It’s been busy here at Casa de RoyMusicUSA so this will be a quickie (“that’s what she said”). Below is a video of the Berry Oakleys’s isolated bass track to the Allman Brother’s Ramblin’ Man off their 1973 album Brothers And Sisters. The Allman Brothers were one of my favorite bands and were a major influence on both my guitar and bass playing. I don’t know how they are able to isolate the bass and drums so well but I wish I had this when I was leaning to play Ramblin’ Man in cover bands. I have previously stated my high regard for Berry Oakley, who I feel is one of the great unsung bassists of rock so here is an opportunity for you to appreciate his great melodic bass playing without the distraction of those annoying guitarist, vocalists, etc.
The Allman Brothers Band – Ramblin’ Man (Isolated Rhythm Section)
It is a very sad day. Yesterday my country elected a hateful bully as it’s president. To think that so many of my fellow Americans could not see through his smoke and mirrors is an embarrassment. When I contemplate the damage that he’s has already done and the damage that he can potentiality do, it fills me with dread. A blues that goes down to the bone.
I was originally planning to write this post about Robert Johnson, the Mississippi delta blues musician but I have the blues so bad that it almost hurts. All I can do to listen to Robert Johnson sing the blues and sigh. Like him, we have sold our soul to the devil.
Continuing my series on cool blues guitar instructional videos, I want to focus on one of my favorite guitar techniques: slide guitar and in particular, slide guitar played in standard tuning.
My older brother went to high school in the East Village in the early seventies and would often buy records at a used record store by St. Marks Place called Free Being. He brought home records by people he read about in Rolling Stone magazine (when it actually tried to curate good music). I was lucky to be exposed to records by classic bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf as well more contemporary artists such as Ry Cooder and Little Feat so I was no stranger to the sound of slide guitar. The big epiphany was hearing the classic Allman Brothers record Live At The Fillmore East. So when I started to get serious about playing guitar, I also started playing slide as well.
A major turning point was when the guitarist Arlen Roth put out one of the first instructional books on slide guitar. I picked up a lot of things about playing slide from that book but there was a major problem. The majority of it (and most of the subsequent slide guitar instructional material that I’ve seen since) was centered on playing in what is known as open tuning. A guitar in open tuning is configured to sound a chord when all the strings are played open. A guitar in open E tuning will play an E major chord when strummed open. This tuning helps facilitate the playing of chords with a slide by just positioning the slide across the strings over a given fret. It’s more forgiving of string damping since all the notes will be part of the chord.
The downside is that it means learning a new system to navigate the fretboard. It also meant having to retune the guitar for slide playing or bringing an extra guitar for slide. To me, these issues were such a pain in the ass that I just tried to play slide in standard tuning. It seems that I wasn’t alone. Having high profile slide guitar players like Warren Haynes and Allen Hinds play in standard tuning has resulted in slide guitar instructional material that actually addresses the player who wants to play slide in standard tuning.
The first video is by studio ace Allen Hinds who offers a pretty comprehensive run through of the mechanics of slide guitar playing in standard tuning. He talks about having exact intonation with the left hand and the importance of right hand damping. He also touches on the use of unorthodox techniques like slant left hand positions and using chord fragments for cool ambient playing.
Allen Hinds Slide Guitar Lesson – Playing Slide in Standard Tuning
The rest of the videos are from website I discussed in my last post, Leaning nGuitar Now and are aimed for the intermediate/advanced player. The first of the three videos demonstrates a cool slide riff with a George Thorogood vibe to it.
Learning Guitar Now – Standard Tuning Slide Guitar Lesson
The next video is along the lines of what Warren Haynes would play during Statesboro Blues. It centers on, in what is known as the CAGED fretboard system, as the G position. It lick has a major key feel, as opposed to the minor key feel typical of most blues. The major key feel has always been one of the features that differentiated Duane Allman influenced players from other slide guitarists. The G position allows the player to take advantage of the major chord that lies across the B, G and D strings (2nd, 3rd and 4th strings respectively). While based on the major chord, the line pivots between the chord’s minor and major 3rds and links the G position and E positions of the neck where it touches on the sixth string root minor blues pattern.
Learning Guitar Now – Standard Tuning Slide Warren Haynes Lesson
The third video from Learning Guitar Now give us a lick over the Allman Brother’s tune One Way Out. Like the previous video, the lick is based on the major triad that sits on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings.
Learning Guitar Now – One Way Out Slide Guitar Solo in Standard Tuning
Leaning Guitar Now (http://www.learningguitarnow.com/) offers a lot of excellent videos. Beside the stuff on standard tuning slide, there are videos on playing slide in open E and open G tuning as well as straight blues playing. Well worth checking out.
Continuing my little mini series on instructional blues guitar videos, I want to call to your attention a cool website called Learning Guitar Now w/ John W. Tuggle (http://www.learningguitarnow.com/). The site has dozens of free instructional videos on blues guitar. The video quality is excellent with clear shots of the fretboard and the picking hand. Like the videos shown in the previous posts from Texas Blues Alley (http://texasbluesalley.com/), the approach is focused of leaning blues licks and touches on theory peripherally. Tuggle is pretty thorough in walking you through the lines, bringing up playing details like pre-bends, slides and quarter tone bends. They are not for the absolute beginner but for the intermediate and above level guitarist, they provide a great resource for increasing your blues vocabulary.
The videos below are great examples of what you can learn. The Clapton video touches on linking the different positions on the neck. The Warren Haynes shows a cool slow blues lick in a neck position that is usually not dealt with in most blues instructional material. The Duane Allman video show one of my favorite Duane licks from his solo on Stormy Monday from the classic Live At The Fillmore East record. These videos are just the tip of the iceberg to a cache of cool stuff to learn. Check them out at http://www.learningguitarnow.com/free-guitar-lessons/.
With September 18th marking the 46th anniversary of his accidental and tragic death, it seems like a a good time to mention Jimi Hendrix. In addition Legacy Recordings has announced the release of the complete first set ever played by Hendrix’ Band of Gypsies as Machine Gun: The Fillmore East First Show 12/31/69.
On New Year’s Eve 1969, Jimi Hendrix and his Band Of Gypsys made their debut at The Fillmore East in New York City, performing an early and late show. The subsequent January 1, 1970 shows at the Fillmore East make up the classic Band Of Gypsys LP.
The Band of Gypsys performance is often considered one of the finest electric guitar performances in the history of recorded music. The material is mostly based on very loose structures that serve as launching pads for Hendrix’s improvisations with the undisputed high point being Machine Gun. Here Hendrix draws on his blues roots but also brings in tonal effect that push the blues into places it’s never been before. It was Hendrix playing delta blues but the delta is on Mars.
This brings us to the instructional videos below. My last post talked about the free blues guitar instructional videos put out by Texas Blues Alley (http://texasbluesalley.com/). Here is a four part series talking about playing over a open E string drone (or vamp as they refer to it) ala Hendrix’ Machine Gun. These videos are clear HD quality that really give you a good view of what he’s doing. He also brings up the importance of timing. So many guitar players focus on starting their lines but not on when to end them. There is also attention paid to a essential but often under served aspect of blues guitar playing: the way we articulate our lines such as right hand rakes, vibrato, different bend, etc. And you can also get to learn a bunch of cool blues licks.
Confession time. I don’t think I’m a particularly good straight blues guitarist. I’m o.k. but my style is more Grant Green than B.B. King. But I love B.B. and all the other Kings. I grew up listening and learning from Clapton and Allman. I would love to be a great blues guitarist. So I did what all the kids are doing these days. I went looking for You Tube videos.
Side Bar: I know that those of you out there with a “old school” approach are thinking “Videos! You should be learning licks off the record!”. And you should. If nothing else, it develops your ear and that is probably the single most important skill for a musician. But to deny the benefits that good instructional videos provide to the aspiring musician who wants to improve would be foolish (IMO) and videos are the de facto platform of music education for most people today. The problem is that there are so many bad instructional websites and videos. One of the things I try to do with this blog is bring attention to what I feel are superior examples of music instruction on the internet.
Texas Blues Alley is a web site I found that features a ton of interesting videos to learn from. The first video below pretty much outlines his approach: learn licks, not scales. This is the opposite approach from the way I learned music but I see now the value of it, particularly with something like blues guitar. I had felt that learning licks would ultimately stifle my own “voice”. I thought, “better to learn the system behind the licks rather than the licks themselves”. But I realize now that this part of the learning process is essential in developing a musical vocabulary. That musical vocabulary will provide the foundation for your musical voice as it morphs into something of your own over time. Knowing the system behind the licks can provide you with the tools to expand that vocabulary but having that foundation is key. Also, the music was initially passed down from one generation to the next via the “learning licks” approach. To break down a rich musical tradition to simply a series of theoretical constructs robs it of it’s character.
Texas Blues Alley – 10 Rules For Blues Soloing
Below are three videos touching on the three Kings (B.B., Albert and Freddie). As he says out front, besides being free lessons, they are also commercials for his paid lessons but there is a wealth of good stuff that you can use to jump start your blues playing.
I was watching a bit of the Olympics and happened upon the medal ceremonies for some event or another. As I watched, I thought about the athletes who never get a gold medal despite all the blood, sweat and tears they put into their efforts to achieve some sort of greatness. It was a very small leap to then think about all the musicians in the world whose lives take a similar path. Then there are those who dream of achieving such greatness but who never get beyond the dream. In a world where winning is everything and more often than not, the only thing, Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” deals with the losers, the people who don’t have and never will have a “gold medal” moment in their lives. It about those who dream but never do.
Among music nerds who value the Apollonian instead of the Dionysian, the group Steely Dan has always been the bees’ knees and on their sixth studio album, Aja, they created their most fully-realized collection of songs. By this time Steely Dan had transformed from a recording and touring band into the songwriting partnership of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Utilizing a ever changing slew of top session players, they had become obsessive sonic perfectionists, scrutinizing every overdub until every note was perfectly in place. While such a pursuit of perfection could lead to a cold stiff performance, that is not the case here. As it’s noted in the video clip below, the goal of the musicians was to play “past the perfection point until it became natural”.
In an album of amazing songs, I always had a particular soft spot for “Deacon Blues“. The protagonist dreams of leaving his suburban life for the fantasy of the bohemian life of a jazz musician. He doesn’t see himself as one of “winners in the world”. Instead he aspires to (in the words of Walter Becker) “one of those mythic forms of loserdom “, one deserving of a nickname as grandiose as one given to a college football team. For all his dreams, you are left doubting that he will ever “cross that fine line” but you also get the feeling that his creators, Fagen and Becker, are rooting for him.
Below are two fascinating videos about the song. The first one is from a great series of video essays called Nerdwriter . The video discusses elements that make the song (and Steely Dan’s music in general) so distinctive, from the recording methods that provide such sonic detail to every instrument, to their use of register and voicings in their horn arrangements, to their use of something they call the “mu major chord” (for the real serious music geeks out there, check out http://www.hakwright.co.uk/steelydan/mu-major.html for more info on the mu major chord).
NerdWriter – How Steely Dan Composes A Song
The video below is from the Classic Album series on the making of Aja and features Fagen and Becker going through the individual instrument parts. Very cool!
Sometimes I have a specific topic in mind when I start writing a post for this blog. Other times. . . well, not so much. I had just finished reading “Live At The Fillmore East and West” by John Glatt (https://www.amazon.com/Live-Fillmore-East-West-Backstage/dp/0762788658) which told the story of Bill Graham’s Fillmore East And West through the careers of Graham, Janis Joplin, The Jefferson Airplane and Carlos Santana. The book talked about the series of concerts that Bill Graham presented at Tanglewood, the classical music venue located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Then I realized that the last of these shows occurred forty six years ago today. Presto! New post topic!
At the time, the idea of presenting rock music in a classical venue was a radical idea. The idea that rock music was anything but “low brow” was new and the thought that rock music had any artistic component was far from the accepted norm. Tanglewood had just begun to experiment with staging contemporary concerts on their grounds. Staging a rock concert in a classical venue had yet to be done, so of course the concept of doing so excited Graham. Graham was also very aware of the plans for the upcoming Woodstock festival which he did not think very highly of, as well as feeling it could be a threat to his business interests. So only a few days before the Woodstock Festival, Graham staged the first of several concerts billed as “The Fillmore at Tanglewood.” He brought the full-scale Fillmore East production team in, including the Joshua Light Show, and booked a great lineup. This first concert featured B.B King, Jefferson Airplane and The Who, and drew the largest crowd that Tanglewood had ever seen by far. Buoyed by the event’s success, Tanglewood and Graham agreed to stage three similar dates in 1970. It was the last of these shows, with Santana headlining a bill with The Voices of East Harlem and the legendary Miles Davis, that happened forty six years ago today.
The video below is the complete set of Santana at Tanglewood. It was just about one year after their career making performance at Woodstock. They were enjoying the success of their debut album with three hit songs, had a new Top 10 hit with a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Black Magic Woman” and were about to release their second album, Abraxas. This is the classic lineup of Santana, before a young Neal Schon joined the band and shows them in what I consider to be their prime. Enjoy.
Santana – Full Concert – 08/18/70 – Tanglewood (OFFICIAL)
Personnel:
Carlos Santana – guitar, vocals
Gregg Rolie – keyboards, piano, lead vocals
David Brown – bass
Michael Shrieve – drums
Jose “Chepito” Areas – percussion, conga, timbales
Mike Carabello – percussion, conga, vocals
It was May, 1994 when the Central Park Summer Stage concert series announced their schedule. One of the shows that immediately caught my eye was The Lounge Lizards with Sonny Sharrock opening for them. I had seen The Lounge Lizards several years earlier at The Squat Theater and found them interesting and I was looking forward to hearing them again, knowing that the band had changed significantly since that time (they will the subject of a future post). I was aware of Sonny Sharrock from his playing on the Pharoah Sanders record Tauhid as well as Herbie Mann’s Memphis Underground. My quick take on him was that he a guitarist who played free jazz, a little too heavy on the noise/shriek for my taste. Nonetheless I thought it was an interesting bill and I was looking forward to seeing it.
Then a terrible thing happened. On the verge of signing the first major label deal in his entire career, Sonny Sharrock passed away unexpectedly on May 26, just weeks before the show, at the age of 53. The Black Rock Coalition, the New York based artist’s collective put together a band to play Sonny’s music for the show. Like the other show’s I talked about recently, it made me aware of a great musician who previously was not really on my radar.
Sonny Sharrock released 3 records as a leader from the mid sixties to the mid seventies before going into musical semi retirement but he had his fans. One of them was bassist/producer Bill Laswell who coaxed him out of retirement in the mid eighties. With Laswell’s assistance, Sharrock began a very prolific period of his career, playing on numerous Laswell related projects as well as records under his own name, also produced by Laswell. But without a doubt, the greatest exposure that Sonny ever got was for the soundtrack to the Cartoon Network show Space Ghost Coast To Coast, one of the last projects he completed in the studio before his death. It was the music from his later solo records that was the basis for the tribute.
The thing that struck me immediately was the melodic quality of the tunes. Great melodies, great grooves. I could put any of these tunes in a playlist alongside songs like The Allman Brother’s In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed or Santana’s Samba Pa Ti and they would not feel out of place. This is what Fusion was supposed to sound like. A couple of days after the concert, Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR, played a special show showcasing the music of Sonny Sharrock. I recognized many of the tunes from the concert and it was interesting to compare Sonny’s guitar playing to those paying him tribute. Sonny played a Gibson Les Paul with a rich, overdriven tone, reminding me of early Larry Coryell. The principal guitarist for the Black Rock Coalition was Vernon Reid, best known for his playing in the band Living Colour, playing what looked like an Ibanez guitar with a much more modern sounding distortion. Also, Sonny’s playing would veer from melodic single line playing to noisy racket and back again. When Vernon’s playing went out, it wasn’t as jarring but somehow seemed less natural (Note: Please don’t take this as me dissing Vernon Reid’s playing which is amazing. This is just my opinion on comparing the two guitarists in the context of playing the same material).
The clips below (sorry, audio only) are of some of my favorite Sonny Sharrock tunes. I hope that you love them as much as I do and seek out his records. Popular critical consensus is that his best single record is Ask The Ages (1991) which features a killer band of Sharrock, Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax, Charnett Moffett on bass and the amazing Elvin Jones on drums. Once described as “a late free jazz recording for those who do not care for free jazz”, it’s well worth checking out though many may find the more rockier, less jazzy Seize The Rainbow a better place to start.
Sonny Sharrock – “My Song”
Sonny Sharrock – Seize the Rainbow
Sonny Sharrock – Who does she hope to be?
Sonny Sharrock – The Past Adventures of Zydeco Honeycup
It was in the summer of 1994 when while talking to a drummer friend she asked if I was going to see the band Morphine that weekend in Central Park’s SummerStage. I had seen the band mentioned in the Village Voice but I hadn’t given it much thought till then. So I figured “what the hell, I don’t have anything else going on” and I went. Wow! One of my favorite shows of all time.
On paper, Morphine sounds like a gimmick. A trio of drums, baritone sax, two-string slide bass. I’m definitely a fan of the low end of the sound spectrum but I thought it could be a little too much but the novel instrumentation proved to be the perfect setting for the heart of the matter: the songwriting of two-string slide bassist/vocalist Mark Sandman. Their sound was the epitome of stripped down minimalism. Rounding out the trio was Dana Colley on baritone sax (occasionally playing two saxophones ala Rahsaan Roland Kirk, see my post about Rahsaan – https://roymusicusa.com/2016/02/29/bright-moments-rahsaan-roland-kirk-live-at-the-keystone-1973/) and drummer Billy Conway.
Coming out of the Boston indie rock scene, their sound was unique. It immediately made one think of the sound track to any number of film noir movies. Sandman’s voice was a deep, hypnotic croon that projected a world weary detachment of someone whose been in the wrong place at the wrong time a couple of times too many. They were once described as sounding like they were the house band in a Raymond Chandler novel. There is an existential blues meets Kerouac Beat Generation vibe going on. In one of my favorite Morphine songs, Have A Lucky Day, he sings, “I can’t lose forever but I’m doomed to try”. If that’s not existential dread then I’ll eat my copy of “No Exit”.
The fatalistic world view of the songs now seem especially tragic now. While playing in front of a festival crowd in 1999 in Italy, Mark Sandman collapse onstage and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital of a heart attack. It’s just so sad.
ManRoy Music 