Bonnie Raitt

The venerable Ms. Bonnie Raitt has enjoyed a great deal of commercial success in recent times, and I think that at this point she has virtually become a household name. But the first time I saw her was back in the early eighties at the Asbury Park Convention Center opening for Dicky Betts from the Allman Brothers. She was awesome, playing slide guitar with precision, power, and great aplomb, while displaying a voice that is indescribably thick, gritty, and gorgeous. It is little wonder that world eventually caught up to this great talent.

Patti Smith

Patti Smith is a very interesting and eclectic artist who came out of New York back in the seventies. I remember going down to the local record store and being drawn to her album that was entitled Horses. I really enjoyed Horses. As a poet myself I could appreciate the lyricism, and the delivery was quirky and unique. Lenny Kaye was in the band and he has been involved in a lot of cool projects over the years. She is well loved even now by a cult following.

Snake Oil Medicine Show

Speaking of the song Laughing in Rhythm, I used to live down in Athens, Georgia when I was hoping to make a name for myself in music and while I was living in the south I had the pleasure of attending quite a few music festivals. I went to a festival called the Black Mountain Music Festival in North Carolina and I met a lot of great people and had a fantastic time. In fact I went to two of them, and I saw Snake Oil Medicine Show at these fests. They are bluegrass, but with a twist, and they play the Gaillard tune Laughing In Rhythm, but when I heard them do it, I didn't know its origin. Everything is connected I guess.

Slim Gaillard

I am a lover of the literary work of Jack Kerouac, and I even named my son after him. I have read all of his books, and most of them more than once. I can remember in one of his books he goes to a jazz club and there is a guy playing there by the name of Slim Gaillard, and he winds up hanging out with him. I bought a CD of Slim Gaillard because of reading about this connection and his stuff is funny as well as musical. It is hard to explain, you just have to listen to it to understand. A song that sticks out in my mind is a tune called Laughing In Rhythm.

Blues

I haven't been in the best of spirits of late due to financial issues, but I try my best to stay positive even as I'm tied to the tracks and the train is bearing down on me. I learned a lot about jazz by watching Ken Burns' Jazz several times and I will always remember Duke Ellington saying, "What's the point of getting depressed? You can take the energy it would require to feel that way and write a blues." Maybe I should do that.

Hip Hop

I didn't get into hip-hop music until I was in my 40's. I started out by listening to Jurassic 5 and Common, Dilated Peoples, The Roots and Talib Kweli and after becoming sensitized to the art form I branched out and listened to a lot of hip-hop. I enjoy KRS 1, Bid Daddy Kane, Nas, and Wu-Tang Clan as a whole and all of their individual projects, and all sorts of other stuff. Def Jux artists are great and innovative, a very different and original sound. I like pretty much all of what people who know would call "real hip-hop."

Bass

Since the bass is just the lowest four notes that a guitar is tuned to and they are both stringed instruments you might think that it is really easy for a guitar player to play bass, but it is challenging. You do have a head start for sure, but the strings are much heavier and further apart, and the role of the bass is very different than that of the guitar. I learned to play bass only after playing guitar for about 28 years. I like it, I should have started sooner!

Joe Zook

When I was a little kid I used to read the newspaper and check out the sports page, and then the comics, and I would find my way to the entertainment section eventually. I remember noticing that there was a band playing in town all the time called Joe Zook and Blues Deluxe. When I got to be 17 I started playing guitar, and after I turned 18 and could get into the bars I had the chance to see Joe Zook and Blues Deluxe play, and I was amazed. I wound up taking lesson from Joe, and those lessons created a foundation that I was able to build on and I became a pretty good musician.

Bob Marley

I love all types of music that are real and genuine, and have some type of heart and soul. Clearly, reggae is a soulful and instructive from of music, and it really embodies a feeling that transcend words, and that is what music is all about. Bob Marley was one of many great reggae artists, but he may have been the most prolific. He was one of the greatest of all time.

Carl Palmer

I was fortunate in that I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, which is just a around an hour from both New York and Philadelphia, so I got to see many of the great classic rock bands. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, was one of them. Carl Palmer, the band's drummer, was truly one of the most amazing musicians that I have ever had the pleasure to see perform.

It's A Wonderful World

Have you ever had the pleasure of hearing the great Louis Armstrong sing the tune called It's A Wonderful World? A lot of jazz purists who venerate Satchmo's contribution to the art form as a trumpeter marginalize him as a singer, but I think that his rendering of this tune is truly a treasure.

Naima

As I have mentioned on many of my blogs, I am a big fan of John Coltrane's music, and though he is known for wild improvisation and some "out there" innovation, he was also an excellent composer, and many of his compositions have been inculcated into the musical idiom of jazz standards. I learned to play Naima on the guitar some years ago, and learning jazz tunes is a great way to expand your skills, because you have to learn chords and voicing that you may not know. In the case of Naima, none of the voicings were familiar to me, but now, they are just a routine part of my musical vocabulary.

Naima is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard.

The Who

Who doesn't like The Who? Not you, I hope. If you don't like The Who, then who do you like? If you say The Guess Who, well, can't a person like The Who and The Guess Who ...?... but if you just say to someone, "Who did you see the other night in concert," and they say "Guess Who," and you say "Who," where does that leave us?

Early On

The first music that I listened to was the Philadelphia radio stations on my mother's car radio when I was little kid in the sixties. They played Motown, and I got a feel for soul and R & B and that was what music was to me for a long time. Even today Philadelphia is the neo-soul mecca, spawning artists like D'Angelo and Jill Scott. It is also the home of the seminal hip hop group The Roots. I have always loved the Philly sound, and I still love it.

Springsteen

One of the very best live performers that I have ever seen is Bruce Springsteen. I saw him three times in the late 70's and honestly, his shows were just transcendental. He put so much sincere and genuine energy into them that it was just contagious and really moving. At one of the shows he ran off of the stage at one point while the band was jamming, and when they reached the break where he was supposed to start singing again the spotlights led your gaze up to the second deck of seats and he was up there, all sweaty and disheveled among the fans, holding the mic, saying "I'll never try that again," I guess because he sort of got mauled. It was intense, one of the most fun nights of my life.

Genesis

When I was growing up in Trenton, NJ, before moving and winding up here in Las Vegas, I was fortunate enough to have a lot of friends who were really into music and I got turned on to a lot of progressive rock and jazz fusion. Genesis became my favorite band, in the days when Peter Gabriel was still the lead singer. I had every album and wore them out. I especially liked The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Selling England by the Pound. Even now when I listen to the classic Genesis I am completely captivated, and my son has even absorbed it all and he really appreciates their genius as well. There is something timeless about their work that cannot become dated over the years.

Jazz Singing

When you listen to people sing jazz, though of course most jazz music is instrumental, it is amazing to me that they can use their voices like an instrument and hit the correct notes while singing precise and complex melodies. Knowing where a note is on an instrument is one thing, but making it come out of your mouth without wavering around trying to find it is entirely another.

The lyrics are also always timeless and archetypal in jazz, full of that same kind of wisdom that Willie Dixon talks about. If you get it, you get it, and if you get it, then, well, you got it.

The Grateful Dead

I really enjoyed the music of the Grateful Dead throughout my life, and I was saddened by the passing of Jerry Garcia, though it may well have been that his time had come. I think that many people inflated the Dead and worshipped the individuals in the band, and Jerry in particular, rather than simply enjoying the music and allowing the musicians the right to remain "mortal."

Neutral listeners often say that the Dead were overrated and that they don't understand what all the hype was about. But the Grateful Dead was an odd beast. You had to see them live to really understand what was special about them. And you had to be the kind of listener who prefers improvisation and its peaks and valleys over pure rehearsed perfection, though the Dead was occasionally able to pull off both simultaneously.