Guitars

1974 Five Faces of the Guitar Jeff Beck



Jeff Beck - She's A Woman (Live)

Your way of saying "goodbye", eh Dan?   Yeah, RIP too.  But getting slightly back to jazz....

Even before Wes my introduction to jazz guitar was kind of silly on my part.When watching the movie THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS  in my early teens I saw a familiar face from the TV show ROUTE 66 and surprised that Marty Milner played guitar that good 




But many years later I discovered that Milner was just very good at faking it.  And that it was this well established jazz guitarist that was actually playing those notes.




Sepiatone

I have seen John Pisano a few times since he lives in the Los Angeles area. He was the rhythm guitarist for Joe Pass on 3 or 4 albums at the tail end of Pass's career. But Pisano can hold his own when it comes to soloing. Some of his best work was in the early 60s with guitarist Billy Bean. (not the baseball manager of the Oakland As). Pisano is still with us but stopped performing a while back.

Tonight is my weekly jam session night. We start out with jazz standards but end with Beatles tunes. I don't know any Jeff Beck songs but I do play She's A Woman in the kind of pace that Beck did (as posted above). I.e. with a lot of space to know in riffs and to bend notes but with feeling.

So I'm going to see if the others wish to that as a tribute to Beck. (the song is just A7 to D7 than to E7, with the "she's a woman' break going to c#m7, so they should be able to handle it on the fly).

The Mother of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Despite her fame, institutional racism in the mid-1940s was still rampant. On tour, all restaurants and hotels were still segregated, so Tharpe slept on buses. She went around the back end of restaurants to pick up food because they wouldn't let her in. Yet the spirit in her music never broke.

Tharpe, a striking woman who performed in evening gowns with an electric guitar, cannot be categorized easily. She sang with the cadence of a blues artist but looked like the gospel queen she was, with a crowning permanent wave and flowing dresses.

“She was playing rock ‘n’ roll way before anyone else,” says Lonnie Liston Smith Jr., a jazz, soul and funk musician who played with Miles Davis and Pharoah Sanders. “That was way before Chuck Berry and all those guys. Nobody else had even come up with something like that.”

The LGBTQ community has adopted Tharpe as an icon, a boundary-smashing figure in her personal as well as professional life and a forerunner of those artists who consciously blurred aesthetic and social lines over the past 50 years.

The topic of what type of guitar works "best" for jazz is a hot one on the jazz guitar forum. Of course one can play jazz on a Strat, Telle, or Les Paul. I use hollow body arch tops, with a silver face Fender Princeton amp, since I like the woody sound, but the playing of jazz is about the skill of the musician and not what equipment is used. Also related to these debates is the strings. I prefer 13s which my rock friends can't understand. But since I rarely bend notes when playing jazz I like thick strings.