Jazz guitarist, Pat Martino, has built an international following with his palette of music that covers a broad sonic landscape, moving from rock, pop, hard-bop, world music and jazz. Known for his penchant for blending together various styles of music, he has established himself as one of the forerunners of modern bebop.
In the back country of Pennsylvania, so far from urban life that the locals are Amish who ride in horse-drawn wagons, guitarists Steve Howe and Martin Taylor are recording an album with some of the world’s most valuable guitars.
Born the grandson of immigrants in 1915, Lester William Polfuss exhibited an inborn Germanic talent for analytical thinking at a precociously early age.
It seems to be harder and harder these days to find a working jazz band that stays together for more than a few short years, often only releasing one or two albums before the band members go their separate ways and form other ensembles. Though it’s always exciting for fans of the genre to hear their players in different set-ups and musical collaborations, there’s something to be said for the kind of camaraderie and sense of ensemble that forms when a group is on stage together year after year.
There was a time when jazz was purely an American art form. When all the best players grew up in the U.S. and the cutting edge bands and players resided within her borders. As jazz has grown in popularity over the past century, it has become a truly global musical genre. One can walk into a bar in New York, or a club in London, or a resort in Fiji and find local musicians playing through the great American songbook standards that have come to define jazz over the years. With jazz’s worldwide expansion, it’s no surprise that countries like England have come to embrace this music in their concert halls and conservatories with open arms.
Summer is here and for guitar players around the country that means it’s time again to pack their bags, load up their instruments and head to dozens of different guitar workshops, festivals and weekends across the country. The number of summer guitar workshops has ballooned over the past few years, providing participants with great new options, but this has also made choosing the right workshop that much more difficult. People can attend classical guitar camps, jazz guitar weekends, week-long rock guitar intensives, the list goes on and on.
There are few guitarists alive today that are more accomplished or easily recognizable as Lee Ritenour. With a resume that reads like every budding guitarists wildest dream, Ritenour has performed and recorded with some of the biggest names in music during his fifty years as a guitarist. After beginning his professional career at the age of sixteen,
Solo and side projects are a tricky venture to say the least. Listeners and concert goers seem to find comfort in the familiar. Though most musicians know this, there’s an allure to finding one’s own voice outside of those sonic expectations. Of taking a chance on something new and exploring a different side of one’s art. While tackling a side or solo project can produce mixed results at best, just ask any member of KISS, others are very successful and add a positive element to an artist’s catalogue.
Played with Miles Davis, check. Helped invent the jazz-fusion movement and played on the genre’s most important album, check. Introduced millions of Western listeners to the wonders of Indian classical music and improvisation, check. Exponentially raised the level of rhythmic diversity in jazz, check. Recorded one of the most commercially successful jazz albums of all time while simultaneously making people rethink the acoustic guitars role in modern music, check
To an entire generation, the name Joe Negri conjures up the image of the gentle and soft-spoken “Handyman”, from the long running PBS children’s TV program Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
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