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looking for longer String life Without Sacrificing Tone or Feel? D'Addario's Extended Play Coated Phosphor Bronze Acoustic Guitar strings look like traditional strings, feel like traditional strings, and sound like traditional strings. The only difference is that the EXP coating provides a barrier against the corrosion and wear that sap life from regular strings, so EXPs retain their "new string tone" 3 to 4 times longer than traditional .strings. The secret is the way the string is coated. Rather than just coating a finished string, we coat the phosphor bronze wrap wire with an ultra-fine layer of EXP coating before we wrap it around the high-carbon steel hex core wire. Then the string is wrapped normally, giving you the feel you're comfortable with, along with longer life, increased durability, and the brightness, clarity, and sensitivity you expect from D'Addario strings.
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The new McPherson Guitar pedects ''Offset Somtdhole Teclmologf.'!. a pursuit we began twenty years ago ~
The original McPherson Guitar (1980) pioneered offset soundhole placement
What do some of the world's finest studio musicians and petfonners have to say?
The McPherson Guitar achieves an incredibly rich sound three ways:
"The McPherson guitar achieves a balance like no other. The top end is brilliant and the bottom is tight without the boominess heard on centerhole guitars. I've recorded acoustic guitars on projects from Alan Jackson to Amy Grant... the McPherson guitar is the best I've hearq. • Bill Deaton
l.Offset soundhole design Unlike center-hole designs that rob a guitar of sound-enhancing flexible surface .area, the McPherson Guitar moves the soundhole away from the center to a less critical spot on the guitar face. This preserves flexible surface area on the central part of the instrument to deliver pristine highs an.d a rich bottom end.
Nashville Producer/Engineer
"I used my McPherson on my new album "Stories from the Heart." It is the best recording acoustic guitar I own. McPherson Guitars achieve a level of tones, sustain and Low-E to High-E sonic consistency that I have never experienced before." Bob Carlisle
Patent Pending
2.Strategic hole shape, size and location · The elliptical shape of the soundhole on this guitar, combili.ed with its tested size and precise location, helps create the richness, balance and versatility that musicians everywhere are talking about.
3. Uniquely engineered bradng pattern The challenge when bracing a guitar is to create structural stability without restricting sound potential. Our innovative, state-ofthe-art bracing pattern maximizes the available open, "vibrating" area on the inside of the guitar face resulting in a sound you have to hear to believe.
Grammy Award W"mner for "Butterfly Kisses"
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"As a touring musician for over 20 years, I've always had to choose between great tone or·road tough durability, but not anymore. My McPherson has the best sound of any guitar I have ever played AND has held up to over 26,000 miles of bumpy roads and gorilla baggage handlers with not even a neck adjustment!" Dave Watson Oak Ridge Boys
"This guitar, to me, is like a great tube amp. You play soft - you get a certain sweetness. You dig in - you get power. .. this is a superb sounding and playing instrument .. a true joy to play!" David Cleveland Nashville Studio Musician (Crystal Lewis, Avalon and 1\vila Paris)
"The McPherson has a vintage warmth with sparkling highs. A gourmet acoustic with guts!" Jerry McPherson Studio Musician (Amy Grant, Neville Brothers and Spice Girls)
"It projects extremely well and creates a very large sound." Mark Baldwin Studio Musician, Producer and Instrumental Recording Artist (Whitney Houston, James Ingram, Amy Grant)
"One of the most versatile and wonderfu( sounding guitars I've ever played... We've used it exclusively in the recordings of The Normal$, Heather Miller and Whiteheart." Billy Smiley Producer and Recording Artist
We. ~,cit.~~ :tk ~! 919 River Road, P.O. Box 367 Sparta, Wisconsin 54656 (608) 269-2728 Fax (608) 269-3120
He's an award-winning classical guitar artist, a student of Segovia, who has released a Time-Life CD internationally, and won first prize in the Guitar Foundation of America Competition. He's an eclectic steel string artist whose compositions have been featured on TV and in movies, and is a winner of the National Finger Picking Championship in Winfield. He's a respected professor of guitar and heads the guitar department at the University of New Mexico. When it comes to acoustic guitars, Michael Chapdelaine knows no boundaries.
MICHAEL LILLE'S TOP 5 WAYS T O SP END THE TIME H E'S NOT CHANGING GUITAR STRINGS:
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Mountain biking in the skinny air. 0 Q uoting the classics (Caddyshack, A nimal House, etc.).
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Whitewater kayaking. 0 Playing my guitar w ith ELIXIR strings.
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ACOUSTIC
MAY
GUitAR . . . ,_
2001
VOLUME
I SSUE
1 1,
NUMBER
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10 1
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Behind The Door The singular vision that allows Keb' Mo' to tell the stories in the songs. By David Hamburger Words and music to "Loota Loo" p . 40
Philly Gumbo "Philadelphia" Jerry Ricks brings gospel, R&B, and jazz influences to country blues guitar. By Duck Baker Words and music to "No More Ramblin"' p. 48
'-Spirit of the Blues Eric Bibb gets outside his head and inside the song. By Bill Milkowski Words and music to "Come Back Baby" p . 58
The guitars and accessories you'll need to create that vintage sound. By Steve James ~
CONTRIBUTORS
10
MUSIC NOTAnON KEY
12
MAIL
14
JUMP STREET Mark Olson, the Hot Club of Cowtown, a farewell to Luiz Bonta, and more.
20
REVIEWS Bill Monroe biographies and Hit List CDs and books.
26
A.G. LETTER Sam Shaber checks in from the Cutting Edge of the Campfire Festival in Harvard Square.
30
STAGE AND STUDIO Performance Lab: How to make the most of your local open mic. By Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey
70
MARKETPLACE
76
GEARBOX Beginners' guitar kits reviewed, a visit with Froggy· Bottom Guitars, and new gear.
M
DEAR A.G. Answers to your questions, plus a reader tip.
PRIVATE LESSONS 86 Basics: Combining Bass Notes and Slide. By David Hamburger Musical examples and "Offbeat Blues" p. 88 92
Rhythm Techniques: Building Swing Chords. By Jim Wood Musical examples p. 94
98
OFF THE RECORD Stephen Dick celebrates the 30th anniversary of Joni Mitchell's ground-shaking Blue. Words and music to "This Flight Tonight" p. 98
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*: BJ;U:EGRASS;. Cover: Keb' Mo' and his new signature model Martin. Photo by Anne Hamersky. MAY
2001
I ACOUST I C
GUITAR
100 1Q.§
AD INDEX GREAT ACOUSTICS Epiphone Bluesmaster. By David Hamburger 7
ACOUSTIC David Hamburger is a guitarist, writer, and teacher who lives in Austin, Texas. In this issue, he interviews Keb' Mo', profiles the Hot Club of Cowtown, and gives a lesson on steady-bass slide. Hamburger is the author of four instruction books, including Acoustic Guitar Slide Basics. He has been heard on TFN's Emeril Live, on the soundtrack of the PBS film Betrayal: The Flood of 1928, and in the Broadway production of Footloose. For a discography, performance schedule, and information on his latest solo CD, Indigo Rose, visit www.davidhamburger.com. Photographer Anne Hamersky's work has appeared in scores of magazines, including Time, Vanity Fair, Teen People, and New Scientist, and graced the jackets of numerous Rounder and Compass CDs. She lives in San Francisco with husband Scott Nygaard and their son Josef. Of this month's cover subject, bluesman Keb' Mo', Hamersky says, "We waited through a long sound check, but he had a great combination of charm, mellowness, and complete professionalism that made the 15 mi11utes he was able to give us worth two hours." Steve James is a touring performer, recording artist, and one of Acoustic Guitar's contributing editors. His latest albums of original acoustic roots music are Boom Chang (Burnside) and Not for Highway Use, a retrospective compilation on his own Settlement label. James' multi-instrumental sessionography for other artists is extensive, and he has made a guitar instruction video (Blues/Roots · Guitar) for Homespun Tapes. In this issue, he gives advice about blues gear in an excerpt from his upcoming Blues Guitar Answer Book (String Letter Publishing). For current tour dates, visit www. stevejames.com. Multi-instrumentalist Jim Wood, who gives a lesson on building chords in this issue, works as a performer, studio musician, and instructor in Nashville. A fiddler since the age of ten, he has won more than 140 fiddle contests and is the Tennessee state champion. He has recorded and performed with such artists as Ray Price, Emmylou Harris, John Hartford, John McEuen, Amy Grant, and many others. Wood also owns and operates his own recording studio and plays bouzouki, mandolin, viola, and tenor guitar. He has arranged music for TNN, ESPN, and the Discovery Channel.
GUitAR EDITORIAL Editor Managing Editor Music Editor
Simone Solondz Scott Nygaard Andrew DuBrock
Gear Editor
Te)a Ger1
Web Editor
Paul Kotaplsh
Assistant Editor Senior Writer Contributing Editors
Matthew Kramer
Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers Sharon Iobin Steve James
Richard Johnston Rick Tumer
DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Production Director Designer Production Manager Production Artist
Ellen Richman Ray Larsen Judy Zlmola Chris Maas
ADMINISTRATION Publisher General Manager Systems Administrator Administrative Assistant
David A. Lustennan Joan Mumoy John Papanlkolaou Peter Penhallow
ADVERTISING Advertising Director
Dan Gabel
Eastern Advertising Manager
Brannan Willson
Western Adve~tising Manager
Rich Osweller ·
Advertising Coordinator
Man: Moore
FINANCE Controller
Man:la Johnson
Staff Accountant
Claudia Holland
MARKETING Circulation and Marketing Director
Sabrina Smith
Circulation Manager
Matt Morton
Books Marketing Manager
Jen Fujimoto
·Promotions Manager
Paige Clem
CORRESPONDENCE . Mail .,
PO Bolt 767 Slin Anselmo,
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Fax
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ACOUSTIC GUITAR ( I SSN 1049·9261) is published monthly by String letter Publishing, Inc., 255 West End Ave., Sa.n Rafael, CA 94901. Periodicats postage paid at San Anselmo and edditionaJ mailing offices. Printed in USA
POSTMASTER: Pleue make address changes on·line at www.acousticguitar.com or send to ACOUSTIC GUITAR, PO Box 469120, Escondido, CA 92046·9020. A single issue costs $4.95; an individual subscription is $29.95 per year; institutional subscriptions are $36 per year. Foreign subSCitbers must order air·mail deliv&ry. Add $15 per year for Canada/Pan Am; $30 elsewhere; payable in U.S. funds 011 U.S. bank.
.www.acousticguitar.~om
Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome but cannot be considered or returned unless accompanied by a self·addressed, stamped envalope. Prior inquiries are preferred.
'Loola Loo' C 2000 Wamer·Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI) and Mo' Than Jus' Music (BMI); 'Come Back Baby" 0 1999 Bug Music Ltd. (PRS); 'No More Romblin'" 0 2000 Mojic in a Bottle Music (BMI); "This Flighl Tonight" C 1971, 1975 Joni Mitchell Publishing Corp. (BMI); 'Combining Bass Notes and Side' C 2001 David Hamburger, aJ other contents C 2001 . String Letter Pubishing, D!Md A Lustetman, PIJblisl>er.
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ACOUSTIC
GUITAR
I
MAY
2001
A Breedlove guitar. With such sensuous beauty and inspiring thought possible. To experience it for yoursel4
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4
MUSIC NOTATION KEY Guitar tunings are given from the lowest (sixth) string to the highest (first) string; standard tuning is written as E A D G B E. Arrows underneath tuning notes indicate strings that are altered from standard tuning and whether they are tuned up or down. In standard notation, small symbols next to notes refer to left-hand fingers: 1 for the index finger, 2 the middle, 3 the ring, 4 the little finger, and T the thumb. Right-hand fingering is indicated QY i for the index finger, m the middle, a the ring, c the pinky, and p the thumb. Circled numbers next to notes show what string the note should be played on, with 1 the highest and 6 the lowest.
In tablature, the horizontal lines represent the six strings, with the first string on top and the sixth on the bottom. The numbers refer to fret numbers on the given string. H indicates a hammer-on, P a pulloff, S a slide, .J a bend. The number next to the bend symbol shows how much the bend raises the pitch: ~ for a slight bend, J1 for a half step, 1 for a whole step. ,....;;...
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Chord diagrams show where the fingers go on the fretboard. Frets are · shown horizontally. The top horizontal line represents the nut, unless a Roman numeral to the right of the diagram marks a higher position (IV would mean fourth fret). Numbers above the diagram are left-hand finger numbers, as used in standard notation. X indicates a string that should be muted or not played; 0 indicates an open string.
A complete guide to A. G. music notation can be found at www.acousticguitar. com. To receive it by mail, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Music Editor, Acoustic Guitar, PO Box 767, San Anselmo, CA 94979-0767. 10
ACOUSTIC GU I TAR
I
MAY
2001
MAIL
1!-thiers Mercantile international, Inc. -Complete Supplies for the Stringed Instrument Maker-
FREE 80 PAGE CATALOG
1·800-477-4437 or
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Congratulations on a great February issue. Eric Lugosch (Off the Record) is a great musician who deserves more recognition. And Paul Kotapish did a fantastic interview with Richard Thompson ("More Daring Adventures"). I appreciate the thoroughness of the What They Play section .and the notes for playing "Turning of the Tide." Finally, I would like to mention another great British guitarist who deserves attention: Pete Berryman. He is now on Peter Finger's Acoustic Music Records and was an influence on many great guitarists as far back as the 1970s. In fact, Pete Berryman was one of the finer artists recording on Stefan Grossman's groundbreaking Kicking · Mule Records. Shaun Porter Cambridge, England
I was glad to see an article about flamenco guitarists Tomatito, Gerardo Nunez, and Vicente Amigo in your February issue. But what a disappointment-particularly that there was no What They Play section. I suspect [author) Stephen Dick never even talked to the th ree guitarists. Monica Wyatt Santa Monica, California
guitarist Merlin!
See ALL of our new guitar releases at www.presser.com 12
Stephen Dick responds: You suspect right, and it was a drag becquse I was looking . forlJ.!ard to talking to these guys. Unfqrtundtely, I wasn't able to get in touch with all bf them. The editors considered abandoning the article but decided instead to offer something that would introduce these · artists to nonflamencos and provide some background information for those who had heard of them ·and wanted to know more. Meanwhile, to qnswer your What They Play question, Vicente Amigo plays two guitars built by Lest~r Devoe (680 Camino Roble, Nipomo, CA 93444; [805} 931-0313; www.maui.net/-rtadaki/ devoe.html), one of which is featured on the cover ofAmigo's Ciudad de Las Ideas CD. Nunez plays a Conde Hermanos guitar, and Tomatito plays guitars by Conde Hermanos and Manuei Reyes.
Thanks for citing the Robin Nolan-Trio for their contribution to Gypsy jazz (Jump ACOUS TIC GU I TAR ' MAY
2001
Street, February). My wife and I met them a couple of years ago on the streets of Amsterdam, where they play eight hours a day in just about any weather. They are the embodiment of musical dedication, they play their butts off, and they're great guys. Their Gypsy Jazz Songbook and play-along CD [available at www. robinnolantrio.com] are wonderful practice tools for those of us who'd like to develop some Gypsy jazz chops but don't have access to the players.
From One Craftsman to Another
John Curtin Milford, Pennsylvania
Yourarticle on Shelley Park (Gearbox Profile, January), especially the information on her preferences for setup, helped me decide to ask her to fix up the buzzes in my guitar that I had put up with for too long. Her work is-meticulous, as you describe. The guitar plays better than ever. By the way, her phone number is now (604) 988-4324. Garry Stevenson Coquitlam, BC, Canada
As a regular reader·· of your excellent magazine, I have just ··seen Banning · . Eyre's lovely article in your January ·. issue ("In Griot Time"), in which he di~- · cusses the guitar stylings of Djelimady · Tounkara, et al. He mentions that I put the idea of meeting Djelimady into his head and also credits me as the person behind the Bajourou recording. I did make the trip to Bamako, and the recording too, but credit must go also to Dr. Lucy Duran for putting that idea into my head and for .working together with me on the visit. You head the discography with a mention of the Bajourou Big String Theory CD. release on Xenophile, which I recorded direct to OAT in Bamako with Djelimady, Bouba Sacko, and Lafia Diabate. I believe that this is no longer available through Xenophile, but our original, GlobeStyle U.K. release is still in catalog (www.acerecords.co.uk). As Banning says, it is an ,impressive acoustic session. Thank you for keeping an open musical perspective in your pages. Ben Mandelson Ace Re.cords London, England SEND LETIERS TO Mail, Acoustic Guitar, PO Box 767, San Anselmo, CA 949790767; fax (415) 485-0831; e-mail mail.ag@ stringletter.com. Include your name and address. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. •
MAY
2001 ' ACOUST I C GU I TAR
13
Hot, Hot, Hot
Hot Club of Cowtowners Whit Smith, Elana Fremennan, and Matt Weiner. While there's a certain rugged logic to a band called Hot Club of Cowtown hailing from Austin, Texas, Hot Club guitarist Whit Smith's path to the Lone Star State was as circuitous as it was inevitable. A teenage Van Halen fan from Cape Cod, he made it to New York City in time for the early '90s collision of punk rock energy and hon!..-y-tonk rediscovery on the Lower East Side. Vintage Telecaster in hand, Smith played numerous sideman gigs while bending his brain and fingers around Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West records and other high-speed hillbilly jazz. He eventually found himself at the helm of the Western Caravan, a sprawling, Bob Wills-inspired outfit complete with triple fiddles, stee! guitar,
14
piano, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, and a featured vocalist. Smith and sometime Caravan fiddler Elana Fremerman eventually split for San Diego, where they continued playing as a duet. Relocating to Austin and adding a bass player, they came to the attention of Austin western swing stalwart Don Walser, who helped hook them up with HighTone Records (www. hightone.com), a label on which they've now recorded three COs. Dev'lish Mary, their latest, adds another New Yorker to the band, upright bassist Matt Weiner, and includes another change for the band: overdubbing. "Everything was live on the other two records," says Smith. "In a live performance,
you have character and delivery and energy all fortifying the performance. But you want to listen to a CD over and over again, and you don't need to dwell on anybody's clams. We didn't sit there and do 50 overdubs, though," he says. "It was probably three overdubs and then you'd have the solo you wanted." Some tunes, like the Joe Venuti/Eddie Lang showpiece "The Wild Dog," were recorded straight up. "Everything there happened just like that," says Smith. "There are no extra instruments, nothing." Smith often cut acoustic rhythm tracks first with the band and went in afterward to lay down electric solos, using the DeArmond pickup on his 1925 Gibson L-5. "l lov~ playing
ACOUSTIC
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2001
acoustic rhythm," he says. "It's different than playing electric rhythm, and it's totally different than trying to sing and take a solo and play rhythm at the same time (laughs)." The Hot Club's spare trio format, imposed by the economic realities of touring, has had ramifications on the band's musical approach. "If you limit yourself to the members of the band but you don't limit your ideas, you'll arrive at ways of making a bigger sound," says Smith. "We have both the tone coming out of the acoustic bass and the percussive sound coming off the fingerboard as it's being slapped. Elana chunks little doublestops on her violin, almost like a rhythm guitar background that I can play off. And when I'm playing rhythm guitar, I move the voicings around at least every two beats if not every beat, almost like the way a piano player, a stride guy, accompanies himself singing or playing the melody." In concert, it's immediately clear how Smith's technique affects the band's biggerthan-trio sound. "I've been trying to play two parts, a third below and a third above what Elana's playing," he explains. "So if Elana's playing the single-note melody on her violin, I play two parts on either side, which is a lot different than harmonizing just underneath or above. And if you play those double-stops on adjacent strings, for some bizarre reason it sounds much different than if you skip a string. They're awkward fingerings, but the
sound is worth it. You really have to rehearse the part, though. I'm only just now starting to be able to use those for improvising. 'Lazy Day,' 'Dev'lish Mary,' 'Little Liza Jane,' and 'My Life's Been a Pleasure' are all done with that technique." Smith's thought process, however, is the real key. "I try to think like someone from the '20s or '30s. I love fiddle tunes, and it's fun to listen to those tunes and hot-jazzily them. I love the idea that you'd have a thorough jazz background but be playing western tunes in a Dixieland style. Most of the western swing soloists were interested in hot jazz, and you can hear that they've been listening to Louis Armstrong or someone like that. So we don't just listen to Bob Wills." There's also the question of how much room there is for one's own personality in vintage music, but Smith puts his faith in the inevitable individuality of each person's efforts. "Even if you're copying something," he says, "the way you hold the pick, the way you finger the strings, the guitar is going to sound a little different, the equipment's going to sound a little different, and everybody has a unique vision of what they want to do. It makes for good conversation to say 'I like these things and I'm working on these things and putting these things together,' but who the heck knows why it comes out sounding like it does?" -David Hamburger
What They Play
Cowgirl Pop
Retro romantic Erin McKeown.
MAY
200 1
ACOUST I C
GU I TAR
Betty Boop in a cowboy hat. That was my first impression of singer-songwriter Erin McKeown, and it was hardly fair. It had more to do with her hair and size than anything else-when she tunes her Chet Atkins guitar, she has to fully extend her arm to reach the pegs. But then her fingers hit the strings, it's abundantly clear that this 22-year-<>ld Brown University undergraduate is no small talent-and that the success that has been nibbling at her heels must be gearing up for a big bite. Following a home-recorded tape that sold 7,000 copies at gigs and on the Internet, Signature Sounds (PO Box 106, Whately, MA 01093; [800) 694-5354; www. signature-sounds.com) released McKeown's debut CD Distillation last fall. Produced by Dave Chalfant of the Nields, it has a cheery pop/ alt-country vi be-edgy but not morose, with catchy hooks and unabashed retro-musical references. ·A cross between G Love and Django Reinhardt," is how McKeown wryly describes it. True to its name,
Distillation is a spare, clean recording that dispenses with all but the essence of McKeown's strengths: intelligent lyrics, a clear and intimate voice, and quirky, commanding guitar playing. "Most of Erin's songs come with a distinct guitar part as part of the package, so we started there," says Chalfant. "It all came down to what that one acoustic guitar implied," echoes McKeown. "It might function as a ukulele, or a bass, or a piano. We listened to that and filled in the spaces around it." It was a smart, if unusual, way to go about creating a band recording, and its success owes much to the skills of the instrumentalists. McKeown wields acoustic and electric guitars with equal aplomb, Chalfant mainly plays electric guitar and bass, and Lorne Entress and Dave Howard play drums. Embedded in the sparse arrangements are myriad details- vocal harmonies, whispers, a Dobro here, a piano there, and tasteful loops and samples. "Someone said to me recently that we didn't play a note more than was nee-
15
NEW 5
After learning that a recently discov· ered dinosaur had been named Masiakasauras knopfleri because Dire Straits' music had accompanied the archaeologists' Madagascar dig, Mark Knopfler quipped, "I am real· ly delighted. This is a very special honor. The fact that it's a dinosaur is really ap~ but I'm happy to report that I'm not the least bit vicious~
Mark "Dino" Knopfler. VVhen the new Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum opens in downtown Nashville this May, visitors vvill be treated to live music, interactive displays, a theater featuring digital film presentations, and relics such as Hank Williams' musical suit and gui· tars played by Jimmie Rodgers and Mother Maybelle Carter. For more in· foonation, go to www.country.com. EVENTS
May 24-28 brings the Spring Strawbeny Music Festival to Camp Mather, in Yosemite, California. Nickel Creek, the Seldom Scene, and Willis Allan Ramsey will per· form. For more information, go to www.strawberrymusic.com. IN
essary on this record ," says McKeown. " I think that's an amazing compliment.'' Distillation is McKeown's second band effort-or third, if you count her high school boyfriend's rock band, Weezecake. After a childhood at the piano, McKeown began teaching herself guitar at age 11. Steeped in the music of the Indigo Girls and Dave Matthews, she started writing songs at 15. In her second year at Brown, she launched a trio with upright bass and drums. "We took all my songs and pretended we were Soul Coughing," says McKeown. "It didn't work. I didn't know how to change my guitar part to play with a drummer and a bass player, and none of us knew that silence is good." At her CD release party at the Iron Horse in Northampton, Massachusetts, this past September, McKeown was clearly on top of the band game. "Generally, I'm totally focused on the audience when I'm playing," she says. "But with these guys [Chalfant and Entress ], if I could, I'd just turn everyone In a circle and face each other and play. I'm so in· terested in what's going on." The trio deliv· ered material from Distillation that ranged
from the 1940s Rodgers and Hart cover "You Mustn't Kick it Around" to hook-filled originals like "Blackbirds" (a catchy, melodic takeoff on the nursery rhyme) , "The Little Cowboy" (the saga of a cocaine-sniffing cowpoke with a "nose for the setting sun"), and "Fast as I Can," a squint-eyed look at success: "Something about success that lies, lies next to me I ln a strange bed, a strange bed, bedfellow strange." Success does seem ready to pounce on McKeown. She's already garnered industry interest and a fan base on both coasts-and all with a university degree in ethnomusicology still pending. When asked what she'd like to be known for, McKeown shoots straight. "That's the easiest question. I want to be known for a good, fun live show. I want people to be a part of it, to create an energy flow between the stage and the audience. Number two, I want to be known as a good songwriter. That's where I need to grow the most. Number three, I want to be known as a great guitar player. That's my favorite thing to do."
- RaniArbo
What They Play Erin McKeow n plays a 1972 Gibson Hummingbird custom that she bought in high school for $400. "It's an amazing-sounding guitar," she says. "It has a warm high end and a !humpy low end that suits my style. It has no pickup and I don't care if it ever gets one. I can't fathom how many problems they start, and then it takes four racks of something to fix them. If I'm going to play an acoustic guitar, it's only going to be in the studio. Plus, the Hummingbird is a big dreadnought, and that's not comfortable for me on stage~ On stage, McKeown plays a Gibson Chet Atkins SST acoustic-electric with flatwound strings and a heavy pick. She also recently acquired a brand·new Gretsch Synchromatic G3900 arch· top, which she's dubbed the "Lady Baltimore." On Distillation, McKeown and Chalfant used the Hummingbird, a mid·'70s Gibson ES-335, and an Ibanez Telecaster copy.
MEMORY
Cuban-American singer-songwriter Isaac Guillory died December 31 from undetected cancer. Guillory had one U.S. solo release in 1974 (many more in Europe) and over the years worked with Donovan, Joan Baez, and Mick Jagger. Learn more about Guillory at www.anetstation.com/ guillory. "Queen of the Cowgirls" Dale Evans died February 7 of congestive heart failure: €vans co-wrote "Happy Trails" vvith her,husband Roy Rogers ; and starred with him in 35 movies and two television shows in the '50s and '60s. She also was a best·sell· ing author of 'two ~Qoks: Angel . Unaware and Life·isla 8/e:ssing.
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This Bird Has Flown What would inspire a songwriter/guitarist in a successful alt-country band with devoted fans across the country and beyond to throw in the towel, move to the California desert, and put together his own homespun folk band? In the case of ex-Jayhawk Mark Olson, it was field recordings by the Holy Modal Rounders and Lucinda Williams ' early records. "Those are the kind of records I play," Olson says, "so I might as well sound that way." And despite the commercial success the Minneapolis-based Jayhawks were enjoying in 1995 when Olson decided to quit the band, his decision was also innuenced by what he perceives as the fickle nature of the rock 'n' roll world. "With pop music, you're up one·tlay, down the next," he says. "With
folk music, you can build a following that will stick with you over time- regardless of whether or not you get played on the radio." Olson got a good look at that kind of devoted following when he toured with his wife, cult heroine and singer-songwriter Victoria Williams, who has been doing her own quirky thing since releasing her first solo recording, Happy Come Home (Geffen), in 1987. There was something magical about Olson's collaboration with Gary Louris, his c<>;-writer, cofrontman, and electric guitarist in the Jayhawks- the blend of tl)eir voices, the way Louris' soulful lead guitar parts filled the spaces in the melody- but Olson is creating a different kind of magic in Josh!la Tree, California, with a whole new crew of collabo-
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raters dubbed the Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers. The Creek Dippers' new recording, My Own Jo Ellen (High Tone), is a collection of Americana penned by Olson and featuring himself and Williams on vocals, acoustic and electric guitar, dulcimer, piano, and electric banjo; Mike Russell on fiddle, mandolin, and bass; Greg Leisz on acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, bass, and Dobro; Brian Kane on acoustic guitar, clarinet, and sax; and Danny Frankel and Don Heffington on drums. It's actually Olson's third recording as a Creek Dipper; the first two, The Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers and Pacific Coast Rambler, were not only self-recorded but self-released. The latest presents more of Olson's simple, singable songs in a kind of loose, folksy format (despite the high-quality production provided by engineer Michael Dumas). "My songs are really simple," Olson says. "Anyone with a basic knowledge of music can sit down and play with me." The off-kilter harmonies spun out by Olson and Williams are something of ·an acquired taste, and that singing-around-thekitchen-table vibe is amplified tenfold when the group loads its equipment (and its dogs) into the van for a concert tour. Williams plays guitar in the Creek Dippers, and Olson plays bass in Williams' band, and their down-home, seemingly off-the-cuff shows are immensely appealing. Olson writes the majority of his songs on his workhorse Guild D-25 but also writes on piano and has recently taken to the dulcimer. He discovered the appeal of the dulcimer
Ex·Jayhawk Mark Olson (right) and the Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers.
while playing for mentally retarded kids, who " really liked it." The sound of the instrument
inspired him to write some of the strongest tunes on My Own Jo Ellen, including "Walking Through Nevada," a sweet, romantic duet with Williams; "Ben Johnson's Creek," an oldtimey ecological awareness song; and the country-flavored title track. "I wrote 'Letter from Africa' and 'Linda Lee' on the piano," Olson says. "We have this old van and we're able to carry a weighted keyboard in there, so I get to play three different instruments when I'm performing my own songs [on the road). I really enjoy that."
The change in band status has certainly taken some getting used to. The Jayh~wks traveled with a full entourage of managers and roadies and essentially had only to show up and play. With the Creek Dippers, Olson and his cohorts are necessarily hands-on, handling everything from booking the tours to loading in their gear to working with venue managers and sound engineers. But the physical labor is a small price to pay for expressing what's in his heart. "Now there are new fans who have just heard of me through the Creek Dippers," says Olson, "and that's a nice thing." - Simone So/ondz
Luiz Bonfa, 1922-2001
Brazilian master Lulz Bonta.
Luiz Floriano Bonta, renowned guitarist, pioneer of the bossa nova sound, and composer of over 500 instrumentals and songs,
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including the haunting Brazilian classic "Manha de Carnaval," passed away in Rio de Janeiro on January 12. Bonta was born on October 17, 1922, in Rio de Janeiro. He began p laying guitar at the age of 11 and studied with the great Uruguayan guitarist/ composer Isaias Savio. Developing a passion for popular music in his teens, Bonta became a singer and began performing in local clubs as a member of the group Quitandinha Serenaders. By 1946, he had become a nationally known guitarist and composer t hrough broadcasts on Brazil's Radio Nacional. After touring the U.S. as the guitarist for singer/actress Mary Martin in 1957, Bonta divided his time between New York City and Rio, composing, recording, and scoring films in both locations. In 1959, film director Marcel Camus commissioned Bonta to write the theme for his movie Black Orpheus. The
movie and its theme, "Manha de Carnaval," brought the music of Brazil, bossa nova in particular, to worldwide attention. Over the next several decades, Bonta worked and recorded with several American jazz musicians, including Stan Getz, and performed regularly in Europe and the U.S. His songs were recorded by countless artists as diverse as Elvis Presley and jazz t rumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Bonta's harmonically and melodically sophisticated compositions were ·strongly influenced by jazz, classical, and Afro-Brazilian music and had more of a traditional samba feel than the music of many of his bossa nova contemporaries. Although his music could be ebullient and upbeat, much of it is characterized by a delicate, wistful quality and expresses the Brazilian notion of saudade, a sense of deep, unfulfilled yearning. - Ron Forbes-Roberts
A CO UST I C GU IT AR I MAY
2001
Guitars:A Musical History is the first rial reference work to offer guitar enthusiasts, players, and collectors an opportunity to explore the rich, synergistic relationship between builders and artists, between instruments and music-all in the context of a cultural and historical legacy that is uniquely American. Here you' ll meet the craftsmen whose innovations _ in guitar design and construction inspired new sounds in blues, jazz, country, and popular music, and the pioneering musicians whose endless quest for new sounds pushed these instrument makers into unexpected and unheard-of places. And, of course, you'll see and savor the rich variety of their guitars. • Generously illustrated with more than 150 photographs of players, instruments, catalog pages, and other memorabilia. • Feawres everything from the elegant American guitars of the 19th century to the evolving d readnought, jumbo, 12-string, archtop, resophonic, and more--the original instruments as well as contemporary incarnations and reissues. • Spotlights the guitars of Lead belly, Jimmie Rodgers, the Everly Brothers, Tony Rice, Emmylou Harris, Ben Harper, and others. From the publishers of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
300 copies, individually numbered and signed
BINDING Hardbound, with slipcase
FORMAT 9 by 12 inches, 152 pages
INTRODUCTION By Ben Harper
CONTRIBUTORS Richard Johnston • Michael Wright • Michael Simmons • Steve James • Ben Elder • Eric Schoenberg • Bruce Taylor • George Gruhn • Jon Sievert
PRICE $100 (after July I, 200 I) $80 (before July I, 200 I)
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You are invited to acquire the limited edition now, in advance of publication. If your order is received before July I, 200 I , your price is $80.00, a savings of 20%. You will receive your ) book by early July 200 I .
REVIEWS True Life Blues Two new biographies detail the life and music of the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe
mong the bluegrass faithful, no name conjures a more potent image or elicits more respect than that of Bill Monroe, the undisputed founding father and arbiter of style for the idiom. While casual listeners might be more familiar with the banjo-driven strains of Flatt and Scruggs or the -latter permutations of the genre fostered by David Grisman, for true believers, Bill Monroe was Moses, David, and John the Baptist rolled into one. His compositions and repertoire are the heart of the genre's canon, and his work remains vibrantly alive through the thousands of active bluegrass bands the world over that hew close to the "traditional" sounds he created with various iterations of the Blue Grass Boys. And Monroe's impact reached far beyond the confines of his imitators and acolytes. He was an early star of the Grand Ole Opry and performed there nearly every Saturday night during his 58-year career. He played thousands of gigs and recorded hundreds of songs, and his compositions were covered by everyone from Elvis Presley to Jerry Garcia to Ray Charles. Yet in an era when teen P
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offer significant insight into the life and times of Bill Monroe. Richard D. Smith's Can't You Hear Me Callin ': The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass
is the first full-fledged biography of the man, and it is a gripping read. The details of Monroe's life are as compelling as any novel, and over the years countless anecdotes, oral histories , jokes, lies, and tall tales about his quirks, quarrels, and high adventures have been traded among aficionados. Smith makes the most of the dramatic elements of Monroe's life to support his thesis that Monroe's potent, lonesome music and hapless career were the result of early pain and abandonment. This dimestore psychology wears pretty thin by the book's end, but Smith does a wonderful job of moving the yarn along, and he must be credited for putting together tbe mos.t comprehensive picture of Monroe's life to date. Born in 1911 near Jerusalem Ridge in Rosine, Kentucky, Monroe was the youngest of eight children. He was burdened with a retiring disposition and embarrassed by his cross-eyed vision. Orphaned by the time he was a teenager, he fell under the grudging care of elder brothers who seemed to take delight in bullying the shy and sensitive boy. Monroe took refuge in music, and under the tutelage of his uncle Pen Vandiver, a fiddler of local renown, and AfricanAmerican guitarist Arnold Shultz, Monroe began to acquire the skills that would lift him into the limelight but never fully deliver him from this early sadness. Despite their cruelty to him, Monroe cast his lot with his brothers, and his initial musical success was in various combos with Birch and Charlie Monroe. They shunted the lowly mandolin to Bill while they
grabbed the more popular fiddle and guitar, but Monroe turned the tables by transforming the little instrument into a fierce ax capable of blazing melodies and indomitable rhythm chops. Over the years, Monroe's professional life traced a jagged course veering from stratospheric success to desperate lows, a career comprising grueling tours, punishing schedules, and lousy business decisions. For every musical success there was a financial debacle, and even in his final years when he should have been basking in the admiration of his many ardent fans, Monroe was struggling to make ends meet. Inadvertently or not, Smith builds a convincing case that · Monroe was as much to blame for his frequently stalled career as the fickle public or waning interest in his mountain-style music. His brooding temperament and quick anger led to long feuds with other musicians and frequent misunderstandings with agents and managers. He was a deplorable businessman who was careless with money, and he often turned his
Books Reviewed Tom Ewing, Ed., The Bill Monroe Reader, University of Illinois Press, $29.95 (hardcover book). Richard D. Smith, Can't You Hear Me Callin; Little, Brown, and Co., $ 25.95 (hardcover book).
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back on those who were trying their hardest to help him. Monroe's personal life was every bit as rocky. Despite passionate attachments to several wiv~s and a string of long-term companions, Monroe was a relentless womanizer, and while his romantic escapades were inspiration for some of his best "true" songs, they also resulted in an exhausting stream of real-life heartaches. Smith goes to great lengths to reveal the "untold" and occasionally unsavory aspects of Monroe's love life, and he occasionally lapses into mere gossip mongering when he records allegations and rumors only to dismiss them as unfounded. Smith can't quite make up his mind about whether to put Monroe on a pedestal or knock him off it, and one wishes that he had focused more on Monroe's art and given us a clearer glimpse of the man's incredibly fertile musical imagination. There are some cursory descriptions of a few key musical encounters and recording sessions and a handful of telling quotes from the many players who worked with him over the years, but valuable insight into Monroe's creative genius too often gets short shrift in favor of exposing the vicissitudes of his personal life.
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The book sports an exhaustive bibliography, and Smith's source material is scrupulously documented via endnotes. There is a reasonable index and a brief essay on recommended listening. The lack of a complete discography or any timeline indicating the various permutations of Monroe's ever-shift ing band are significant oversights in a serious biography of a man whose life was spent performing and recording. For this data, serious fans will have to wait for the anticipated update of Neal Rosenberg's 1974 Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys: An Illustrated Discography. Despite thes e quibbles, Can't You Hear Me Callin' is fas-
cinating and fun. Monroe fans will gain insight into the life and times of their hero, and neophytes will get a grand tour of bluegrass from the mountains to the main stage. In The Bill Monroe Reader, editor Tom Ewing offers a more detached, wideangle view of Monroe's legacy via a potpourri of previously published writings. Ewing played guitar with the Blue Grass Boys during the master's final decade, and he was intimately familiar with Monroe as a friend, musician, and employer. His chronologically ordered compendium spans seven decades of writing
about Monroe, beginning with excerpts from mid-'30s promotional materials and ending with reflections and memorials written after Monroe's death. The book includes excepts from music periodicals, newspapers, books, and newsletters, and they range from puff pieces to serious criticism, from hard words and angry memories to sentimental poetry. There are many first-person accounts from men and women who worked and traveled with Monroe over the years, including Neil Rosenberg, Sandy Rothman, and Ralph Rinzler. The half-dozen transcriptions of interviews with Monroe himself are essential reading for the serious fan , as is the wonderful memoir by Cleo Davis, one of the original Blue Grass Boys. Ewing provides concise editorial comments after every piece, and these notes are especially helpful in putting the stories in context and rectifying stray bits of misinformation. Both Can 't You Hear Me Cal/in' and The Bill Monroe Reader are welcome additions to the limited library about Monroe. Read in tandem, they provide a robust picture of this most prickly patriarch of an enduring American music. - Paul Kotapish
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are into acoustic amplification you should be intoUltraSound. Just ask artists like ... Jerry Reed, Thorn Bresh, Wayne Wesley Johnson, Muriel Anderson, Duck Baker, Edgar Cruz, Nokie Edwards, Tim Farrell, Tommy Flint, Todd Hallawell, Pat Kirtley, Jim Nichols, Preston Reed and Bob Saxton.
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Wake the Dead. Many bands have covered the Grateful Dead, but never quite like this. Led by acoustic guitarist Danny Carnahan and mandolinist Paul Kotapish, Wake the Dead reconceives a number of Garcia/ Hunter songs as Celtic tunes, setting them in medleys alongside traditional Irish jigs and reels. It works beautifully because the medleys are all so well balanced and the ideas so idiosyncratic. "Friend of the Devil" becomes a jig, "Touch of Grey" a reel, "Sugaree" a slow air. The playing is sensitive throughout, and the players-Carnahan, Kotapish, harpist Maureen Brennan, bassist Cindy Browne, uilleann piper Kevin Carr- fit together perfectly, creating an album as beautiful as it is unlikely. (Grateful Dead/Arista) -Kenny Berkowitz Ulisses Rocha and Teco Cardoso, Caminhos Cruzados. This CD by Teco Cardoso on reeds and flutes and Ulisses Rocha on nylon-string guitar is an imaginative fusion of the diverse .musical styles and moods embodied in the best Brazilian music. Rocha is a skillful player and improviser who is precise and thoughtful yet full of fire as he explores the rich harmonic possibilities of these ten tunes, which include six of his own jazz-flavored pieces as well as others by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Egberto Gismonti. Rocha's technical elan and beautiful, complex originals place him firmly in the continuum of Brazilian guitarist/composers that includes the late Baden Powell and Garoto, the original jazz/classical fusion1st. (Malandro) -Ron Forbes-Roberts Michelle Malone, Strange Bird, Vol. 3. Throughout her career, singer-guitarist Michelle Malone has filled her live performances with everything from radiofriendly pop rock to thrashy folk to bar-
room blues. This live compilation follows Malone as she tackles an array of tunes in amphitheaters, out-of-the-way pubs, and tiny house parties. The 14track set spans Malone's catalog and includes crowd-pleasers such as the nimble jazzy-acoustic "The Edge." But Malone also mixes in some hefty axgrinding with her pop ballads. This disc will appeal as much to Malone's hardrockin' fans as it will to longtime lovers of her solo acoustic shows. (Strange Bird Songs) - Karen Iris Tucker
Kane's River. Kane's River stands out from the current pack of new bluegrass bands on the strength of John Lowell's fl uid, melodic flatpicking and Julie Elkins' punchy banjo playing and sweet, soulful voice. Each member of the band, which includes bassist Dave Thompson and mandolinist Jerry Nettuno, contributes to the excellent original material on this debut CD, and Steve Earle's "Billy Austin" is an inspired choice for bluegrassification. The material and approach stick to the prevailing modern bluegrass stylehard-driving picking, smooth vocals, and a dash of contemporary harmonies-but Kane's River has added an original voice to the scene and . should eat up the festival circuit. (Doobie Shea) -Scott Nygaard Tchavolo Schmitt, Alors? ... Voila! Alt hough Tchavolo Schmitt has only played on a couple of obscure COs and made a brief appearance in the film Latcho Drom, his skill as a guitarist has made him a legend among Gypsy jazz aficionados. On this recording he is joined by violinist Florin Niculescu, accordionist lonica Minune, bassist Gilles Nature!, and rhythm guitarists Phillipe "Doudou" Cuillerier and Romane, the CO's producer. Schmitt ACOUSTIC GU I TAR I MAY
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has fast fingers, as he demonstrates on Romane's "Duo D'Amour," but he is at his best on slow tracks like the lovely ballad "Lyola" and his own composition "Variation," where his expressive playing, blended with the timbres of the accordion and violin, evokes a sweet, melancholy mood that is more Gypsy than jazz. (Iris/Harmonia Mundi) -Michael Simmons Rodney Crowell, The Houston Kid. For his first album in four years, Rodney Crowell revisits his old neighborhood, writing about the people he grew up with on the dirt-poor side of Houston. There are his mother and father, constantly fighting with each other, the armed robber who lives down the street, and the redneck twin boys next door. They're complex, conflicted, unconventional characters, and Crowell gives all of them the chance to speak in their own words. Even with a full band behind him, it's the quietest album Crowell has made in years. On acoustic guitar, Crowell fingerpicks with a warm, light precision, supported by longtime collaborators Michael Rhodes on electric bass and Steuart Smith on electric guitar, Autoharp, mandolin, and bouzouki. The Houston Kid is filled with stories of rockabilly rebels, one-eyed sailors, and barefoot kids, a beautiful, touching album that is worlds away from mainstream Nashville. (Sugar Hill) -Kenny Berkowitz Various artists, A Jewish Odyssey. This sampler is a fine introduction to some contemporary Jewish roots performers. You won't find any.rough folky edges on this disc-these are pop artists with smooth voices and professional backup. The styles here range from Eastern European klezmer tunes to the less familiar Sephardic music of the descendants of Jews forced out of Spain in 1492. Several tracks have unusual guitar work, most notably Erkan Ogur's soulful accompaniment on "Ija Mia Mi Kerida," by the Turkish singers Janet and Jak Esim. (Putumayo) -Sue Thompson 24
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Books Ozzle Kotani, Guitar Playing Hawaiian Style. Ozzie Kotani is one of the rarest
kinds of musicians: a skilled guitarist who is equally adept at clearly explaining how he does what he does. His bookand-CO set Guitar Playing Hawaiian Style is the first volume of a projected threevolume series devoted to teaching the ki ho 'alu, or slack-key, guitar style. Kotani uses nine original compositions to demonstrate the basic right- and lefthand techniques, slack-key's distinctive rhythms, and three common tunings, including taro patch (D G D G B D), double slack (D G D F: B D), and dropped C (C G D G B D). The compositions are written in tablature and include extensive performance notes. Kotani has been teaching slack-key guitar for 11 years, but if you can't make it to his class in Hawaii, this book is the next best thing to being there. (Mel Bay) - Michael Simmons
Anthony Glise, Com plete Sonatas of Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli. Nineteenthcentury guitarists enjoyed a surprising amount of creativity in performance. You can hear it in the approach to tempo found in the recordings of artists born and grounded in that period, such as Vahdah Olcott Bickford. You can also find it in Anthony Glise's thorough urtext edition of the works of three major 19th-<:entury composers for the guitar: Fernando Sor, Mauro Giuliani, and Anton Diabelli. Glise includes multiple versions of the works as they were published at the time, as well as an essay and bibliography on 19th-century performance practice, including sample "improvisations"-brief melodic or harmonic excursions that a performer might insert into a piece. These elements provide guitarists with the tools necessary to create performances that reflect the composers' intentions with depth and understanding. (Mel Bay) -Stephen Dick
Resources Dooble Shea, PO Box 68, Boones Mill, VA 24065; (540) 334·2673; www.doobieshea.com. Malandro, PO Box 15639, Cincinnati, OH 45215·0639; {800) 356-1786; www.brazilianjazz.com. Strange Bird Songs, PO Box 3092, Decatur, GA 30031; www. michellemalone.com.
MAY
2001 ! ACOUSTIC GUITAR
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Dear Folkies,
I arrived in Cambridge at around midnight on the Friday before Labor Day. As I came around the corner and caught sight of Club Passim, Harvard Square's cozy basement spot, I was struck by how many people had congregated on the street outside. It's the Cutting Edge of the Campfire Festival, four days of live music from noon to 2 A.M., and · it's hopping. Created by Matt Smith, a manager and talent buyer at the club, the Campfire is a brilliant tapestry of new and familiar faces, musical styles, and personalities that takes place over Memorial and Labor Day weekends, all for just $10, less than the cost of a CD. Since the Campfire's inception in 1998, the attendees and performers have more than doubled. The performers-everyone from Ellis Paul to Melissa Ferrick-play for free, and the event has exposed audiences to many new faces , including Teddy Goldstein, James O'Brien, Sloan Wainwright, and yours truly. The amazing thing about the Campfire is that while 56 hours of music could be enough to drive anyone to voluntary isolation, people actually become more and more addicted as the weekend goes on. One woman from Germany approaches me and says that she had planned to listen for an hour and is now intending to stay for the entire weekend. It's the way Smith sets up the schedule that keeps the action going. He purposefully puts acts in order that contrast and complement each other, and he loves to put people on stage together who have never met before or heard one another's music. The result is a remarkable chemistry that develops right before the audience's eyes and ears. Perhaps it is the spirit of the club that makes it work. Passim, a nonprofit organization, is largely volunteer-run and eager to give back to its musicians what they put into it. There is an amazing feeling of equality and friendliness at the Campfire. Performers 26
ACOUST I C GUITAR
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and fans hang out like they've known each other for years. Friendships are made, musical partnerships born, mailing lists enhanced, COs sold, much falafel eaten (Passim is attached to a Middle-Eastern restaurant), and lots and lots of music happens. For my first set of the weekend, I'm slated with Anne O'Meara Heaton, Nini Camps, and Pamela Means, some of my favorite players and best friends. It's easy to find a feeling of camaraderie on stage, although the packed house is slightly intimidating. Pamela is the only Passim headliner out of the four of us, yet this is the prime-time, Saturday-night slot. There are 120 people in the room, another 50 waiting in line in the lobby, and an estimated 150 more out on the street. Sidewalk fans watch through the windows and listen via speakers that Smith has placed outside. In fact, the energy is often as focused outside as it is inside, with people bringing lawn chairs and vying for "front row" seats along the edge of the sidewalk. The performers include this audience in their banter. I had been stiff and a little nervous at the beginning of the round, but I'm slowly loosening up and realizing that, packed house or not, prime time or not, I'm here in equal stead with my fellow performers, and everyone inside and outside the building is having a great time. This enables me to debut a brand-new song. "Well," I declare, "if you're going to screw up a new song, you might as well do it in front of 250 people, right?" Up until now, only my houseplants have heard this one, "Solitaire," a song about my father's death less than a year ago. As I make my way through the emotional verses, I truly feel the room rooting for me, and I especially feel the love of my friends sharing the stage and holding me up with their eyes and ears. I start to cry twice, but the audience doesn't seem to notice. I learned long ago that it's cool if the audience cries but awful if the performer actually starts tearing. When I finish the song there is silence and then a concentrated, almost sedate applause that seems to go on and on and on, as though no one can believe I just sang that song. I can't really believe it either. Anne O'Meara Heaton sits to my right, and as I turn around to put my guitar down and sit back on my stool, I catch her eye and really start crying, holding it back as well as I can and spending the next song-a beautiful love song by Pamela-staring at my lap. My second Campfire set is not quite as dramatic, although I do play the new ACOUSTIC
GUITAR
I
MAY
2001
song again just to wear it in a little more. This time it's very late Sunday night. The round also features my buddy Teddy Goldstein, Christopher Williams, the caramel-voiced Rachel McCartney, and king of the Boston folk troubadours, Ellis Paul. It's a bit nerve-wracking to share the stage with him and with Christopher Williams, who is a songwriter and a regular member of Ellis' band. But the crazy hour (12:30 A.M.) makes the whole experience goofy and relaxed-an anything-goes atmosphere. I ask Ellis how long we are supposed to play, how many rounds, and he says, "We're just going to keep playing until everyone goes home!" At 2:45, we're still going and no one has gone home! A fun thing about playing in the round is that there's no need to write a set list beforehand; the next song I play is always determined by the performance that prec~des it. In the third turn of our set, wary of the fact that I have played some very serious stuff up to this point, I watch Ellis play his emotionally rousing "Maria's Beautiful Mess" and wonder what I have to go with that. I could get emotional, I could get quiet. Or ... I could hit them with a very siily song I wrote about being stuck on a train at rush hour, called "Bomb Threat in New Rochelle." It describes the other people waiting on the train with me, hot and frustrated, and it's a true story.
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At least this car is air-<:onditioned Hell, at least I'm sitting down And though my right leg is pressed up against my neighbor's Well he looks so fine, maybe I don't mind sticking around
I realize that Ellis is on my right on stage and decide to play the song. We all get a good laugh when he blushes at that line! Finally, a weary Matt Smith signals for us to bring the round to a close and thanks everyone for being there. He and Ellis, co-<:hair of the Campfire's board of directors, are excited about the weekend's turnout. But after four days, 108 performers, more than 56 hours of music, less than 20 hours of sleep, and lots of coffee, Matt is ready for a little vacation. For the rest of us, though, it's time to get back to work. Looking forward to the next one,
BORDERS www.borders .com
~
~ © 2001 Capitol Records. Inc.
SamShaber
MAY 2001
' ACOUSTIC GUITAR
29
STAGE AND STUDIO Performance Lab How to make the most of your local open mic
W
hether you want to build performance skills, network with local musicians, or simply get the emotional charge of regular public performances, your local open mic scene has a lot to offer. Generally, open mics provide performance opportunities for amateur musicians, but they can also be an end in themselves for musicians who have professional skills but no desire for the rigors of touring. "All I really want to do is play a couple of my songs in front of 20 to 100 people who are really quiet and are paying attention to me," says Steve Rapson, a Bostonarea musician, writer, and instructor who gave up a successful rock band to concentrate on acoustic music. I spoke to a number of regular open mic performers as well as the people who arrange the events to find out what works and what doesn't in a typical 30
open mic performance and what guitarists can learn from the experience. Steve Friedman at Melville Park Studios in Boston records each of the 40 to 60 performances in a typical Tuesdaynight open mic at Club Passim in Harvard Square (www.clubpassim.org). He estimates that he's observed about 9,000 open mic performances since 1991, and he has come up with his own list of Dos and Don'ts based on simple mistakes that he sees repeated over and over again. Friedman divides the performance into three parts: the setup, the intro, and the song. "All three are important and should be planned and practiced with equal diligence," he says. Friedman is amazed by how many performers get on stage with no batteries in their pickups or with tangled or missing cables. Fumbling with equipment, he advises, pulling up stools or fid-
dling with microphones, is a great way to lose the audience before even playing a note. He also notes that "the introduction to a song can go a long way toward making a song more effective." Introductions should be interesting, entertaining, and short. Friedman advises performers to "pay close attention to other open-mikers. Talk to them and analyze what the good ones do and what the bad ones do. Compare yourself to them. Learn, grow, and improve." A natural reaction while struggling with stage fright is to feel encouraged by the weak performances before yours and intimidated by the strong ones. But improving your confidence calls for a gradual shift in perspective that allows strong acts by others to inspire your own performance. Geoff Bartley, a Boston-area singer, songwriter, and guitarist who toured nationally in the late '80s and has won awards for his fingerpicking, hosts a highly successful ten-year-<>ld open mic at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts (www.world.std.com/ - lorif/cantab.html). He says that just getting up and playing takes courage, but the players who get the most out of the experience also have the courage to ask, "How was that set? Did you think the song worked? Could you understand the words? How did the guitar playing sound?" Bartley's Monday-night open mic is in a neighborhood bar. Plenty of talking, eating, and drinking are going on, yet, he says, a truly inspired performance can still get people's attention. Club Passim on the other hand, is a nonprofit organization that hosts a music school. As many as 82 performers perform in one night in a room that holds 125 people, yet the room stays quiet during performances. "People are paying attention to what you are doing," says manager Matt Smith. Another open rnic where performers have a tendency to listen and learn from one another is the seven-year-<>ld South Bay Folks at the Espresso Gardens, a music-<>riented coffee shop in San Jose,
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2001
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California (www.southbayfolks.org). South Bay Folks is an informal organization of players who take turns hosting the open mics and provide one another with feedback. Original member Dave Metzger says that for most beginners stage fright is the biggest hurdle. "The only way to get beyond that is with more and more performing time," he says. "The more you do it, the better you get." Advice for dealing with stage fright is plentiful. In addition to practicing your material until you know it cold, most people recommend that you consciously make your body do all the things it does when it's relaxed, such as breathing from your abdomen, maintaining an erect but relaxed posture, and smiling confidently. Also remember that communicating with the audience is more important than impressing them with your technical wizardry. For some, open mics provide a home away from home while on the road. Dennis Aiello's day job as a road warrior for Compaq computers keeps him away from the South Bay Folks open mic about half of the time. He takes his guitar with him on business trips and plays open mics in such varied locations as Monterey, California; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and Austin, Texas, where he started out one night at the Cactus Cafe and ended up in a Rouse House concert (www.pe.utexas.edu/ -brouse/rhouse.htm). Aiello is designing an Open Mic World Tour 2000 T-shirt that will list all of the places he played on the road last year. To find out-of-town open mics, Aiello calls ahead if he has a contact in the area. He also scans the Web by searching for "open mikes" (spelled mike rather than mic), using several different· search engines. When searching for open mics by city, he recommends looking for "city pages" as opposed to the name of the city (such as cleveland.com) because official city listings usually don't include open mics. He also searches for local folk music venues on sites such as www.musi-cal.com and then checks the venues' sites for events calendars. When he arrives in a new city, he checks the local entertainment listings in the free weekly newspaper and also asks hotel staff to suggest appropriate venues. "When you are on the road, open mics are nice," Aiello says. "You get out and meet people and get a chance to listen to them play music. And you get to talk to people and find out what's going on in the area." -Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey
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2001
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was all it took for Kelly Gilhooly to decide he had to have the Taylor guitar. He just stood around and played for another 25 so he wouldn't look like some kind of trust fund baby or something. Co:IIJllilll. . .
Moore has been exceptionally busy in recent months. He released his fourth album, the critically acclaimed The Door, has been working on a kids' album tentatively titled Big Wide Smile, is pursuing a hectic touring schedule that has included dates with Bonnie Raitt and Lyle Lovett, and has found time to knock out a tune or two with vocalist/mouth percussionist Bobby McFerrin. Moore appreciat.e s the success, while viewing it with the perspective and appreciation you might expect from someone who's arrived a little later than most in the pop world. He clearly enjoys talking about guitars, songwriting, band-leading, acoustic amplification, and his studio days. He sat down with me last November before a concert in Dallas. You've been asked a lot about your influences, about discovering Robert Johnson and country blues relatively late in the game, but what made you want to play and sing when you were a kid?
Mo' [Cuban percussionist] Mongo Santamaria made me want to listen to music. Because drums and rhythm, you know, that's pretty important. But I learned about performing and being on stage and about putting songs together from people in the neighborhood. Everybody listens to the radio; we're all influenced by pop culture, what comes over the media. But the influences right under your nose [have more impact]. Charlie Tuna and Monk Higgins really made me want to play the blues. It wasn't Robert Johnson. And listening to Bobby McClure sing, Lermon Horton, Vernon Garrett, people I played with in the clubs.
body, and we'll start something from scratch. But if I start getting the idea going, I'll finish it up. Sometimes when you co-write you have to bring an idea to get things going. So I'll have some ideas. How did you get started with Bobby McFerrin?
Mo' He started "Loola Loo." He had
that change [sings turnaround], that sequence. He had sussed it out on keyboards. We got together for a couple of days in Minneapolis and started the songs, and then I finished them up. "Mommy Can I Come Home" is probably the song I had the least to do with on the co-write. That was more on the side of Melissa Manchester. She had the idea, "mommy can I come home," and we added the words and music to it. I'd say that song was about 65/35, in her favor, where it's usually the other way around. Were the tunes on The Door written specifically for the album?
Mo' Why else is there to write [laughs]?
You start touring, your career takes off, and time management becomes a problem. So there's no sitting around writing whenever I feel like it. My day is filled with, "OK, we gotta take care of this, soand-so wants an interview ...", and all of a sudden I'm a self-promoting commodity, rather than an artist. That's the unfortunate side of success; it becomes hard to maintain your creative integrity.
Do you set aside time to write?
Mo' If I've got an album to do, I see the goal, and the moments kind of appear. Time [to write] does show up. I can't write on the road. I need to be sitting down, talking with someone, having some life. I don't want to end up writing songs about lonely hotel rooms. When you record, do you cut the vocals live?
Mo' Yeah. Some of the vocals on The Door, like in "It Hurts Me Too," are the
track vocals. On this record the vocals were probably the most painless vocals of any of my records. For some reason I was able to get the vocals really fast and I didn't labor over them. What made it different this time?
Mo' On the other records I was putting my own vocal too loud in the headphones. I wanted to really hear ~hat I was doing, to hear if it was in tune. But there wasn't enough of a relationship to what I was singing to. This time my reference point was more the instruments. My vocal was something in the distance, not right in my face. I was real relaxed during the sessions. !liked every track. So when I was singing, I wasn't thinking, "I wish I had ... "Greg Phillinganes, the keyboard player, he just played brilliantly. And the combination of Continued on page 44
How does the guitar contribute to the way you put songs together?
Mo' The song usually starts with the guitar, because that's my base. And then I start with the subject. Usually the music, the subject, then the words. How do you come up with a subject?
Mo' It doesn't have to be a fancy subject, or something different than what everyone's written about, but the subject has to have had some kind of effect on me. Do you contribute the words in a co-write?
Mo' I'm usually a big contributor of words. I'll sit down together with some-
38
ACOUSTIC
GUITAR I MAY
2001
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*""'
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Special
Words and Music by Kevin Moore and Bobby McFerrin The Door features a broad palette of acoustic and electric sounds, but "Loola Loo" is the only cut that features Keb' Mo's unaccompanied acoustic fingerpicking. Mo' co-wrote this lilting, Travis-picked tune with s inger Bobby McFerrin, who got the ball rolling by bringing Mo' the slightly off-the-wall descending chord turnaround that surfaces for the fi rst time in measure 11 . While the verses are based on standard chord shapes and licks from the Mississippi John Hurt school, the form of "Loola Loo" is closer to a pop song (verse/chorus/bridge) than a 12-bar
blues. The first eight bars of the verse are what you'd expect from a blues, but then those eight bars repeat before getting to the V chord. When the V chord arrives (measure 35), the loopy turnaround moves semi-chromatically d own to the II (D), V (G), and back around to the I. These seven bars reinforce the feeling of cockeyed disorientat ion described in the lyrics. While the chorus is pretty straightforward, the bridge takes you to another place altogether-its plaintive jazz voicings and descending bass line in measures 76-79 mirror the puzzled musings of t he lyrics. -David Hamburger
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' A COUST I C GUITA R
43
What They Play Keb' M o' is touring with only three guitars these days: a Martin or an Epiphone flattop, a Bellona electric resophonic guitar (Bellona, Old Parua Bay Rd., R.D. 5, Whangarei, New Zealand; [64] 9·438·3313; fax [64] 9-438-3361), and an Epiphone Sheraton (a Gibson ES-335-style instrument). For solo gigs, he also plays a 1995 steel-bodied National, and a Keb' Mo' signature model Martin dreadnought was just released. On The Door, Moore used a koa Goodall with a cedar top (Goodall Guitars, 734786 Kanalani St., Bay 1, Kailua-Kana, H I 96740; [808] 329·8237; www.goodallguitars.com), one of producer Russ Titelman's Martins, the Bellona on "It Hurts Me Too;• a Larry Pogreba aluminum resonator guitar on "Don't You Know" (Pogreba Guitars, PO Box 861, Lyons, CO 80540; [303] 823-6691), and an Epiphone Bluesmaster (see Great Acoustics, page 106). During solo gigs, the acoustics go straight into the board. In band gigs, Moore runs the Sheraton through a Mesa Boogie Mark IV and the acoustics through SWR California Blonde amps. That way, he says, "I can feel it coming back to me, I can have control of my own monitor system:' To save time and get a con· sistent sound, Moore just mics the SWRs. "What comes out of the amp sounds l1ke a guitar;' he says. Moore uses H1ghlander pickups in his resophonic guitars. "I love that pickup;' he says. "If you get a decent, balanced guitar, that Highlander pickup sounds really sweet. You have to mount it right; if you don't, one string will be louder than the other. You have to get somebody that really knows how to put it in:' Moore strings his wooden acoustics with D'Addario phosphor-bronze light·gauge strings and uses phosphor-bronze mediums on his resophonic instruments. His electrics get D'Addario light-gauge nickel strings. Pick choices include Jim Dunlop "plastic thumbpicks and metal fingerp icks and Fender or D'Addario heavy flatpicks; and for slides, Moore favors black ceramic Mudslides, made by Moonshine Slides ( 1011 Second St., Santa Rosa, CA 95404·6608; [707] 541·7350 ; www.jimdunlop.com/ moonshine).
him on the track with Jim Keltner supplied this meeting of something slick with something swampy. They took a long time on the Keltner track; they went slow. I was sitting in the studio going [mutters], "Man, this is Jim Keltner. What's taking him so long?" [Laughs.] But Keltner creates an environment. He creates something special every time. What was your own experience as a ses· sion musician like?
Mo' I got to rub elbows with a lot of really great session players living in L.A. I was always on the outer rim of the session loop. Probably my biggest problem was that I had no gear [laughs] . Making records now, I've found how important it is to have a few axes, to help a song or a record come to life in a whole different way. I had a Gibson ES-335 and a Fender Deluxe amp-great sounding guitar, great amp, but that's all I had. I remember going to sessions and I'd get there and start playing the song, and I'm thinking to myself [whispers], "This should be a Strat!" [Laughs. ] And I ain't got one.
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ACOUST I C GUITAR I MAY
2001
I was always an L.A. session-guy wannabe. I mean, I did sessions, sometimes I even had steady work doing sessions, but I never got there. But that's how I think: like a session guy. It's all about telling stories, having fun, getting a groove going, and leaving some breathing holes for the imagination. Do you stick to the acoustic guitar when you play live and let the other guys do the electric stuff?
Mo' No, I get on the electric. But my problem in the past with guitar players, the second guitar, is that guitar players are notorious for playing too much and too big in band situations. It's so easy with a guitar to play too much or play the wrong things, too thick. In that midrange, the keyboards, the vocal, all that stuff is in the same range, fighting for a place to exist. Playing subtle rhythm guitar is such an art. That's what the guitar players who influenced me did. I listened to Cornell Dupree. I wasn't interested in the flashy lead guys. I listened to the guys that were playing little parts in the back to make it go. So when a guy doesn't have that sensitivity, I start flipping out, when he starts playing big chords [sings power chord
riffs], too much on the bottom strings, compromising the textures that are coming out of the whole band, not finding those little sweet spots that help deliver the message.
Do you have a regular touring band? Mo' I make changes sometimes because I tend to get a little meticulous. Sometimes I might be asking too much. When you're demanding all the time, there's an air of contempt that starts to build. What are you asking for?
Mo' Their attention. I'm asking them to be attentive to helping me tell a story. I don't sing in the high tenor range where it cuts over. And then, in live circumstances, you have the resonance of the room, and vocals tend to get lost. My solo shows work all the time, because people can hear the words; it's very focused. But when you add the band, all the other frequencies in there in the same range as the vocal, you start to dilute that communication with the audience. Your band becomes a bigger, fuller sound, but they become a hindrance to the storytelling that you're working to do.
So what do you want from the band?
Mo' I want them to really be dialed in. I want them to know the songs. I want them to pay attention to me, not to how cool they can play their instrument. They can already play cool- ! wouldn't have called them if they couldn't play cool [laughs]. I don't want them to cover up the story. If you can tell the story with a solo show, then why tour with a band?
Mo' I like to represent the recordings more, and I think having a band show is fun. It's fun to see a band. I can have different textures and do little solos with a band, different colors. It's great. •
Discography KEB' MO'
The Door, Sony 61428 (2000). Slow Down, Sony 69376 (1998). Just Like You, OKeh/550/Epic 6731 6 (1996). • Keb ' Mo; OKeh/550/Epic 57863 (1994).
ike most traditional musicians, Jerry Ricks grew up in a household and community where music was a natural part of daily life. But where youngsters in a rural setting might only be exposed to one inherited tradition, Ricks came of age in Philadelphia in the 1950s, where blues, gospel, R&B, and jazz were all part of the landscape. When he talks about the neighborhood he grew up in, you realize how unbelievably vital it was and how irretrievably it has been lost. "Music was just everywhere-at home, in church, at clubs like the Sahara and the Showboat where they would have matinees for kids, and even on the streets," Ricks recalls. "A couple of guys named Guitar Wilson and Washboard Slim used to play out on South Street-1 later learned they had played with Brownie [McGhee] early on. And right around the corner, Lonnie Johnson and [early jazz guitarist] Elmer Snowden were sharing an apartment over the Afro-American newspaper office. Lonnie used to play over at the Ben Franklin Hotel."
Ricks heard lots of music at home as well. "My father had a guitar and a tenor guitar, which is what he mostly played, in sort of a jump-swing style," he says. "My aunt, Helen Page, sang in a jazzy R&B style, like the Louis Jordan kind of thing, and my first cousin, Billy Gaines, was an organist who played swing and bluesy stuff. They were both pretty well-known locally, but Dad just played around the house." Although Ricks' father thought that the beboppers were "a little wild," he kept up with modem jazz, so Ricks heard all the latest sounds, including some by Clifford Brown, the young trumpet phenom from down the road in Wilmington, Delaware. Inspired in part by Brown, Ricks chose the trumpet as his first instrument. He got to know two older musicians now legendary in jazz circles: tenor sax player Clarence Sharpe and pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali, and they introduced him to various jazzers on the local scene. Others he got to know through school contacts. Pianist McCoy Tyner's younger brother Jarvis was a classmate, and Ricks remembers informal rehearsals held at the beauty salon owned by the Tyner boys' mother during which tenor sax great John Coltrane tried out some of his exploratory ideas with the young McCoy and other players. "We kids called it Flash Gordon music," says Ricks with a laugh. At age 18, Ricks started fooling with his father's guitar, and his aunt sent him to Lonnie Johnson's place to learn the basics. "But I couldn't learn from [Johnson's roommate] Elmer Snowden because he used a weird tuning of some sort," says Ricks. "And I was kind of drifting with the trumpet. The local hero was [hard bop trumpeter] Lee Morgan, and it seemed out of reach; I just couldn't see where I was going with it. But I was still taking in everything, hanging out at a coffeehouse run by a guy named Manny Rubin, who
booked all kinds of 'out' jazz and even poets like LeRoi Jones. Then Manny decided to open a bigger place, the Second Fret, and present folk acts. I helped with the booking, and sometimes I'd go up to New York to see people that I wanted to get for our club." One such performer was the great Texas bluesman Lightning Hopkins. "I finally heard how something like that sound that fascinated me about jazz trumpet could be played on blues guitar, when I heard Lightning play those runs," Ricks says. "And he was so cool, just the way he looked and carried himself." Weren't the jazzers Ricks knew in Philly pretty high on the cool scale themselves? "You have to remember, this was the '50s," he says, "and the jazz cats wanted to look real clean-you know, the John Lewis, MJQ kind of look. Lightning had a process and a brocade jacket, with shades, rings on his fingers, and that sound-! flipped." At the Second Fret, Ricks was in a perfect position to capitalize on his association with the classic form of American music known as country blues and the people who produced it. He met and performed with a Who's Who of country bluesmen: Son House, John Hurt, Skip James, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Buddy Moss, etc. Many of them wanted Ricks to go on the road with them, but by this time Ricks was married with two young children to support and spent most of his time close to home. The only documentation of Ricks performing with one of the older blues greats comes from a mid-'60s performance for the CBS show Camera Three, where he's seen backing up Son House. As the camera pans in past a hopelessly hokey set ("they had built some kind of fake levee on the stage") onto Son House's face, the back of Ricks' impressive afro is visible Continued on page 52
47
No More Ramblin' Words and Music by Gerald Ricks "No More Ramblin"' (recorded on Many Miles of Blues) is an excellent example of the kind of
vocal accompaniment. There are also licks and chord shapes (measures 15 and 16) that will sound familiar to fans of Robert Johnson and other Delta guitarists, but Lightning Hopkins' approach is just as apparent, particularly during the instrumental break, when Ricks brings the dynamics down and exhibits the "wet" sound that he gets with his Bill Lawrence pickup.
style-blending that typifies Jerry Ricks' blues writing. Ricks' right-hand work is based on techniques associated with Delta playing, such as the heavily accented slapping and the tendency to imply different rhythms, particularly during the
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50
ACOUSTIC GUITAR
I
MAY
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for a moment as he plays second guitar on a blistering rendition of "Death Letter Blues" (available on the video Legends of the Delta Blues, Vestapol). The Ricks coiffure also features in one of my favorite stories of his Philadelphia days. The Second Fret had offered Doc Watson his first solo gig in the North for a month's run in 1961, and Ricks picked the blind guitarist up at the bus station and took him to his hotel. He started for home but had second thoughts about leaving Watson alone in his hotel room for the whole day. "I went back and told him that he could stay with me if he would rather have company," Ricks recalls. Watson later confided that that simple
gesture on Ricks' part was a turning point; he was so overcome with homesickness that he had about decided to give up and go home before Ricks came back for him. A deep friendship formed between the two men that bore interesting fruit. Ricks can still flatpick many of Watson's arrangements of fiddles tunes like "Blackberry Blossom," "June Apple," and "Salt Creek," and ultimately it was Ricks who showed Watson's son Merle a lot of guitar basics (which is why Merle played bottleneck, unlike his father). After Watson had been at Ricks' house for a few days, he stumbled as he and Ricks were going out and his hand landed on Ricks' head as he reached out for support. Watson paused in sur-
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52
Blues Special prise and said, "You're colored!" "That's right," said Ricks, wondering what would follow. Watson broke into a laugh. "Blind is beautiful," he said. Eventually, Ricks moved his family from Philadelphia. In the early '70s he was based briefly in Toronto and Montreal, and for somewhat longer periods in Munich and Denver, where he made a deep impression on the thriving acoustic scene of the time. In addition to performing and teaching, Ricks did some studio work in Colorado to help make ends meet. Tim O'Brien remembers Ricks doing a hilarious imitation of a train wreck at one session. He also took some harmony lessons from legendary jazz guitarist Dale Bruning. ("My lesson was right after Bill Frisell had his," Ricks recalls.) But in 1975, Ricks moved back to Europe, where he would remain untill989. During his years overseas, Ricks made some interesting associations, notably with Swiss trumpeter-guitarist Oscar Klein, with whom he made several records in the '70s that blended blues, early jazz, and swing styles. Ricks and Klein toured together all over Europe, and Ricks became a familiar figure in Munich, Basel, and Vienna, speaking fluent German and hanging out at the jazz clubs with musicians he had been introduced to by his aunt in the '50s. In 1981, Ricks drifted down to Turin, Italy. He continued to tour with Klein and also worked with an Italian jazz guitarist, Giulio Camarca After moving back to the States, Ricks resided in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Brigadoon, outside Atlantic City, New· Jersey, before becoming a virtual nomad in the mid-'90s. He changes addresses so often you would think that the FBI was on his trail, but he has spent much of his time in the South. It may be that Ricks isn't better known because he is so far removed from any stereotype of what a bluesman should be-not many of his mentors would have been at home carrying on conversations in German or Italian about world politics, art, philosophy, or obscure points of jazz history. Ricks sees such things as super- . ficial. "Anybody who lives abroad learns the language," says Ricks. "No, Skip James and John Hurt didn't speak French, but not many people in Mississippi do! [Laughs.] Anything that's sophisticated about the way I think is very much a long the lines of the way those ACOUSTIC
GUITAR
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200 1
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guys saw things. These bluesmen I knew, it's not like they Jived out in a swamp or something. People all over the world are fascinated by the musical language they created. Now that's sophisticated!" Most likely the real reason Ricks is not well known in the States is that he never recorded under his own name b~fore he went to Europe and that his European records never came out in America You won't easily find his first two solo records, for example, which were released in Hungary and Yugoslavia. "I do take pride in all the touring I did in the East bloc before the wall came down," Ricks says, "taking the music to new places, like Brownie [McGhee] and Sonny [Terry] going to India" When Ricks returned to the U.S. it was perhaps inevitable that he wound up in the part of the country that he had, in a way, carried around inside him for so long. Even while living in Europe, Ricks often said that his performances were "always painting one picture . . . of the place this music was born." So it is fitting that Ricks' long-overdue American debut, Deep in the Well, was organized by the Clarkesville, Mississippi-based label Rooster Records in 1997. Label head Jim O'Neal introduced Ricks to Charley Patton's daughter, Rosetta, as well as various locals whose memories of earlier times sharpened Ricks' inner vision. Interestingly, most of the songs on Deep in the Well are not things that he learned from the old masters, but originals that reflect their influence. He did include Brownie McGhee's "Born with the Blues," a Rev. Gary Davis medley, a couple of John Hurt classics, and a very affecting version of "Swing.
What They Play
the new double album
4.10.01
1·80(1-0N·HER·OWN www.righteousbabe.com
54
Jerry Ricks plays a Martin D-76 limitededition Bicentennial guitar that was a gift from his children when it was new. He prefers the old Bill Lawrence pickups to anything that's come along since. He runs the signal through a Fender Twin or any other Fender or Peavey tube amp and then mics the amp and combines that sound with a mic on the guitar. He feels that the combination gives him something of the "wetter" sound that Lightning Hopkins had on electric guitar. Ricks has no preference for string brands, but uses medium-gauge (.01 3-.056) bronze strings.
ACOUST I C GUITAR
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Low, Sweet Chariot," but the rest of the titles are his own. Like many great revivalists, Ricks has the knack of penning songs that sound like they were written 80 years ago. With the release of Deep in the Well, the blues press finally took notice of Ricks, hailing him, understandably, as areturning prodigal son. He has been increasingly visible at festivals around the country, reuniting with the Watson clan at MerleFest in 1994 and sharing the stage with his old friend Brownie McGhee in Chicago in 1995 for what proved to be McGhee's final performance. Ricks also enjoys teaching at the Port Townsend Country Blues Workshop in Washington. His latest record, Many Miles of Blues, is a powerful, emotional statement. "I had some heavy family stuff on my mind," he explains. "My brother shot himself and wound up being paralyzed around that time. We didn't know if he was going to pull through or not, and here I'm singing 'Louis Collins' about a guy John [Hurt] knew that got shot and died. That first song, 'All Used Up,' that's an expression my brother would say all the time." Many Miles earned Ricks two W.C. Handy Award nominations and a slew of rave notices. The Ricks guitar style reflects something of all of the music he heard as a young man, and the strongest influences represent different regional styles. One hears Mississippi John Hurt, Brownie McGhee, and Lightning Hopkins, but Big Bill Broonzy's influence is important, too. Like Broonzy, Ricks' sense of time is relentless. He can also reach into a deep bag of Delta licks, which underscores the PanAmerican nature of his guitar playing. The currently popular term Piedmont doesn't scratch the surface. (Ricks dislikes the term, by the way, and says, "Brownie, Gary Davis, Buddy Moss, all giants of that style, never used that wor<~. ") In the end, it doesn't matter whether Ricks got a particular lick or chord from McGhee, Lonnie Johnson, Dale Bruning, or a book. Like every bluesman who ever lived, he takes what he likes from whereJ er he hears it and makes it his own. •
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2001
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ith buttery-smooth vocals and an engaging, earthy style, accomplished fingerstyle guitarist Eric Bibb has cut himself a niche in the acoustic blues scene. Bibb embraces the sound and spirit of musical heroes such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ughtning Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, and Taj Mahal while injecting his own personal vision of the blues. He made his first big splash at the London Blues Festival in May 1996 and began touring the U.S. in 1997, winning hordes of loyal fans almost overnight. He has since released four COs that combine traditional blues offerings and triumphant originals.
56
Bibb currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden, but was raised in a musical household in New York City. His father, Leon Bibb, was a folk and blues singer in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, and his uncle, John Lewis, is the world-renowned jazz ·pianist who cofounded the Modern Jazz Quartet. As a child, Bibb was surrounded by many of the major musical figures of the day, including Odetta, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and his godfather, Paul Robeson. I spoke to Bibb during his December 2000 tour of the Pacific Northwest. What music inspired you as a child?
Bibb I listened to pop radio a lot: the
soul stations down at the end of the d ial or Cousin Brucie playing the Beatles. But at the same time I was lis-
tening to Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly, Odetta, Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, Judy Collins ... a Jot of folk artists, whether they were blues artists or gospel artists or ragtime pickers. It was really a mixed bag. And my uncle John Lewis was the portway into that whole world of contemporary jazz. Did you study jazz?
I was never a jazz player, although I did study some jazz, both piano and guitar. But it influenced my early attempts at playing folk-oriented music. Harmonically, I was always interested in stretching the frame. The musicians who interested me most were the ones who would take traditional music as a starting point and put another spin on it. Josh White did that. Bibb
He put his own mark on the whole traditional thing. Richie Havens was also a great inspiration, as was Taj Mahal. Has your playing and recording always been folk-oriented?
Bibb I experimented with other types
of music-writing instrumental music, children's music, pop songs- and when my career wasn't doing what I wanted it to do, I decided to go back to square one and use as a basis for my repertoire the songs that had stuck in my craw as a youngster. I figured that if I still remembered them and still sang them while I was walking down the street, there must be something in them, a staying power or truth factor. As musicians, we can get so cerebral. You gotta remember what moves you, because music is supposed to move people. It's that energy inherent in a really fine song that brings people out to concert venues and makes people buy a CD. A song that has lasted for a hundred years without radio play has to have some real juice. If you can make that personal, then you have something people want. And at the same time you're connecting to a [musical] lineage. You're basically saying, "There's something universal here, and I want to be a part of it." Tell me something about your guitar work.
Bibb I've never been a strummer. I've
always appreciated the fact that the guitar is an orchestra. It's got so many possibilities in terms of accompaniment. You can use all six strings; you can use your thumb and three fingers; you can create movement , counterpoint, micromelodies . .. That's illustrated well on your songs "Come Back Baby" and "No More Cane on the Brazos" on your new album. You can hear the moving bass lines and melodies against your voice.
Bibb It's taken some time to get all that together. It's an intuitive process, not a cerebral thing. I mostly feel my way through a guitar arrangement. When I compose, it's the same way. I don't find basic chords to a melody and then work out a guitar part after the fact; I write the guitar part as part of the composition. Was guitar your first instrument?
Bibb Yes, from age eight. My Dad had so many wonderful guitar players acContinued on'page 60
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~
Blues Special
Come Back Baby Music and words traditional, arranged by Eric Bibb On this age-old 12-bar blues- performed by Eric Bibb on Home to Me and recorded innumerable times over the years by everyone from David "Honeyboy" Edwards and Robert Lockwood, Jr. to Ray Charles, Josh White, and Eddie "Cieanhead" Vinson- Bibb showcases his accomplished fingerstyle technique in the service of his smooth and soulful vocal delivery. Bibb's relaxed approach integrates moving bass lines and deftly fingerpicked chordal voic-
ings into the fabric of the song. His guitar provides a syncopated rhythm section behind his impassioned vocals, and this allows him to take great liberties with his vocal phrasing throughout the course of the song. Anchored by the groove, he is free to float over the bar line, fall behind the beat here or emphasize a word there by hitting the downbeat hard. Heart, hands, and mind work in perfect synchronicity on this revealing solo showcase. - Bill Milkowski
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MAY
2001
~ ACOUSTIC
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59
·~,
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Bibb I tried electric guitars, but I've never really been a player of solid-body electrics. Although I'm fascinated by some of the things that people are doing on electric guitar, I realized from an early age that I was bonded to the acoustic guitar. I spent a lot of time playing classical guitar as well and decided that the acoustic guitar was where I would find my expression. I might occasionally use something like a Howard Roberts guitar, which is very compatible with what I do. I like fingerpicking on electric guitar and capoing up high on the neck. Did you ever play with a flatpick?
Bibb No, that didn't feel natural to me. I did use a thumbpick and even experimented with fingerpicks, but in performance I found that I would just heat up and sweat and the thumbpicks would be flying off. For a long time I missed the clarity in the bass, but I realized that if I really worked on it with damping and hardening my thumb, I could get that [sound] anyway. Also, there are things you can do with your thumb that you can't do if you have a pick on it. You can brush strings, you can get a lot more colors out of the guitar. So even though it's a longer road and it's a lot of frustration not having that volume, I found that hard nails and calluses are the best tools for fingerpicking. Do you ever fret with your left thumb?
Bibb A lot. On "Come Back Baby" [transcribed on page 58) it's essential. I use dropped-D tuning as well, which is a wonderful tool for a singer who wants some bottom in the accompaniment. Maybe half of my repertoire is in dropped-D tuning. And there you really do need to use the thumb, because if you get to a G chord you can put the thumb over on the fifth fret there and play some kind of G chord with your other fingers on the first three or four
strings. It's a nice sound. It's great to have that extra fretting finger. A lot of players, even Delta and ragtime players, use their thumbs for fretting. Do you see a clear distinction between Delta and Piedmont blues styles? Do you have an affinity for one or the other?
What They Play Eric Bibb's main ax is his 1961 Gibson J-45, which he bought in a guitar shop in Newcastle, England. "It's a greatsounding instrument;• he says. "I per· form with other instruments as well, but if I had to take one guitar out on the road it would be that one. Gibsons tend to have a kind of self-damping thing in the bass that works great for certain types of thumbpicking. It's very different from the sustain of a guitar like a Martin, which would be great for a flatpicker or bluegrass player. The Gibson is a much bluesier guitar, and I like that shortness in the bass, that thumpy thing. A lot of the older Gibsons lose volume, but this instrument doesn't. It's well balanced, and it doesn't have a lot of ringing overtones so you can really get clarity:• Bibb also owns a handmade guitar he calls the Plum, which was made for him by Andras Novak, a luthier in Stockholm. Other instruments in his arsenal include a 1960 Stella 12-string and a 1930s wooden National. Bibb recently began using Elixir strings. "They have what I need in terms of clarity and tone, and that coating seems to be kinder on my fingers:· says Bibb. "Somebody who plays and tours as much as I do needs to watch out for that whole sore-finger syndrome~ Bibb experimented with different gauges and finally settled on .0 13- .056. "I play rather energetically on stage~ he says, "and I try to keep accuracy but at the same time produce a sound that jumps out of the guitar, so I need a heavier gauge, especially with dropped-D tuning. But if I went heavier than .056, I'd start losing tone and speed. I want fluidity and some resistance, but I don't want stiffness. I end up tuni11g my instruments down to Et. With a droppedD tuning in Et, you actually go down to D ~. And because I use a capo a lot, it gives the heavy-gauge strings a hair more slackness that fits my left hand nicely:• He also uses Sunrise soundhole pickups and Trace Elliot acoustic amplifiers on stage.
ACOUSTIC GUITAR
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2001
The Guitar oi
The Guitar of
Lightnin' Hopkins
Mance Lipscomb
Taught by Ernie Hawkins
Taught by Ernie Hawkins
9:J··m in video • Level 32. page tab/musi<: booklet GW 804 S39·9S
Volume One %
When you hear someone say "Texas Blu es Guitar" you may immediately think of Stevie Ray and Jimmie . Vaughn or maybe Fredd ie King. The invisible presence, buried deep in every one of their guitar riffs, is the true king of Texas blues, Lightnin ' Hopkins. Offered here are all the secrets and tricks of Lightnin's deeply accomplished, deceptively simple acoustic Texas boogie gu itar style. This lesson also features rare video footage of Lightnin'. Titles include: Pull A Party, Coin' Down Slow, Shin· ing Moon, Baby Please Don't Co and Toke Me Bock
··· · -~············· ····· 94..,.ln video • Level 3 48 page tab/music booklet GW Sol> S39·9S
........................ The genius country bluesman/songster Mance Lipscomb was the most accomplished of the Texas "dead thumb" guitarists. His solid driving bass- propelled his dancing, spontaneous melodies thtough song after song. He came Jrom a musical family and grew up playing in the Texas country blues traditions. In this video, Ernie Hawkins carefully takes you through the complete range of Mance's playing, revealing all the tricks of the trade. Most importantly, you will learn how to play in Mance's style so that you can effortlessly adapt it to any kind of song. Titles include: Captain Captain, Night Time Is The Right Time, Gain' Down Slow, You Cot To See Your Momma Every Night, You Got To Reap What You Sow, Sugorbobe and Cherry Boll
The Guitar oi
Mance Lipscomb
The Guitar oi
Volume Two
Blind Blake
Taught by Ernie Hawkins
Taught by Woody Mann 94·min video • J;evet J 48 page tab/music booklet GW 801 S39·9S
Blind Blake was the premier ragtime blues guitarist of the 1920s. His playing featured unique right hand thumb rolls that evoked the feel of the Charleston dance step. Blind Blake influenced generations of country blues guitarists and was never equalled. Titles include: Diddie Wo Diddie, Chump Man Blues, Police Dog Blues, Block Dog Blues, That Will Never Happen No More and Blind Arthur's Breakdown
The Guitar oi
Big Bill Broonzy Taught by Woody Mann 90·min video • Level 3 48 page tab/music booklet GW 802. S39·9S
Big Bill Broonzy's repertoire was we ll recorded, from solo to duets to ensemble playing. He was a master of ragtime and country blues guitar. His playing was highlighted by a strong pu lsating bass and melodic lead li nes. Woody Mann carefully explains Big Bill's techniques and style in this video lesson. Also presented in this video lesson is ra re footage of Big Bil l from the 1950s. Titles include: Mappers Blues, Pig Meat Strut Long Toll Momo, Worried Man Blues, Saturday Night Rub, Brownskin Shuffle, How You Wont It Done, Mississippi River Blues, Worrying You Off My Mind and Hey, Hey
···· ················~··· 61>-min video • Level 3 40 page tab/music booklet GW 807 $39.95
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......................... In this second video lesson Ernie Hawkins continues his study of Mance Lipscomb's guitar style and techniques. In this lesson Ernie highlights the ever popular Spoonful, two ragtime instrumentals in the key of G and A and an extended blues in the key of G. Titles include: Spoonful, CRag, A Rag and Blues In C
The Guitar oi
Blind Boy Fuller Taught by Ari Eisinger
•••••••• * •••• *It
•••••••••
88·mln video • Level 2./3 2.4 page tab/music booklet GW 803 S39•9S
...•.••..•.......••.•.•. Blind Boy Fuller recorded his unique brand ofcountry blues from 1935 through 1940. His guitar arrangements are stri.king{y original and make perfect use of the unique sound of the National steel guitar which he used on most of his recordings. He is best known for his dassk Ttuckin' My Blues Away which has been performed and recorded by generations of blues guitarists. This video gives a fully-detailed presentation of Blind Boy Fuller's music. Titles include: Untrue Blues, Jivin' Woman Blues, Pistol Slopper Blues, Funny Feeling Blues, Meat Shokin' Woman and Truckin' My Blues Away
The Guitar oi
Blind Willie McTell Taught by Ernie Hawkins
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Blind Willie McTell, a legendary mystical genius, recorded from 1927, when he established his reputation with Statesboro Blues, all the way into the 1950's. In homage to the great Georgia 12-string bluesman, Bob Dylan said: "No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie MeTell". McTell is known for his unique swift clean fingerpicking style on his old Stella 12-string guitar. This was perfectly suited for his blues, rags and haunting vocals. He was also a master slide player, able to melt hearts with both blues and gospel gems. In this lesson Ernie Hawkins teaches Blind Willie's greatest songs. Titles include: Statesboro Blues, Come Around To My House Momo, Broke Down !ngine, Searching The Desert For The Blues, Momo T'Ain't Long For Day and Savannah Momo
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Bibb There are a lot of similarities be-
tween the two styles. In the '20s and '30s, musicians were moving around a lot- on foot, by boxcar, whatever. So there was a degree of swapping licks that went on. Some of my colleagues have made careers out of really nailing the styles of a Reverend Gary Davis or a Robert Johnson, but I never wanted to adhere strictly to a certain style, because I only wanted to play the licks and the moves that really touched me. I didn't want to play them because they were good guitar moves and because somebody else made them sound great. I found those licks in [the music of] gospel guitar players, in the Mills Brothers type of guitar players, the ragtime players like Blind Willie McTell, a Delta player like Tommy Johnson, somebody like Robert Pete Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe ... It was a question of collecting a language of blues and fingerstyle guitar playing. I like when somebody can come up with a song of their own that sounds like it could've belonged in the repertoire of one of their heroes. To me, that's a real victory. It adds to the blues legacy.
my guitars are for tone Players tell me that my guitars are thebest-sounding archtops being built today. Well, that's exactly what I shoot for. You see, every builder has their pas~on Mine is tone. Intensely sweet tone, with crisp, responsive highs and well-balanced lows. Sound you can feel-with great volume, projection and sustain. To get this, I hand-craft each guitar to its full potential, using the world~ finest tonewoods, consistently creating instruments that look as beautiful as they play and sound.So, if you share my passion for tone, I know you'll lovemy guitars. And I always enjoy buildingfor fellow fanatics ...
P.S. My guitars aren't as expensive as you might think. To learn more about the guitars ! build, visit my web site, where you can also purchase a numbered, limited edition handmade color catalog.
Bibb Exactly. And that's what's needed. If the genre's going to stay vibrant,
it needs new vehicles for its expression, new ragtime tunes, new blues tunes. What do you say to the blues critic who contends that the language of the idiom consists of only a few chords and repeat~ ed verses?
Bibb The blues is not just three or four
chords and simplistic lyrics that repeat the first two lines. The great blues players knew the language and were able to make every tune distinctive, even though you could tell it was a blues tune. People who are uninitiated to classical music will hear something by Vivaldi and something by Bach and say it all sounds the same. I've heard uninitiated people say that about blues. Howlin' Wolf's vocal phrasing was very subtle and sophisticated. It went over the bar line and laid behind the beat and then caught up again in a real conversa· tional manner.
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Bibb Absolutely. Taj is also a great phraser like that. A lot of blues guitarists know licks-they'll figure out this lick that Albert King did or Freddie King or Albert Collins- but it's where you put it that matters. It's how you lay it in the structure of the tune that is evocative. And it's not just a combination of notes; it's the dynamics you play it with. The blues is vocal music. The phrasing comes from a vocal tradition. One reason a guy like Howlin' Wolf was so great was that he never made singing a slave to the accompaniment. It was always a question of the vocal being the king. He had a story to tell, and his vocal delivery was written in stone. A lot of people think that blues melodies are just improvised, but they're not. They're conceived when the song is written.
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Have you been writing or recording any new songs? Bibb There will be a new American
record, which will be simultaneously released in Europe, probably prior to the summer season. I'm really looking forward to that because with every record you feel like you come closer to what you really want to share. More and more I'm finding that I want the power and the immediacy and truth of the live-in-the-studio performance to be at the core of what I do. It gives you the opportunity to be more intuitive and less self-conscious. Musicians get in their own way a lot, and guitar players are sometimes the worst offenders. They get hung up with technique. That's not what I want to be about. I'm not t r ying to wow people. I want to integrate the singing and the guitar playing so it's a choreographed, integrated thing. A genius at that would be somebody like Blind Willie Johnson, whose s lide playing and vocals were just one. It feels like • riding a bicycle.
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Discography ERIC BIBB Home to M e, EarthBeat/Rhino 79793 (2000). Spirit and the Blues, Rhino 75686 (1999). Me to You, Code Blue 20444 (1998). Go od Stuff, Rhino 75265 (1998, originally released in 1997 on Opus 3).
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coustic blues has enjoyed a resurgence in the last decade, and many fans and musicians have developed an interest in the styles and players that are at the root of the acoustic __rblues sound. As with any popular guitar style, the players want to know about gear. In the acoustic blues realm, this includes not only a variety of new and vintage acoustic and resonator guitars, but a number of specialized accessories like bottleneck slides. Here are answers to some questions I'm often asked about the guitars and accessories needed to play the blues.
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What kinds of guitars did the early bluesmen play?
H.C. Speir ran a music store in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1920s and '30s and arranged recording sessions for Charley Patton, Skip James, Son House, and Robert Johnson, to name a few. He told collector/researcher Gayle Wardlow that his customers preferred the Stella guitars that sold for $9.95. Speir's recollection was borne out by House and fellow Mississippian Bukka White who said they started on Stella instruments, which were manufactured by the Oscar Schmidt Company in New Jersey and distributed in the South by St. Louis Music. Also popular were Washburn guitars, made by Chicago's Lyon and Healy and handled by mailorder giant Montgomery Ward. Lemon Jefferson cradles a Lyon and Healy instrument in his only known photo. Sears and Roebuck's famous catalog, the "wish book," where many rural pickers · got their first guitars, also included a line of inexpensive guitars built by Harmony and other Chicago firms. The popularity of these instruments had more to do with their availability and low price than playability or superior sound. Many models had tailpieces instead of the fixed pin bridges common on more expensive flattops; and virtually all of them had transverse, or ladder, top bracing instead of the Martin-style X pattern. Three or four of these bulky braces ran from side to side above and below the soundhole, often accompanied by a substantial bridge patch. Though the purpose of this design was to cut manufacturing costs, these old guitars have a distinctive, twangy sound, and many of them are quite loud. It's not that the blues players felt any attachment to these instruments, however; the few who ever made any money invariably ditched their Stellas in favor of pricier items. Speir recalled, for example, that when Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe returned to the Delta in 1930 after the success of her salacious "Bumble Bee" recording, the principal trapping of their new-found notoriety was a pair of gleaming Nationals.
A
What guitars work best for playing slide?
Back when referred to wine, A was a tacit dismissal of beaters that were nearly useless for anyvintage good for slide
thing else (i.e., a plywood Harmony with storage space between the strings and MAY 2001 ' ACOUSTIC GUITAR
fingerboard). Now that slide guitar and budget Harmony guitars hold a somewhat more elevated position in the acoustic firmament, the description still has some merit. A guitar with a bright sound- biased toward the mids and high endand higher-than-average action is a logical choice for the slide player. Intonation is not as big an issue when you're seldom fretting in the higher positions, and stout action makes for cleaner bottlenecking. Some of the cheapo boxes of yore fill the slide bill admirably. Mance Upscomb with an inexpensive Harmony Sovereign. That doesn't mean that guitars of pedigree Are vintage guitars better than new are unsuitable. On his milestone ones for playing blues? 1941 Library of Congress debut, Muddy Waters played producer Alan Lomax's No. There was a time when vintage Martin. Bukka White, whose Stella gave were better than new ones guitars up the ghost during his 1940 Okeh anything; but the much-toutfor playing recording date, crafted slide mastered "second golden age" of guitar design pieces like "Jitterbug Swing" and is as much a reality for the rootsy twang"Streamline Special" on a Gibson borster as it is for other players. My conrowed from Big Bill Broonzy. Starting temporary Collings C-10 is equal, if not with bottleneck boss Tampa Red, and up the prewar Gibsons that insuperior to, to the present, the weapon of choice for spired its shape, and my 1998 National many players Oncluding this writer) has E-N is actually louder and fuller-sounding been the National resonator guitar. The than most of the vintage brass-body, sinsuperior volume and high-register susgle-resonator guitars to which I've comtain of these instruments make it easier pared it. The increased quality and dito get the decisive attack and smooth versity of modern acoustics, combined legato that distinguishes slide guitar with the sometimes stratospheric prices music. of high-end vintage instruments in good No matter what ax you choose, an escondition, makes a new guitar an imporsential feature of a guitar that's good for tant consideration for anyone in the marslide is the way it's set up. Heavier and ket for an instrument they're actually higher describe the ideal strings and acgoing to play. tion. Most acoustic guitars will accept That said, vintage instruments can medium-gauge strings, and a common still be obtained (even by those of us device is to use a medium (.013-.056) set, who don't own software companies), subbing heavier wire (say, .015 and .018) and finding them can be fun if you know for the unwound first and second strings. what to look for. My friend Dave Moore I prefer an even heavier set for my responded to an ad for a $100 "debro" Nationals: a custom-made, round-core in an Iowa City swap sheet and wound .016-.060 set. At least as important as up with a 1930 National Triolian. Cases strings is action. I've found that I can set like this are increasingly rare, but they my guitars up so that the bottom side of still happen. I recently got a 1932 Style I the first string passes a full 3/32 of an inch tricone at an affordable price by purfrom the crown of the 12th fret without chasing it in compromised condition (it compromising the intonation or making was coming apart at the seams) and the guitar too hard to fret up the neck. sending it to the National factory to Use these suggestions as a rule of thumb. be restored. It's by no means in mint Experiment with strings and setup until you find a good balance between tone condition, but it plays and sounds, and playability. well, like a vintage German silver 65
tricone. I've gotten a lot of use out of it on studio slide sessions. The blues buff on a budget can even find older instruments with that great cheap-suit look and sound in a (gaspO vintage guitar shop. This is done by sidestepping the prominently displayed collectors' items whose prices are commensurate with the down-payment on a house and perusing the "hall of shame" racks in the back. There you may find guitars with an obvious history by Regal, Harmony, Kay, Stella, or Kalamazoo. If something looks good, check the action and examine the instrument for obvious defects, badly executed repairs, or signs of past trauma. Remember that a neck reset or fret replacement can cost hundreds of dollars. A new nut, replacement tuners, or a bridge reglue is not so expensive. Don't pass over archtop instruments; they're some of the best values on the vintage market. And don't be put off by a few "hillbilly tracks"-signs of honest wear. Sometimes when you give a dirty old guitar a good polishing you can almost hear it say thank you.
I've gotten some wonderful guitars for a few hundred bucks or less by following these simple directives. They're the kind of guitars that make people ask, "Hey, what's that?" Are there different types of resonator guitars? What's the difference between a National and a Dobra?
In a basic way, all resonator guitars are the same. The sound is produced when string vibrations are transmitted through the bridge into an aluminum speaker cone (or cones) mounted inside the body. Hence the generic designations: "ampliphonic," "resophonic," "resonator guitar." They're among the most fascinating of acoustic instruments because they differ from other stringed instruments in so many ways. The bodies can be made of metal, wood, or even plastic. The necks may have a square profile for Hawaiian-style playing, or they may be conventionally rounded. The name on the headstock may be National, Dobro, Regal, Supro, Airline, Magnatone, Sho-Bro ... the list goes on. A Brazilian variant has even been made since the '30s by the Del Vecchio Company. Depending on the model and con-
A
dition, the resophonic guitar can sound like a celestial chorus or a garbage can full of newspapers falling down a fire escape. Since they first appeared in 1927, they've been a central voice in Hawaiian music, country and bluegrass, jazz, and especially the blues. The original National instruments were designed by luthier/inventor John Dopyera at the behest of guitarist George Beauchamp. They had three small resonators connected by a T-shaped aluminum bar on which the bridge was mounted. The success of this design inspired Dopyera and Beauchamp to form the National String Instrument Company. In 1928, National introduced another model (also with a metal body). It had a single nine-and-a-half inch resonator with the bridge mounted on a wooden disc attached to the small end of the cone. By 1929, John Dopyera had left National, designed a new style of resonator guitar, and (with his brothers) formed a new company, the Dobro Corporation. . Like National, Dobro made standard and Hawaiian-style guitars (and a variety of other instruments). Less costly wooden bodies would largely take the place of the metals common to early Nationals, but the main difference was in the design
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1964 Supro Resophonic: Folk Star.
of the resonator. Mounted in a wooden "well," the Dobro resonator had a single compound cone, like a flattened w in cross-section that opened toward the front coverplate of the guitar. The bridge was mounted on an eight-legged aluminum frame or "spider," whose feet rest-
MAY 2001 ' ACOUSTIC GUITAR
ed on the outer edge of the resonator. The resulting sound, sort of like a banjo played through a sustain pedal and a r~ verb unit, is distinct from that of National guitars, which generally have a punchier, more hornlike tone. The National and Dobro companies eventually merged, continuing to manufacture resonator guitars and also pioneering early electric guitar technology. Ironically, the latter development helped to render National guitars obsolete as Hawaiian, jazz, and blues players abandoned them in favor of electric instruments. Very few metal-bodied cone resonator guitars were produced after World War II. In country music, the sound of the Dobra's spider resonator persisted. This was largely due to popular records by acoustic country icon Roy Acuff and bluegrass masters Flatt and Scruggs, whose bands incorporated the Dobro played in a modified Hawaiian style. Dobro guitars have remained in production, under various brand names, up to the present. Today, the Dobro trad~ mark is owned by Gibson and appears on instruments with both wood and metal bodies and spider- and con~type resonators. The manufacture of National brand guitars, single and tricone, was r~
sumed in 1988 and, to make matters even more complicated, the company has recently introduced a squar~neck, wood-body, spider-resonator guitar (Style D) to its line. In addition, instruments and resonators modeled after National and Dobro designs (and of widely varying quality) are presently made by factories and individual custom builders throughout the world as a r~ vival of interest in the resonator guitar continues to spread. How can I amplify my acoustic and resonator guitars?
It's ironic that one of the questions most frequently asked by acoustic musicians is, "How can I get a wire on this thing?" It's a good point to consider, especially for the live performer. After all, how often have you heard this? "Hello, I'll be your sound engineer tonight. I got here early because I wanted to be sure we had enough time to get optimum mic placement and suitable levels in the room and over the monitors. The acoustics here are great, and during the show you'll be able to hear a pin drop. By the way, that's a great shirt!" Happens all the time, right? Just the same, I always
67
feel a little better knowing that I can augment the ambient microphone sound with a little D.!. The oldest method of amplifying an acoustic guitar is to attach a magnetic pickup to the face under the strings. In other words, you make it into an electric guitar. Blues players from Lightning Hopkins to Elmore James did this by clipping a single-coil pickup from the now defunct DeArmond company into the soundhole. It's a great sound; the DeArmond is just dirty enough, and there's not much feedback. Pre-owned DeArmonds can still be found, and there are a number of good add-on magnetic pickups currently available from companies like Seymour Duncan, Fishman, and Sunrise. Their double-coil humbucking units are cleaner and quieter than a DeArmond. Of course, clipping a fiveounce metal object to your soundhole diminishes your guitar's acoustic response, to say the least. The alternative to a magnetic pickup-one whose electronic field picks up the vibrations of the metal strings-is a piezo transducer. These are mounted or stuck to the inside of the guitar face or under the bridge saddle and are sensitive to the vibrations of the guitar itself. They're small, and the signal is more "acoustic-sounding." Their active circuitry requires a battery or other power source, and most sound better with an outboard EQ. Notable among these, especially for resonator guitars, are Highlanders, stock equipment on many contemporary Nationals. They're loud and realistic-sounding with little or no EQ. In combination with an ambient cardioid mic to deliver all those nice crunchy metallic noises a National makes, they produce a great reso sound, even on a festival stage. Some guitarists use a combination of magnetic pickups, piezo transducers, and even internally mounted microphones, mixing them, running an outboard EQ, and adding digital effects like reverb, delay, and compression. Experiment with this kind of setup if you've got the inclination (and money). Before I go to that kind of trouble, I'll just get out my Telecaster guitar and Vibrolux amp. • EXCERPTED FROM Steve James' Blues Guitar Answer Book, forthcoming from
String Letter Publishing.
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VERMONT'S LARGEST SELECTION
of
STRINGED INSTRUMENTS
Maple LeafMusic
NEW -
GUITARS- USED
Martin· Paul Reed Smith· Collings Larrivee • Fender • Froggy Bottom Mandolins • Banjos • Fiddles
&
Bows
19 ELLIOT ST. BRATTLEBORO, VT 05301
802-254-5559 Check out our vintage intrument list. store info and Ftoggy Bottom pages on our web sire:
http://-www.mapleleafmusic.com
MAY
2001
~ ACOUSTIC
GU I TAR
Mel Bay Presents . . .
Mastering the Guitar by William Bay and Mike Christiansen
Absolutely the best method for all contemporary guitar styles! h1 innovative. exciling way to leom both flaticking and fingerstyle guitar! Concepts tough! in this series cover vir· tuolly fNery key wilh solo and duet orrongements of lhemes by some of the world's greot composer.;. The music is presented in nototion and tobla· lure and CO'Ie!S styles ronging from Renaissance ond flamenco to be-bop ond rock.
'L.~=
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NOTED GUITARISTS:
~MARTIN ~JOEL
CARTHY ~STEVE GILLETIE MABUS ~STEVE TILSTON
KARAN CASEY • NORMA WATERSON • SILK CITY MAMADOU DIABATE • HARMONIA • MONTCORBIER CINDY MANGSEN • ARTISAN • TOM, BRAD & ALICE SALLY ROGERS & HOWIE BURSEN • SIMPLE GIFTS LAURIE RILEY • FINEST KIND • MANY MORE! FREE BROCHURE: PO Box 399, Guilderland, NY t2084 Phone: (5 18)765-28 t5 • E-mail: [email protected]
www.oldsongs.org 71
workmanship. Steel-string, classical, and archtop since 1978. Gary Zimnicki, 15106 Garfield, Allen Park, Ml 48101. (313) 381-2817. www.zimnicki.com KATHY WINGERT GUITARS. One at a time ... one of a kind. Fine, hand-built acoustic guitars. Please visit www.wingertguitars.com. (31 0) 522-9596. LAWRENCE SMITH, AUSTRALIAN luthier. High-
Megas, Portland, OR. (503) 2898788. [email protected]
~ "" 1 ' Ct>ntury M~""
phone: 802.888.416 1 http://www.rigelmandolin.com PO Box 288 Hyde Park, VT 05655
OME BANJOS. BLUEGRASS, JAZZ, clawhammer, and guitar. Free color catalog. OME Banjos, 5680 Valmont, Boulder, CO 80301. (303) 449-0041. www.omebanjos.com. E-mail: [email protected]
P.W. CRUMP CO. IRISH BOUZOUKI, octave mandolin specialists. Guitarmaker since 1975. C.F. Martin warranty repair. For more information, call (707) 826-1 I64. Fax: (707) 82&-9530. E-mail: crurnpco@ humboldtl.com or visit www. pwcrumpco.com
SHANT! GUITARS. CUSTOM BUILDing guitars for individuals. Steelstring flattops, archtops, and nylon-string. Call or write for free color brochure. (209) 795-5299. PO Box 310, Avery, CA 95224.
made acoustic and acoustic-electric guitars. Phone: (770) 974-1340.
THOMPSON GUITARS. FLATTOPS and classicals. 9905 Coldstream Creek Rd. , Vernon, BC V1B 1C8, Canada. (250) 542-9410. TONY GRAZIANO UKULELES. All sizes, four, six, eight strings. Electrics, cases. For a brochure, write or call Tony Graziano, 1016 Seabright Ave., Santa Cruz, CA 95062. (831) 423-2517 or (831) 4793590 shop/fax. THE CONCERT CLASSICAL GUItars of Thomas Humphrey can be seen and heard on the Web at www.thomashumphrey.com. E-mail: [email protected]. (914) 2560035.
rJ ae a:iru~;31~ acous tic a mplification syst~ms live/st udio reference mon itors i y
www.DaedalusMusic.com~ 607.564.0000
"the ONLY choice" since 1992
MUSIC INSTRUCTION FREE VIDEO OFFER: VISIT our Web site, www.guitarvideos. com for instructional videos featuring Chet Atkins, Stefan Grossman, John Renbourn, Marcel Dadi, Buster Jones, Pierre Bensusan, Pat Kirtley, and more. Free postage on all video orders.
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SUPERIOR INSTRUCTION IN AN incomparable setting. Week-long with master guitarist Mike Dowling in the beautiful northern Rockies.
Box 900H • Athens, Ohio 45701 • USA For free catalog call 800·848·2273 Fax 740·593·7922 • www.stewmac.com
72
ACOUST I C GUITAR I MAY
2001
Year round. Lodging, meals, unlimited instruction. Brochure: Wind River Guitar, (307) 455-3748. www. mikedowling.com FREE CATALOG! ENORMOUS selection! Instructional guitar books and videos. All styles. Also, Steven Crowell's four-year jazz guitar course. Write or call now! Chord Melody Productions, PO Box 4132, Dept. A, Annapolis, MD 21403. (410) 729-3859. www. cbordmelody.com CUSTOM TRANSCRIPTION SPEcialist. Large catalog (Ventures). Albums, songs, solos- all styles. John Maier, 55 William St., Dept. AG, Pleasantville, NY 10570. (914) 7416321. www.guitar-lessons-at-home. com THE ORIGINAL CUSTOM TRANscription Service. Learn the tunes and solos you choose-accurate, professional! Flatpicking, fingerpicking, alternate tunings, all styles. John McGann, PO Box 688AG, Boston, MA 02130-0006. (617) 325-6853. www.johnmcgann.com JOHN KNOWLES' FINGERSTYLE Quarterly: Music you will en joy learning and playing. Notation with tab and cassette. Loaded with ideas you can use in your own arrangements. "Think of it as a
chance to steal from the best." -Chet Atkins. For free information, write Fingerstyle Quarterly, Dept. 10, PO Box 120355, Nashville, TN 37212. (800) 662..()577. MARTIN SIMPSON GUITAR workshop series 2001. Study with the master! April 20, 2 1, 22, Marblehead, MA; May 25, 26, 27, Traverse City, Ml; June 1, 2, 3, Clarksburg, NJ. Also private lessons recorded and transcribed, correspondence study, books, COs, videos. Web site: martinsimpson. com or call Tim Higgins at High Bohemia Records, (231) 275-4058. MUSIC THEORY COURSE FOR Gu itar. Correspondence. Complete curriculums. (Skills, ear, theory.) Certificates. Jim Sutton Institute of Guitar, 23014 Quail Shute, Spring, TX 77389-3944, USA. (800) 6217669. [email protected]. www. guitar-jimsuttoninst.com
PUBLICATIONS THOUSANDS OF SONGS IN TAB! The world's best selection of songbooks, instructional book/ CO packs, videos, reference books, and more! All items in s tock. Orders shipped within 48 hours. Contact us for a free catalog or to order: (800) 637-2852. www. musicdispatcb.com. Mention codeAGCAT.
fARABOLIC BRACE WORKS Bringing Guitars to Life Expert Brace Sha-ing Gmtly enhanced volume, suSialn, string balance & clarity. Scallop«! braces or not.
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Box 3044 • Slh-.r City, NM 88062
RECORDINGS
SHOPS
FREE! DOWNLOAD BLUESMAN Nashville Fats' songs. www.MP3. com/ NashvilleFats. "You Reap Just What You Sow," a #I MP3 hit. Deep delta blues.
ADOPT YOUR "GUITAR OF A Lifetime" from Ohio's largest Martin d eale r. Also Larrivee, Lowden, Gallagher, Bre edlove, National, Petro s, Bourgeois , Ste lling, Deeri ng, Lakewood , Gibson, and many others! Large dulcimer, banjo, and mandolin selection. Comfortable prices! Wildwood Music, Historic Roscoe Village, Coshocton, OH 43812. (740) 622-4224. www. wildwoodmusic. com
SERVICES
POSITIONS WORLD OF ST RINGS NEEDS qualified luthier full-time to repair violin family instruments, sitars, mandolins, banjos, etc., plus Martin and Gibson warranty. Send resume to 1738 E. 7th St., Long Beach, CA90813
Visit Edit Nine Web Design a t www.editnine.com or call (800) 835-4430 for a free estimate.
CREATIVE WEB SITE DESIGN FOR musicians and small businesses.
BLUE NOTE MUSIC, LOCATED IN San Luis Obispo, California, spec ializes in fine handcrafted and vintage guitars. Also stocking banjos, mandolins, violins, violas, basses, harps, ukes , and other sundry stringed instruments. 570
All Those Nicks & Chips From Belt Buckles Buttons &
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cl..v~reenfield ~guitars
Individually Handcrafted • St eelstring • Classical • Archtop
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Small Dog Case Covers... Picker's Best Friend When you demand quality protection for your fine instrument, call Small Dog. We carry case covers made to fit Marrin and Taylor guitar cases along with many other guitar, mandolin, banjo and violin case styles. Custom covers for hard to fi t or vintage · cases are our specialty. Waterproof, insulated Small Dog Case Covers add to the life of your instrument and case. Don't leave home without your Small Dog! Made in Massachusetts, available from Small Dog or your dealer. Call toll free to order our complimentary brochure.
Small Dog Case Covers 574 Boston Ave. • Medford, MA 02155-5539
Call800-732-3016 • Fax 781-396-0712
MAY
2001
! ACOUSTIC
GUITAR
73
Higuera St. #15, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401. (805) 541~188. bluenote@ thegrid.net. www.thegrid.net/ bluenotemusic FREE GUITAR TAB CATALOG. Virtually all transcriptions in print! Classical, jazz, flamenco. fingerstyle arrangements, folk, rock , country, and more! Guitar OneStop, Dept. AG, 4607 Maple Ave., Baltimore, MD 21227. (4 10) 2420326. Or see it all on-line: www. kirkpatrickguitar.com JERRY ROBERTS OFFERS OVER 100 handmade classical guitars from $300 to $7,000. Hill, Kakos, Kohno, La Mancha, Ramirez. Ruck, Thames, and more. (800) 775-{)650. www.lamancha.com. LOS GATOS GUITAR GALLERY. Fine handcrafted an d vintage instruments. Many new arrivals from solo luthiers: Mark Blanchard, Mike Baranik, Roy McAlister, Ed Claxton, Kent Hamblin, Kenny Hill. A lso Santa Cruz, Tacoma and RainSong. 359 Village Ln., Los Gatos, CA 95030. (408) 3954770. www.lggg. com MA PLE STREET GUITA RS. Outstanding selection of fine acoustic and classical guitars: Collings, Goodall, Hill , Hirade, LoPrinzi, Lowden, Martin, National Reso-Phonic, Ramirez, Rein, Santa Cruz, Takamine, Tr aphagen, and
many more! Spanish student clas· sicals from $349! Find out why our guitars are so easy to play and sound so great! 3199 Maple Dr., Atlanta. GA 30305. (404) 231-5214. www. maplestreetguitars.com. E-mail: [email protected]
tars by San t a Cruz, Collings, Schoenberg, Martin. old Gibson. Old basses. 161 West 25th Ave. #201-A, San Mateo, CA 94403. (650) 572-8400. [email protected]. www.steveswanguitars.com
MARC SILBER GUITAR CO. 1998 Players' Choice Award! Handmade since 1992. Hawaiian lap, steelstring, classical, flamenco, ukuleles. From S750. (510) 644-1958. www.marcsilbermusic.cDm
CATHEDRAL MUSIC
ONE 1HOUSAND SUPERB I NSTRUments! Every brand and model you crave. Visit our showroom and play 'em all. Can't visit? A sample copy of The Vintage News is free for the asking. Mandolin Brothers, 629 Forest, Staten Island, NY 10310. Tel: (718) 981-8585. Fax: (718) 816-4416. Click on www. mandoweb.com. E-mail: mandolin® mandoweb.com
7,000 titles for all styles of guitar. (713) 528-5666. Toll free: (800) 4398525. Fax: (713) 777~97. sales@ guitargallerymusic.com
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1813 5th Ave. Troy, NY 12180 Fine Handcrafted Guitars
· Vhty l
Breedlove. Everett. Robertson, Hill, Webber, Goodall. Larrivee, Lowden, Froggy Bottom, Tacoma and more.
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STRINGS/ACCESSORIES
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SCHOENBERG GUITARS: PATIENT, detailed experti se. All levels of acoustic guitar. 100 yards from the ferry (from downtown San Francisco). 106 G Main St., Tiburon, CA 94920. (415) 789-0846. www. om28.com STEVE SWAN GUITA RS. Specializing in new guitars by Mer rill, Deli'Arte, Ed Claxto n, Santa Cr uz. New double basses by Gllga, Mathias Thoma. Used gui-
The award-winning Band-In-a-Box ac:com.panimtnt software IO< Moclntosh' & Windows" is so to use! Ju>t type on the chords IO< •ny song u>ing standard chord symbols (like C, fm7"' C13b9), choose the style yotld like, •nd 81nd-ln-o-8ox does the rtll - outO
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• Fixes warped guitar tops • Makes your guitar louder & richer • Is scientifically proven
PG Music Inc. 29 Cadllloc Avenue
THIN·MEO.·HEAVY·EX. HEAVY PICK COLORS---BLACK, PURPLE·BLUE-PINK-REDGREEN·YELLOW·WHITE PRINTED TWO LINES 10 SPACES EACH LINE ORDERS SHIPPED WITHIN 3 WORKING DAYS
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ACO U ST IC
GU I T AR
I
MAY
2001
HOW TO FI ND THE RIGHT
repair and maintenance. Parts, tools, hardware, advice, repair articles, and more!
ACOUSTIC
strings: Thousands of different singles, sets, and bulk strings! See our advertisements on pages 82 and 88. www.juststrings.com
CONNECTIONS.
Microphones and pickups for guitars, violins, mandolins, banjos, and other stringed instruments. Brands include: MiniFiex and Joe Mills mics; Mcintyre, L.R. Baggs, and B-Band pickups; Elixir strings. On the Web at www.acousticon. com
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GIG BAGS/ GUITAR BACKPACKS. Finally! Convenient, hands-free carrying of your guitar and your gear. (800) 236-8830. www. gultarbackpack.com. Summit Guitar Pack.
Pbo11t: 212.675.3236 Fax: 212.367.9767 http://www.tbtguitarsalon.com
MusEdit - Powerful notation software!
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Translate Treble/Bass to Tab and vi« versa 9000 chords In dictionary or edit your own Alttnma tunlngs/lnotruments, Trans~n. (Chec:k, M.O. MiDI Output. Great priming, Easy lyric entry VISA, MC) Scrolling, and morw. 156 p. manual (Windows 95/98/NT)
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Gallagher Guitars Wartrace, TN 37183
MAY 2001
~ ACOUSTIC
for Guitar, Bass, o,(,.~lin
Play hundreds of s rfoS"w lth
(93 1) 389-6455 Played by: Doc Watson Steve Kaufman Claire Lynch J im Hurst Chris Jones James Griffin Kruger Bros. & Many more www.Gallagherguitar.com
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J.
"worth ~v~ry pm~:J minutes I wa.< playing on th~whol~freJ~oarJ;f:""_..is simple. • C Dunn "a powerful & 9J~nnljqr any playu at any ltvt!l" BreiJUla~t·'{f;uitdrtt- Shan fa TK'
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75
RE VIEW
AII-I n-One Guitar Packs By Teja Gerken
Near Philadelphia in J enkintown, PA 10 Minutes from PA Turnpike
Featuring Breedlove • Collings • Deering • Deii'Arte • Everett • C. Fox • Goodall • Huss and Dalton • Martin • MidMoMando • National Res-0Phonic • Rainsong • Robertson • Santa Cruz • Schoenberg • Tippin • Weber • J.R. Zeidler • Acoustic Amplification New • Used • Vintage Quiet, Friendly, Relaxed Atmosphere
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Fingcrpicking
$699 Includes pick-up
Rockabilly Counny
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Rock Starter kits offer the accessorfes needed to get you going right away.
uying a first guitar can be an intimidating experience that raises a lot of questions: How do you choose from all the available options? How do you know the guitar you're looking at will be right for you? What accessories will you need? Ideally, a knowledgeable friend or qualified sales person will be able to assist in making the right decisions, but there are times when neither option is available. As a result, many manufacturers
B
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1-800-826-5482 76
of entry-level guitars have begun to offer complete packages that include an inexpensive starter guitar as well as the necessary accessories to get going right away. I took a look at seven steelstring guitar packs, offered by Alvarez (RDIO Value Pack, $319), Dean (fl Gear Pack, $279), Epiphone (PRIOO Gig Rig, $329), Fender (DG-8 Value Pack, $329), Ibanez (Jam Pack, $349), Jasmine (S45SK, $299), Was hburn (D8K, $334), and Yamaha (Gig Maker, $329)·. A C OUS TI C GU I TAR I MA Y
2001
Blues Guitars New, Old, Whatever... There's no such thing as the perfect blues guitar, but we've got the usual suspects for you to choose from:
National, Dobra, Gibson, Martin, Collings, and many more Need more volume? We specialize in acousticelectric amplification.
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STRINGED I I I INSTRUMENTS 211 Lambert Ave. • Palo Alto, California Toll free: 1-888-493-2131 www.gryphonstrings.corn
As any experienced player knows, a poor instrument is almost guaranteed to be a major obstacle during a beginner's first steps. Consequently, the real value of a starter pack will be determined by the guitar it is assembled around. All the guitars I checked out feature standard dreadnought designs. Although this is the most popular acoustic guitar design due to its loud and often rich sound , it isn't always the best choice for a beginning player. The dreadnought's deep and bulky body is often uncomfortable for smaller people and children, which makes playing the guitar unnecessarily difficult. The guitars all feature laminated mahogany or nato (Asian mahogany) back and sides and laminated spruce tops. I generally prefer a solid top, but given these instruments' reasonable prices and the possibility that they will
The real value of a starter pack will be determined by the guitar it is assembled around. eventually be replaced with a higherquality instrument, the laminates are an acceptable (and durable) choice. I was very pleased to see that all the guitars arrived with a decent setup that would be usable right out of the box, although some further tweaking would slightly improve the guitars' playability. The guitars' sound didn't vary greatly, which is not surprising for instruments of similar size and · construction. The content of the kit varies with each manufacturer. The most important accessory is probably a bag or case, and all of the kits, with the exception of Dean's, include one. Yamaha's kit includes a basic chipboard case, while the others provide gig bags that can be worn over the shoulder. Jasmine's bag doesn't offer any padding for protection. An electronic tuner will save a beginning player from a Jot of agony, and t his essential item is included in the packs by Alvarez, Epiphone, Fender, Ibanez, Washburn, and Yamaha. Jasmine includes a basic pitch pipe. All the kits also include a guitar strap, some picks, and, with the exception of the Epiphone and Washburn, a
78
ACOUSTIC GU I TAR ' MAY
2001
spare set of strings. These are the kinds of things that a good dealer will often throw in with a sale anyway, but they're still valuable. In addition, Jasmine includes a simple elastic-style capo, which is an accessory no case pocket should be without. Fender and Yamaha provide a polishing cloth and guitar polish with their kits , while Alvarez and Dean include just the cloth. Epiphone, Ibanez, and Yamaha have each produced instructional videos to go with their guitar packs. It's impossible to cram everything a beginner needs to know into a one-hour tape, but I found the videos to be helpful. The Epiphone and Yamaha methods both spend too much time discussing electric guitars, but all the videos give basic information about the guitar's various parts, how to tune and change strings, and how to play a couple of easy songs. I would recommend supplementing t hese videos with more dedicated instructional material or, even better, actual lessons. Wash burn decided to take a more high-tech route and includes a CD-ROM produced by eMedia with its pack. Compatible with Windows and Mac computers, this CD offers much of the same information as the videos, but it has more instructional material and songs to play. Overall, any of these packages would be a good bet for someone who wants to learn to play steel-string guitar, with the exception of those whose physical size would benefit from a smaller instrument. (For those wanting to learn classical guitar, several manufacturers also offer nylon-string guitar packs.) The boxed-up nature of these kits also make them attractive as gifts ; all you'd need to complete the package is a bow. Whether these packages represent a good value will partially depend on the individual customer. In some cases, the accessories included have a street value of about $10. Choosier shoppers might want to compare these prices with guitars that are sold separately and get their local retaile r to assemble a custom-made beginner pack from individual pieces instead. Of the packs that I looked at, Epiphone, Ibanez, and Yamaha felt the most complete. I enjoyed playing all the guitars, but the Dean and the Epiphone's slightly more grown-up sound stood out. These preassembled kits should get the beginning guitarist off to an excellent start. • MAY
200 1
I A C OUSTIC
GUITA R
79
Fine Hardwood Furnishings for the Music Enthusiast
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80
Deluxe Froggy Bottom parlor guitar, luthier Michael Millard, and engraved mammoth Ivory heel cap.
n a decade that has seen a virtual explosion of lutherie, it is easy to forget about those individuals who have been building custom guitars for many years. Froggy Bottom Guitars (198 Timson Hill Rd., Newfane, VT 05345; [802] 348-6665; www.froggybottomguitars. com) has been going strong ever since Michael Millard started the company in 1970. Millard launched his guitar-building career under the tutelage of Michael Gurian in the late '60s and was among the first of a new wave of builders who found success by offering high-quality instruments tailored to musicians' needs. Although Froggy Bottom now offers more than a dozen standard models that are distributed by a network of dealers spanning the country, Millard still enjoys working directly with a cus-
I
tomer to build his or her dream guitar. "My joy in building guitars has always come from dealing with a sincere player," he says. "It doesn't matter what the style is; I want to find a way to make the guitar that they have in their mind's ear." To this end, Millard finds that it is crucial to listen to the player's desires, rather than trying to prescribe a proven formula. "We respond to the player, rather than dictating what the player should want," he says. "As long as I understand a musical reason and underlying need for certain kinds of tonal qualities or ergonomic considerations, that's what we [provide]. We don't presume to tell somebody why they should want it this way, when in fact they want it that way. Who am I? I'm not going to play their guitar for the res.t of my life." ACOUSTIC
GUITA R ! MAY
200 1
~orne t~oug~ts from Oasis Duplication:
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Here are seven great ideas to improve the success ofyour next CD release. 1. THINK "RETAIL-FRIENDLV'' WHEN PACKAGING YOUR CD. Your CD needs ro also-for a modest fee- upgrade your project to single-speed glass. (If you choose look as good as it sounds. Of course, good graphic design is the crucial element in single-speed glass, be sure to let people know! Download the "Single-Speed Glass by how your product looks when it's displayed, but here are a few tips to help you get Oasis'' logo from our website (oasisCD.com/singlespeed.html) and include it in your your project in rhe door and onto retail display shelves. We recommend that you affix rraycard art so your customers can see they're buying the very best!} top spine stickers to your packaging, just like the major labels do. (A top spine sticker is the strip of white rape along the top of a CD package that displays your name, 5. GET AIRPLAY! No matter how you define your goals, getting your music heard on the album ride and bar code number.) Be sure to order a bar code for your CD. (Oasis radio is probably high on your wish-list Oasis will get your music to r:adio via one of our offers free bar codes ro our clients.) If you plan to sell your CD OASISSAMPLER"' compilation COs, which are carefully produced in retail stores, make sure the packaging fits in standard-size by genre. These include our flagship OASisACOUSTIC"' samplers CD holders and displays. (All of Oasis' eco-packaging-except (which have featured Greg Brown, David Wilcox, Kare Campbell, the unique Rough-Look-fits into standard displays. What's Oasis manufactures COs and Jay Ungar & Molly Mason, Indigo Girls and many others), as well more, we give you ten retail-ready counter displays with every as OASISWORLD"", OASISROCK&ROOTS"", OASISBLUES"", and cassettes. Our standard, complete CD duplication order. Your CD will look great in gifr shops more. We send rhese rargered Oasis Samplers to hundreds of key package for 1,000 COs costs $1485 and consignment situations, as well as when you're selling radio stations (CMJ-reporring stations, Triple-A stations, from the stage.) Americana stations, FolkDJ-reporting stations, Air-country plus shipping. Call or email now for stations and more). The Samplers have chatted repeatedly in CMJ samples of our work and a free 2. MAl<£ THEIR EYES POP! To create the most eye-catching and have resulted in wide exposure and industry opportunities for brochure: (888)BY-OASIS (that's package you've ever seen, substitute Oasis' exclusive aluminumOasis clients. When we send out the Sampler that includes a song coated jewel-box trays for standard jewel-boxes in your packaging from your CD, we'll also provide you with a mailing list of 888-296-2747). Reach us by email at design plans. Your CD will practically pop off the shelfl recipients so you can be in rouch with the DJs directly. [email protected], or check out 3. CONSIDER ALTERNATIVES TO THE JEWEL-BOX. The 6. ARRANGE FOR DISTRIBUTION. Unless you're signed with a· our Musicians' Guide to CD cardboard packages recently developed by Oasis can give your label, the major retailers won't sell your product. At least, rhey Duplication and Promotion (Winner, product a unique and eye-catching appearance. The Oasis wouldn't - until now. If you manufacture a CD project at Luckman's Best of the Web) at Jewel-Free"' Box (six graphics panels of cardboard plus a Oasis, your ride can be automatically available at almost every patent-pending tray), the Oasis Rough-Lookn.t (funky brown, single Internet music superstore (including CDnow, www.oasisCD.com. Whether it's very-recycled cardboard), and the Oasis Soft-SpotTM (an amazon.com, Bames&Noble.com [bn.com], and buy.cort)). What's your first cassette or your tenth CD, unprecedented EIGHT graphics panels of cardboard plus a more, your CD can be in the database searched for special order unique hub to hold the CD securely) are three of the top by many of the national retail stores (such as Camelot). This is we're here to help you do your best! alternative eco-packages offered in the industry. a major breakthrough for independent musicians!
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7. HAVE YOUR COS DUPLICATED BY A REPUTABLE COMPANY. We think Oasis is one of the best in the business - although we're happy to say we have some very worrhy competitors. We encourage you to ask around before you choo~e a duplicator, and please be sure ro visit our website ar www.oasisCD.com and call us as you do your research. We hope you'll give us the opportunity to win your business!
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Although a number of apprentices have passed through the Froggy Bottom shop over the years, it was mostly a oneman operation until Millard met Andy Mueller in 1994. Mueller was initially invited to the shop to learn the craft, but he and Millard soon began working together extensively, and within a year the two had become business partners. The Froggy Bottom team has since grown to include luthiers Tucker Barrett and Kipp Krusa, as well as engraver Petria Mitchell, who is responsible for many of the guitars' unique heel-cap designs. Evolving from a one-man shop to a small production facility that produces about 125 guitars per year has necessitated some changes, but Millard is quick to point out that every luthier on his team is able to complete just about any of the steps involved in building a guitar. "Right now, I'm the only one that carves necks on a regular basis," says Millard, "but we encourage everybody to say, 'Hey, I'd really like to do this.'" During my visit to the rural Froggy Bottom shop, it quickly became clear that the guitars are truly the result of a team effort. A varied line of standard models (starting at $2, 760) serves as a starting point for each custom instrument built by Millard and company. The line begins
How to find the right
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82
NEW
with the petite Parlor guitar and 00-size A model, includes several midsize instruments, and culminates in the Jumbo and Baritone models. Customers specify neck width, scale length, and whether they want a cutaway or a 12- or 14-fret neck and select from a variety of tonewoods , including Indian and Brazilian rosewood, mahogany, maple, and koa. Millard also likes to use cocobolo, which he compares favorably to Brazilian rosewood. At least four types of spruce are available for Froggy Bottom tops, and red spruce (also known as Adirondack spruce) is the most popular. Millard is hesitant to give an overarching description of his guitars' sound, because he feels that the buzzwords used to describe guitars have been overused. But he does offer that "clarity and tonal complexity" are the basis for his guitars' signature sound, and he also adds that "the most important thing is that different players hear different things." Guitarists such as fingerstylists Will Ackerman·and David Surette, bluesman Paul Geremia, pop star Duncan Sheik, and singer-songwriter Louise Taylor are among those players using Froggy Bottom guitars, evidence that the company is capable of • meeting diverse needs.
GEAR
Ozark Instruments Electrocoustic Built by luthier Dave Wendler, Ozark Instruments' Electrocoustic guitar (starting at $625) is designed to produce natural acoustic sounds in amplified settings. With a solid body and a bolt-on neck, the guitar features much of the feel of an e lectric instrument. However, a specially designed piezo pickup in its archtop-style bridge and a mini-humbucker at the end of the fingerboard (blended together via passive on-board electronics) allow a warmer tone than most piezo-only systems. Avariety of custom options are available for those who prefer an individual touch. Ozark Instruments, 521 W. Atlantic, Branson, MO 65616; (877) 730-5123; www.electrocoustic.com.
JetSiide The JetSlide ($24.95) is designed to allow easy switching between slide playing and regular fretting by rotating around the player's ring finger. Available in brass or stainless steel, the slide comes in five sizes to accommodate a variety of finger sizes. JetSiide, PO Box 968, Antonito, CO 81120; (888) 244-0252; www.jetslide.com. ACOUSTIC
GUITAR ! MAY
2001
~ he~LOSBUR._c; ~
c;ultA
@
~eStlVAL
Auc;usc 1 s-1 9, 2001 Sponsored by Luthiers Mercantile International and Acoustic Guitar Magazine •
Festival Website: www.guitarfestival200l.com
~OR Licke~s
ec lnJ=oRma~Ion:
DROP THE POSTAGE-PAID REPLY CARD IN THE MAIL TODAY, OR CALL 800-477-4437 ext. 18
DEARA.G. Laminated Woods Nic Jones' Guitar Quick Retuning Tip Sheet: Guitar Hangups
Q
What are the advantages and disadvantages of building guitars with laminated woods? Hal Bellone Olathe, Kansas
The advantage of using laminated A woods in guitar construction is simple: reduced manufacturing costs. Laminated woods are much less likely to change dimensionally with humidity and are far more resistant to cracking than solid woods. They're also cheaper to buy and cheaper to work with. Laminated tops are curiously less strong than solid tops, because 100 percent of the pressure exerted on the top by the strings is in direct line with the grain. So, all other things being equal, a guitar with a solid top is likely to outlive a guitar with a laminated top. Solid woods also display better resonance than laminates, so the overwhelming reason for using solid tops and backs is for better tone. But it's important to recognize that not all instruments are born equal or built to the same design specifications. Thus, a . Yamaha guitar made with a l~minated top might sound better than a solidwood Harmony instrument. -FrankFord
Q
I was shocked and saddened to read that Nic Jones hasn't performed puf>. licly since his tragic accident. What guitar was he playing on the recording of "Canadee-1-0" you transcribed in November? Michael Weiss Brooklyn, New York
Nic Jones used his Fylde Oberon for that recording (Fylde Gl!itars, [ 44) 1768-891515, www.fyldeguitars.com).
A 84
ACOUSTIC
GUI T A R
I MAY
2001
John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, and Martin Simpson.
tually replaces the sixth string's tuning peg and is available in Grover and Schaller-Mini versions. It will not fit guitars with pronounced volutes at the headstock (such as those found on some Martin models). Once it has been adjusted properly and the string has been stretched, the Xtender works beautifully, allowing accurate midsong retuning.
-Dylan Schorer
Q
You mentioned in February's Great Acoustics that Richard Thompson uses a Hipshot extender k ey on his Lowden L27F for quick retuning. What exactly is the Hipshot? Will Danforth Rochester Hills, Michigan
- Teja Gerken
A
Hipshot's Guitar Xtender (www. hipshotproducts.com) is a great little tool that allows the sixth string to be lowered as far as two whole steps with the flick of a lever. The device ac-
SEND QUESTIONS, tips, or observations to Acoustic Guitar's on-line discussion forums at www.acousticguitar.com or write to Dear A.G., Acoustic Guitar, PO Box 767, San Anselmo, CA 94979-0767.
Nlc Jones recorded with a Fylde Oberon.
The Oberon was Jones' primary guitar throughout most of his career, although he has played other Fyldes, including an Orsini and a Falstaff. The Falstaff was damaged in the 1982 car accident that ended Jones' career, but it survived the accident better than Jones did, according to Jones' wife, Julia. Fylde guitars have been made in the U.K. by Roger Bucknall since 1973 and are popular among many British guitarists, including
Tip Sheet Got any great guitar tips or discoveries that you'd like to share? Send them to Tip Sheet, Acoustic Guitar, PO Box 767, San Anselmo, CA 94979. If we print your tip, we'll give you a year's free subscription, gift subscription, or subscription renewal. Here is this issue's winner, submitted by Tim Hudson of Ontario, Canada. I keep my guitar in its soft, insulated case when I'm not using it. I attached a small hook on the back strap and an eyehook in a wall, and I just hook it up so it can't fall. I can easily unhook the bag when I'm ready to play my guitar in the house or take it somewhere else to play, and I no longer have to worry about anyone knocking it over.
MAY
2001
I ACOUSTIC
GUITAR
The Case /or Quality At Cc:'(l.u CrCt'L, ma;lcT cLl/t$mcn en-ate n•dom musical imltu•m-nt e.s.tet fron1 lumd-lami.nat~ wood.s, the fineJl lc•alhe,.. .anti ""OVen t'l''t'<'d, and luxurious interior f.1bri.:f. Ewry detail i.s important, do.'U tu tl,ot final finitlJing to~.~chl"1. lhe result: a ~autifully tkvign~.J. di,tinclive and durable -.·orlr of art.
To fully appn..'(ii1tc: the <•otftandinl) quality .snd crafbman•l•ip that go iolo ~ Cedar c~k C".t.K·. )'OU ~.a,~ to ~u,IJ one in ~·our hand,, We encour.s~ you to do w .tl your c.trlic...t opportunity.
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85
PRIVATE BASICS
Combining Bass Notes and Slide By David Hamburger
0
ne of the main reasons to play slide with your fingers is so you can provide backup for yourself: once you've got some funky melodies going with the slide, you can get the bass going with your thumb at the same time. After you work through this lesson, you'll be able to thump out a steady quarter-note groove on the low string while continuing to syncopate cool licks on top. The first step is finding the bass notes with the thumb; next comes using the thumb to keep a steady bass groove going. Once you can do that, it's a matter of learning to play licks with the slide without losing track of the bass part your thumb is playing. Let's start with the opening lick in Example 1 on page 88. We'll play it as a call and response. How does that work? In Example 1, your fingers play the melody with the slide (that's the calO. and then you answer with two bass notes, played by your thumb (that's the response). To better hear where those bass notes are falling in each measure, repeat the lick a number of times, as in Example 2, until you can keep it going with a good sense of groove. Raising the stakes just a little more now, try dropping in the bass-note responses while playing a sequence of two different melody phrases , as in Example 3. You could even play an entire eight-bar blues using this call-andresponse approach (Example 4).
Steady On The best way to get a steady bass going is to take it step by step. Start by hitting quarter notes with your thumb on the low string. Bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, just 86
as in Example 5. Then add the high string on the first beat of each measure, using your index or middle finger, .as in Example 6. We call this right-hand technique a pinch: you are picking simultaneously with your thumb and finger, and the two digits are moving toward each other, as in, you guessed it, a pinch. Once you've got that coordinated, make that note on the high string a slide note, as in Example 7. Then play half notes. Keep the thumb thonking away and play a slide note on beats 1 and 3, as in Example 8. Next proceed to quarter notes, as in Example 9. Slide into the first note and then keep picking with the slide at the fourth fret for the next three notes. You're now pinching with your thumb and finger on every beat. Let's make things even more interesting. In Example 10, you are still keeping the thumb going like clockwork and playing quarter notes on the high string, but now it's a different note on the high string each time. So you're moving the slide around and picking with your finger while maintaining the low end at the same time. Let's pull all this into Example 11, another eight-bar blues. This time the melody reaches up to the 12th fret and the notes come out of the 0-minor pentatonic scale. N~tice the natted seventh of the scale (Q) at the tenth fret and the flatted third (F0 at the third fret-these are those "blue notes" you read about in the Harvard Dictionary of Music.
Right-Hand Damping Right-hand damping accomplishes two
things: it gives you a more solid attack by anchoring your right hand on the ACOUSTIC GUITAR
I MAY
2001
The Tradition 024 is meticulously crafted to perfection. The Engelmann solid spruce top is hand selected by experienced luthiers, and dried for over 2 years to enhance the natural sound. There are over 20 pieces of abablone which are precisely hand laid in the fretboard for the exceptional "Tree of Life" inlay. The abalone body binding and sound hole inlay incorporate the same procedure. Rosewood back and sides add to its stunning appearance. Topping off this breathtaking instrument are gold Grover tuners. With a retail price of $589, it's worth a visit to your local Dean dealer to enjoy the experience of perfection.
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• The Seagull 86 • Still made in La Patrie • Still only $395 US List
Seagull Guitars, 19420 Avenue Clark-Graham, Baie D'Urfe, Quebec Canada H9X 3R8 http://www.lasido.com MAY
200 1
~ A C OUSTIC
G U IT A R
89
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The Guitar Chair was
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90
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GU IT AR I MAY
200 1
face of the guitar and it creates a thumpier and faster-decaying sound on the low strings. To damp the bass strings with your hand, let the fleshy part of your palm-the part that moves with your thumb-rest on the bottom few strings right where those strings meet the bridge of the guitar. Experiment by sliding your hand more onto the bridge or more toward the soundhole and then picking the bass strings with your thumb to hear the different degrees of muting you can get. Compare this with the way the strings sound when you hold your hand completely off the face of the guitar. The ideal sound is one in which the strings are neither completely cut off nor completely ringing out but are somewhere in between. You want to hear the notes and have them ring long enough to hear their actual pitch, but they should decay quickly. Right-hand damping helps keep the bass notes from drowning out the melody, and it increases the impression that you're playing two different things at once by sharpening the difference in timbre between the bass notes and the high strings. Example 12 shows how righthand muting is notated between tablature and notation staves. Go back to the
earlier examples and listen to the difference when you apply right-hand damping to the bass notes. Eighth-Note Melodies Example 13 involves playing eighth notes in the melody over a steady quarter-note bass. Note that you only have to slide twice per measure, on the downbeats of 1 and 3. The important thing to listen for right now is if you're flip-flopping: playing the eighth notes on the low string with your thumb instead of on top with your fingers. "Not me!" you exclaim. And maybe not. But it can be tricky to read the tab, play the notes, and listen to yourself analytically at the same time, so it is always a good idea to tape yourself occasionally and listen back to what you're doing. For any kind of fingerstyle playing, it's essential to have control over what you're playing in the bass at all times and to be able to maintain that regardless of what you play on top. Most often in a real musical situation you'll find yourself mixing it up in the melody between eighth notes and quarter notes. One way to sharpen your reflexes is to practice going back and forth between the two-as in Example 14.
Playing on the Offbeat Melodies often call for beginning a phrase on an offbeat-on the and, as the jazz cats like to say: "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and." Example 15 provides you with some practice playing all offbeats over steady bass notes that stay on the beat. Example 16 combines eighth notes on the downbeat with eighth notes on the offbeat. We'll finish by playing a blues with a 0-minor pentatonic melody. "Offbeat Blues" includes a handful of slippery eighth-note action, with most of the melody notes in measures 4-Q falling on the offbeats. Compare this with Example 11 to hear how much of a difference it makes when you place the eighth notes off the beat versus on the beat. For more practice playing offbeat eighth notes over a steady bass, try playing measure 4, measure 5, or measure 6 in a loop. Coordinating your fingers like this over a steady bass is the foundation of· playing solo, unaccompanied bottleneck guitar, and it's great practice for playing • with other people, too. Acoustic Guitar Slide Basics (String Letter Publishing).
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earning how to construct and connect chords across 'the entire fretboard is one of the most important lessons any guitarist can ever learn. When I learned a system by which I could play virtually any chord in four different positions on the fretboard, broad new musical vistas quickly became apparent. I began to work out the changes to swing standards and to develop a new understanding of harmonic mechanisms as they apply to the guitar. Before exploring the chord forms and their inversions, let's take a look at how seventh chords are constructed. The dominant-seventh chord (G7, for example) consists of a root, third, fifth, and flatted seventh. Take a look at the notes of the G7 chord in Example la below. Lowering the flatted seventh by a half step creates the major-sixth chord, which consists of a root, thi.r d, fifth, and sixth (Example 1b). By moving the flatted seventh of the dominantseventh chord up a half step, we get a major-seventh chord (Example lc). If the third of the dominant seventh is lowered to a flatted third, a minorseventh chord (root, flatted third, fifth , and flatted seventh) is constructed (Example ld). Let's start our discussion of this chord system by learning a G7 chord in
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root position (with the rdot in the bass), first inversion (third in the bass), second inversion (fifth in the bass), and third inversion (flatted seventh in the bass). All these chord forms employ only the sixth, fourth , third, and second strings. You must mute the fifth and first strings with your left hand. Since none of these chord positions uses open strings , each one works anywhere on the neck. Any give'n chord · form contains each of the four notes of fhe chord (root, third, fifth, and flatted seventh), and no chord tone is doubled. The first step in assimilating these forms is to ·practice moVing from one to the next. Play through Example 2 on page 94. Use a metronome to train your fingers to switch between the forms in time. Once you get the forms under your fingers, concentrate on the note names (B~. F#, etc.) and scale degrees (root, fifth, etc.) · that make up each chord form. After mastering these four G7 forms , the next step is to find all four forms in every key. Try starting on a C7 in root position (eighth fret) and playing the four chord forms up and down the neck. You'll notice as you progress up the neck that you start running out of room. Once you know how the
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system works; you can 'start lower ori the neck with an inversion. For example, start with the second inversion of C7 (fifth in the bass), as s hown in Example 3. One good way to practice all 12 keys is to use the circle of fifths, a sequence of l2 tones, each of which is five diatonic scale degrees (a perfect fifth) lower than the previous tone. Dominant-seventh chords commonly resolve down by a perfect fifth . Starting on C, the circle of fifths progresses like this: C, F, B~. FJ., !>J,, [)1, (or CD! G~ (or F~). B (or 0), E, A, D, G, and back to C.
forms in Example 7, and then, as you did with the dominant-seventh chord forms and major-sixth forms, find them in every key and play them around the circle of fifths. The final chord type in this lesson is the major seventh, which is derived by raising the flatted seventh of the dominant-seventh chord up a half step (root, third, fifth, and seventh). Example 8 shows the four major-seventh chord forms. Remember to practice each chord up and down the neck using all the forms in all 12 keys. Then play through the circle-of-fifths progression using each of the chord forms.
The blues progressions in Examples 9 and 10 give you some real music to practice so you can get a feel for how some of these chord forms are used. Transpose this progression into all 12 keys and experiment with different forms (root position, first inversion, etc.) in each key. If you're feeling adventurous, work out the chord forms on the top four strings by moving the note played on the low E string up to the high E string. You've probably noticed by now that the possibilities are endless. I hope that this system opens the doors for you as it did for me. •
Once you get the forms under your fingers, concentrate on the note names and scale degrees that make up each chord form. Example 4 uses these dominant-seventh chord forms to move through a circle-of-fifths progression. Notice that I've kept each chord form in one general area of the neck (in this case between the first and fifth frets). As you move around the .circle, remember to think of the names and scale degrees of each chord y'ou're playing. This will help you adapt these dominant-seventh forms in v~rious situations. Now let's follow the same procedure for major-sixth chords. Remember that the major-sixth chord is formed by replacing the flatted seventh of the dominant-seventh chord with the sixth by lowering the flatted seventh a half step (one fret). By altering each of the s.eventh-chord forms you get the four sixthchord forms. Practice moving from one sixth chord to the next in Example 5. Once you have these shapes down, practice the forms in other keys, as you did with the severith-chord forms, and then move through the circle of fifths as in Example 4, but this time using sixth chords (Example 6). As you can see, this method allows you to use these basic forms to play any type of chord. Next, let's try the.minor seventh. The minor-seventh chord replaces the third of a dominant-· · seventh chord with a flatted third (root, flatted third, fifth, and flatted seventh). Play through the minor-seventh chord MAY
2001
~ ACOUSTIC
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OFF DIE This Flight Tonight Words and Music by Joni Mitchell
oni Mitchell once told Acoustic Guitar's Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, "There's a certain kind of restlessness that not many artists are 'c ursed or blessed with ... craving change, craving growth, seeing always room for improvement in your work." In 1970, that restlessness moved Mitchell to take a year off from performing. She had ·grown uncomfortable with the rock
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I'M DRINKING SWEET CHAMPAGNE, GOT THE HEADPHONES UP HIGH CAN'T NUMB YOU OUT, CAN'T DRUM YOU OUT OF MY MIND THEY'RE PLAYING "GOOD-BYE BABY. BABY GOOD-BYE OOH, OOH, LOVE 15 BLIND" UP GO THE FLAPS, DOWN GO THE WHEELS I HOPE YOU GOT YOUR HEAT TURNED ON BABY I HOPE THEY FINALLY FIXED YOUR AUTOMOBILE I HOPE IrS BETTER WHEN WE MEET AGAIN BABY
CHORUS
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ACOUSTIC
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June 6, 7, 8, 9, 2001 Join us this summer in sunny southern Utah. Choose from daily classes in fingerstyle, blues, jazz, rock, and bluegrass taught by some of the nation's best players and teachers. Plus daily seminars, mas-ter classes, student showcases, and nightly concerts all included in the early registration price of $200.
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acoustic music news, advice about guitars, gear, and playing, links to hot music spots on the Web, and updates of new features and events at Acoustic Guitar Central. You'll also get advance notice of giveaways, upcoming features in Acoustic Guitar magazine, previews of new publications from String Letter Publishing, and more- all delivered directly to your inbox!
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way she had made music in the past, changing both her writing and how she played her instruments. Whereas her earlier songs, such as "Both Sides Now" and "The Circle Game," were marked by straightforward forms and linear narrative, most of the songs on Blue hide their formal structure in disjointed narrative. They are more layered, their conclusions more openended. A flute and dulcimer were the only musical instruments Mitchell took with her on her trip across Europe. She had bought the dulcimer at the 1969 Big Sur Festival and didn't really know how to play it. She ended up slapping it with her hands. When she finally did get her hands on a guitar again, she found herself playing the guitar in the same slapping style. The sound of the dulcimer also shaped her compositions for the guitar and piano on Blue. On both instruments she imitates the dulcimer's combination of melodic line and tonic/ dominant drones. "This Flight Tonight" says a lot about Mitchell's approach to guitar playing and music making. The open-G tuning gives her two solid major chords to build on: the C when she barres the fifth fret and the G when she plays all open strings. Between these two poles, she uses four simple chord shapes (actually, just two shapes with slight variations), which she moves up and down the neck to create passing chords. The openness isn't just in the tuning. Those passing chords don't change the underlying harmony; until she slides up to the C, the harmony is still just G. This open structure allows for a lot of melodic variation in the verses, and each verse changes to match the scansion and emotional structure of the lyrics. For the part of the third verse that imitates music heard through headphones, she slides up to C. Only the chorus remains the same throughout th·e song. The overall effect is the opposite of a standard rock song; the guitar playing remains fixed while the melody feels fresh and improvised, giving the lyrics the spontaneous urgency of speech. The lyrics themselves have.another underlying urgency, as their focus shifts rapidly back and forth between the past and the present, the internal and the external. "This Flight Tonight" demonstrates Mitchell's ability to create depth through the structural tension that exists between contrasting elements: the fixed harmony underlying the varying ACOUSTIC GUITAR
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The 200 I Teaching Staff: Carlo Aonzo, Butch Baldassari, Stephen Bennett, Rolly Brown, Robin Bullock, John Carlini, Mark Cosgrove, Gary Davis, Janet Davis, Beppe Gambetta, Murphy Henry, Steve Kaufman, Jens Kruger, Marcy Marxer and Don Stiemberg.
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melody and the contrasting visual and emotional images. It's the dynamic aspect of this music that keeps it so fresh after 30 years. Mitchell's vocal style on Blue has an openness, an indelicacy she hadn't shown before. Listen to her keening voice on other Blue tracks, including "The Last Time I Saw Richa rd," and "River," the loneliest song ever written about Christmas. She sings without barriers, without persona. The album also stands out for its cohesion. More than just a collection of songs written around the same time, Blue comes across as a solitary opera, full of passion and vivid imagery. Songs like "Little Green" and "Blue" tell finely detailed stories that the listener can't help but connect into a larger whole. Other songs like "Carey" and "California" describe her journey across Europe and, heard alone, seem sunny and straightforward. Heard within the context of the album, they take on a larger meaning through the underlying narrative. A big part of that narrative comes from Mitchell's willingness to look clearly and honestly at what it means to crave change and growth. "My Old Man" expresses both the highs and lows of a passionate, open relationship. When paired with "Little Green," a love letter to an illegitimate child, the loneliness that passion can bring hits home that much harder. Similarly, "Carey" and ''Blue," pairing portraits of one lover open and free and another dragged down by drugs, are a one-two punch to the gut. Mitc hell is committed to passion and freedom, but that doesn't mean she's blind to their faults. She doesn't just tell us that love is bittersweet. She tells us why, knowing that it's painful, she is still committed to it. The version of Blue we're familiar with wasn't actually the first ve rsion. Mitchell's record label, Reprise, originally sent to its pressing plants an album that included two "pre-backpack" songs: "Urge for Going" and "Hunter (The Good Samaritan)," which were replaced with "All I Want" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard." These changes make for a deeper, more complete whole. 1971 was a great year for women singer-songwriters; Carole King's Tapestry, Janis Joplin's Pearl, and Carly Simon's de but album, Anticipation, all came out that year. But 30 years later, Blue stands out among these great albums for its freshness and e motional impact. - Stephen Dick ACOUSTIC
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"I was a rock band vocalist in the '60s, and played bass. One day I picked up a guitar and began to play folk music. I wanted a Martin, but they were beyond me. "Then I got married and went on a musical hiatus. But recently in a store I spotted a mahogany-top Martin- Woody Guthrie's choice, even after he'd made it and could have afforded a more expensive model. For me it was love at first sight. I went into shock to see the low price- well under a thousand dollars. There was that Martin craftsmanship, playability- and beautiful tone. I walked out with it! "My hobby is Civil War reenacting and I proudly serve with the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment. After a battle we settle by our tents, and I haul out my Martin. That D-15 has a clean, simple look that fits in with the 1860s. Martins were at campgrounds then, soothing souls after real battles. I like that. "I'm not a professional musician, but I sure appreciate a fine musical instrument. And with the D-15, even a hack player like me can play a guitar I feel is every bit a Martin."--Ghuck Crouse, Orlando, FL Mom people own-or want to own - a Martin than cmy other acoustic guitar in the world
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