot, Ashdown, Peavey and a few others were there with plenty of bass toys. It’d be unfair to compare it to NAMM as a) it’s open to the public, and all about selling stuff not launching new products and getting dealers and b) it’s in England.

The two gigs were Nitin Sawhney on Wednesday, and The Bays on Friday.

Nitin’s gig was a bit of a disappointment – the tunes he did with the Asian singers, Nina Bhardwaj and some guy whose name I can’t find online, were amazing. Great vocalists. The other stuff came over like a load of Urban Species mid 90s mellow hip-hop grooves with some OK tunes. Nothing special. Maybe it’s just that I had high expectations. It was enjoyable, just not the mind blowing experience I’d expected. Still, Orphy Robinson came with me, and an evening out with Orphy was enough to make it all worthwhile (and I didn’t pay for the ticket – ’twas a present from Dweez, who couldn’t go due to work commitments – thanks John!)

The other gig.. actually, there were two other gigs, as I went to see Roger Beaujolais play with his sextet in the Foyer of the Festival Hall before going to see The Bays in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Roger’s band were very fine – London really does have some fantastic jazz players!

The idea behind The Bays is that they play completely improvised club-tastic dance grooves. The feel can change from night to night – sometimes its more house-y, sometimes more Drum ‘n’ Bass-ish. Friday night sounded like Gong remixed by Daft Punk. Top notch. The addition of a third keyboard player and a guy playing synth stuff on guitar was fine, but hardly necessary, as they make enough noise as a quartet. Still, the gig was fab, and I’d recommend the Bays to anyone who can cope with the volume (it was loud!).

Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘With These Hands’ (Eric’s had to cancel a few gigs again recently due to being ill, so if you’ve been playing to buy this fantastic record, now would probably be a good time! Head over to Eric’s site to have a listen – he’s one of the finest solo acoustic guitarists I’ve heard, one of the nicest people I know, and an indie artist that you really ought to support by buying his marvellous CDs!)

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It's all in the artwork…

As y’all know, I’m a sucker for good CD packaging. if a CD looks like crap, I’m very unlikely to buy it even if the music is great (despite him being one of my favourite guitarists, I own very few Jim Hall albums cos they all look so dreadful!)

So it’s doubly marvellous that ‘Beware Of The Dog’ by the Works, which I’ve been raving about here recently, has such great artwork:

Granted, it’s still in a jewell case, but the photography and layout are just superb. You really do need to get it. Head over to their website and get a copy (I should be sorting out stocking it here soon).

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another nice review… but what's a ronin??

This mag –

is Bass Guitar magazine (not to be confused with Bass Guitar Magazine, which is British) – it’s a good mag, if a little focussed on metal for my own reading tastes.

Anyway, they reviewed Grace And Gratitude in their new issue. It’s a small but friendly review, but I’ve no real idea what a ronin is – obviously it’s meant to be slighty cryptic, give the italics in the review, but I’m not sure how it applies to what I do…

(thanks to Fenderbird from the dudepit for sending me the scan!)

Here’s one explanation of Ronin, from This site –
“The samurai is an elite warrior in service of a lord and bound by codes of obedience and bushido. He is expected to be absolutely loyal to his master, no matter what the personal consequences of his duty are. The ronin is a masterless samurai who have lost their status due to their own misdeeds or the untimely death of their lord. Ronin became farmers, monks, soldiers of fortune or even bandits, beggars, and assassins. Many committed ritual suicide.”

…not sure I like that!! Farmer? Bandit?? SUICIDE??????

Someone help me out here…

Soundtrack – Ron Miles, ‘Heaven’.

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Finally, Michael Manring's CD has arrived…

It’s was one of those questions that had taken on an almost Monty Python-esque level of absurdity; ‘when’s Michael Manring‘s album coming out?’ – for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been asked this a few times a week, sometimes a few times a day! I started off telling people whatever spurious deadline Michael had told me that week – ‘well, we just need to blah blah blah and it’ll be ready in about three weeks’ etc. etc. It got more and more laughable as Michael missed more deadlines than end-times loonies predicting the end of the world.

So I gave up answering, other than to say ‘your guess is as good as mine, why not email him?’. Hopefully his inbox wasn’t flooded with requests that he was no better placed to answer that I was…

Anyway, his launch gig was last week, and my copy of the CD, ‘Soliloquy’, arrived this morning. My 10 o’clock lesson was cancelled due to illness, which has given me time for a first listen.

OK, these are first impressions, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I’ve heard it 20 times (some time tomorrow afternoon, I suspect!), but this really is the album that Michael’s been needing to make for a long time, the one that all of us have been waiting for.

It’s all solo, no overdubs, bass guitar pieces. He uses a whole range of basses, and an even wider range of techniques and sounds, but it’s all live all him (we like the sound of that – actually that reminds me of Michael mention at a gig once that he was going to release a live version of Selene, to which I answered, ‘we like live’, and he came back ‘you like live!’ – this was not long after And Nothing But The Bass had come out)

Anyway, all the live faves are here – Selene, Helios, Greetings Earthlings, Excuse Me, Mr Manring, Makes Perfect Sense To Me etc. and a load of other previously unheard magic.

I’m sure Michael will be unhappy with it in some way – he’s got that kind of analytical approach to these things where there’s an ideal in his head that he’s constantly chasing, refining and I imagine never quite gets to. It’s what makes his gigs so exhilerating. The rest of us will hear this as his best album to date, by quite some margin, and be inspired and scared by what’s possible on solo bass.

It also comes with a beautifully produced 20-odd page book in PDF format (if you work in an office with a colour laser printer, you’re really in luck!) with tonnes of great background info.

I’ve got some practice to do – it’s inspiring ideas for me already.

It will, I’m sure be available in my webshop soon (though, as with most things Manring-esque, there’s no knowing when!), but for now, you can order it from Michael direct – best to email him via his website, if the details still aren’t there (they weren’t a few days ago – how does this guy make a living?????)

Soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’.

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Sound and Vision

Good lord, I’d forgotten just how closely music is linked to memory.

Having read a thread on a forum saying that it’s Robert Smith from The Cure’s birthday, I thought I’d put on a Cure CD, so out comes Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. A fabulous album.

And all of a sudden I’m transported back to Berwick On Tweed, walking down through Hiveacres (Ramsey Street-esque estate where we lived), with the opening track, The Kiss, blaring out of my ever-present cassette player with the one speaker that didn’t work. Me dressed in grandad coat, or denim jacket with the cover from The Cure In Orange painted on the back, All About Eve shirt, black jeans and suede pixie boots. On my way to some goth get together or other, smiling far more than I should have as a goth. Wearing big maroon framed Christopher Biggins glasses that totally ruined the look.

It’s all there, I can even smell the grass and sheep in the field at the bottom of the road that I had to walk past if I was taking the short-cut across the trading estate into town – the trading estate that I once wandered around for three hours stoned trying to find my way into town (the whole journey took 40 mins even walking slow) – down past Jus-Roll )I can now smell the pastry), and on into town. I can hear the wind, and the air conditioning units on the top of the factories on the trading estate, and then the quiet. You forget what ‘quiet’ sounds like living in London. Nowhere outside is quiet, there’s always traffic and noise. Berwick after 10pm was quiet, unless someone you’d never met stopped for a chat on their way home from the pub.

Track two – Catch – I’d be dancing to this down the street, or singing it to myself if I’d seen someone in the pub that I fancied. Now I can hear the sea – another regular walk was along the front at Spittal, between Berwick town centre and Giles or Martin’s house.

Amazing. Maybe I need to dig out more music I listened to back then… Throwing Muses, Napalm Death, Anthrax, Metallica, The Pixes… actually, I’ve probably listened to the Pixies too often for that to work… maybe the Peel sessions would do the trick. Ah much memory jogging to be had!

Soundtrack – The Cure, ‘Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’; Antonio Carlos Jobim, ‘Love Strings And Jobim’; Matthew Garrison, ‘Live’; Scottish Guitar Quartet, ‘Landmarks’; KT Tunstall, ‘Eye To The Telescope’ (this arrived this morning – fabulous album!)

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New Pope

So Joseph Ratzinger has been chosen as the new Pope – he was the favourite with the bookies anyway, so it’s not really a surprise, but is slightly disappointing for anyone hoping that the new pope might move forward dialogue within the Catholic Church on Contraception as it relates to the AIDS crisis in Africa, or the ordination of Women or the host of other theological areas of contention that all Christian denominations seem to be wrestling with at the moment.

It was certainly never on the cards that the Conclave were going to elect some out and out liberal as Pope, and it’s just as well – I think such a move would have been divisive in the extreme, but Ratzinger’s record is even more conservative than his predecesor. I just hope he proves me wrong and becomes a progressive voice within the church and the wider world.

The biggest disappointment however is that he missed the chance to follow up Pope John Paul by calling himself Pope George Ringo. Benedict is such a predictable Pope-esque name.

Soundtrack – Don Ross, ‘Passion Session’ (one of the most amazing solo acoustic guitar records ever made)

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Hooked on the Marathon

I still remember the first London Marathon. At least, I remember the fuss around it – I don’t remember much about the actual race, I just remember getting up early to watch it on TV when I was about 8 years old, living in Wimbledon. Can’t remember what I thought at the time, probably was thinking of running it one day.

Still haven’t ever run it. Since that day, I’ve kind of lost interest in it. Each year, I listen to a bit of the radio broadcast in the car on the way to church, but ’til yesterday had never been to see any of it.

So when after church yesterday morning, a few people were heading down to cheer on Natasha who was running, it seemed like a fun thing to do.

The atmosphere was amazing – we were watching (we being me and Lizzie) from by Embankment tube, so the runners had already done twenty-odd miles by then and were in varying degrees of a state of total disarray. By this point, I’m sure the people who were running in costume were planning to kill whoever the bastard was who suggested dressing as Hong Kong Phoey, or a pirate, or a rhino, or a caveman, or a pasty or whatever other weirdness people were dressed as. some of the runners were in some quite major discomfort.. well, discomfort that appeared to have crossed into the ‘excruciating pain’ category. But most were soldiering on determinedly, walking a bit, running when they got a cheer or saw their mates.

We almost missed Natasha coming by, due to a guy a few runners in front of her having the worst case of joggers nipple we’d ever seen – two large blood-stains on the front of his shirt… makes me wince just thinking of it. Lizzie’s bit of conversation there went something like ‘look at that bloke’s nipples! (half second pause) Natasha!! WOOOO HOOOOO!!!!’ ETC. much whooping and cheering ensued, from us and from harry, karen and juliet who were on the other side of the road.

The end of the race for Natasha was fab – lots of friends there congratulating her, a picnic in St James’ park, and a medal that none of the rest of us had. Makes it all worth while. And she raised a lot of money for MIND.

It definitely made me think about possibly doing it next year. I would have to start trying to get in some sort of shape now, given that I’m a bit of a sedentary slob most of the time (hey, I don’t even stand up for gigs!)

So I’ll give it some thought, and try not to think about Paula Radcliffe’s ‘unplanned pit-stop’. That’s dedication to your sport!

Soundtrack – Scottish Guitar Quartet, ‘Landmarks’ (beautiful album – more about this later when I’ve heard it a few more times); Andrew Cronshaw, ‘Ochre’ (my most listened to album of the last few weeks – full review on the way)

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Beware Of The Dog

No, we haven’t just got a Dog (the fairly aged felines are particularly glad about that) – it’s the title of the new album from The Works, who used to be known as Woodworks, and are the brainchild of keyboard/guitar genius, Patrick Wood. Pat and I have played together a fair bit – it was fun getting him into my method of ‘spontaneous composition’ and we ended up with some fab stuff recorded, that still needs to be mixed and edited properly.

Anyway, this is his quartet, with Mark Lockheart on sax, Neville Malcom on bass and Nic France on drums – all major players on the London jazz scene – and it is, almost without doubt, the best album I’ve heard come out of that scene for ages. Actually, it’s on a par with Theo’s last couple of albums – which are equally amazing.

The compositions are quite Zawinul/Shorter-ish in places, but with a really strong singer/songwriter sensibility to them, which obviously connects well with me. It’s beautifully recorded, perfectly crafted, and has all four players playing right at the top of their game.

If anyone ever suggests that BritJazz is somehow inferior to US jazz, this is the album to play them to prove them wrong. If Patrick was from New York, this’d be selling tens of thousands of copies.

It’s fab, and you really need to get it. I’m going to talk to Pat about stocking it in my online shop.

Talking of which, I’ll have John Lester’s CD up there before too long.

Soundtrack – The Works, ‘Beware Of The Dog’.

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Calling all Brit musicians

OK, so it could just be another phoney exercise in pretending to talk to the people concerned before ploughing ahead with whatever crap policy they came up with in the first place, but the government are at least pretending to want to hear from people in the music industry about how to improve things for live musicians in Britain.

Here’s the page about it on the culture secretary’s page – all looks good. The email address to contact them is LiveMusicForum@culture.gsi.gov.uk – so let them know your thoughts.

For my part, I’ll be emailing about classifications of music and venue – the licencing laws for venues that require them to have thousands of pounds worth of restructuring work for safety reasons seem ludicrous when the act is a solo acoustic guitarist, or bassist, or a piano/sax duo or whatever – in fact, the audience is likely to be far more static and orderly for that kind of event than they would in an ordinary pub! Lumping together all music as a job lot for licencing is nuts – I think there’s still some sort of ‘two in a bar’ ruling that means you can have solo acts and duos, but I think the ruling changed… need to look that one up. Anyone with any insight, feel free to post over in the forum.

Soundtrack – Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton, ‘Live’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

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Composition famine…

I’ve not written any new music for quite a while. It’s not a problem – most areas of music tend to happen in terms of flurries of activity followed by plateaus, whether it be technique, concepts, composition or whatever. And right now, I’m working on arrangements of other people’s tunes – something I’ve done very little of as a solo player. I used to do a short version of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ to finish gigs, and these days do ‘People Get Ready’, and now have just worked out a lovely solo arrangement of ‘What A Wonderful World’. I’ve also been working on a version of This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody), the Talking Heads track, which sounds great, but is really hard to play!! I need to make sure it’s well hammered into my skull before I attmept it live. It involves some pretty tricky looping (well, tricky for me…)

So I’m having fun with other people’s tunes (and maybe I’ll finally get round to having a go at ‘The Fish’ – something I’ve had a number of people nagging me to do for a while (yes, you, Catherine Street Team and California Bob!)

And as an off-shoot, I’ve got the beginnings of a new tune. It might end up as a solo piece, or maybe in one of the collaborations. This Monday and I met up with a fantastic drummer called Andrew Booker. Andrew has his own duo/trio (recorded thus far as a duo, now have a guitarist as well) called , whose CD is really cool (bass and drums duo, with Andrew singing like a less-heliumed John Anderson).

Anyway, he plays a tiny electronic kit, and adjusts really well to the slight imperfections of my loops, so we’ll hopefully be launching said trio on the listening public before too long – playing the tracks from Open Spaces with a drummer certainly took them into a very different space…

So, despite the famine, much creative noodling is taking place, and many new avenues are opening up…

Soundtrack – , ‘Ghost Town’; , ‘Slow Life’; , ‘Live’; , ‘Stones’; , ‘Polarised’.

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