For those of you who missed it-- What a show. My side project, the Lazarus Brothers, played to a large, enthusiastic crowd of dazzling suburbanites at one of the many block parties that sprout up during the middle of the summer, and damn if everyone didn't have a spectacular time. Little to say about the performance, except that we front loaded the first set with the weaker material and the throwaways, and really got serious during the second set. Though I'm far from being a natural onstage, I compensated by trying to get lost in singing and in playing as honestly as I could, without worrying overmuch about impressing people. As a result, I got back in touch with my 'voice' as a player, and began to rediscover all of the really genuinely good things about my style that I'd pooh-pooh'ed and dismissed as not valid. As much as I've tried to deny it, I'm a bluesman. I'm not a traditionalist by any stretch of the imagination, but everytime I try to eliminate the blue aspects from my playing, I'm left with nothing but a bunch of dry, hyperintellectual puffed air. I found that the blues is what keeps the visceral and the instinctual in my art, and that my personal stamp is in walking that line between the gutsy and the sophisticated, the exciting and new alongside the tried-and-true. I can only think of one instance in Saturday's show where I felt dissatisfied with my work, and that was when I allowed my head to pull my heart out of the picture. The rest of the evening was just great, and felt effortless. I played things I liked, that felt and sounded really satisfying. I'm going to continue on this way until I hit a wall. From now on, I'm going to spend less time on my chops, and more time practicing 'singing' through my guitar, working on my phrasing and playing with authentic conviction.

Though initially it was the Beach Boys and progressive rock that made me want to play music, it was the blues that proved to be the springboard into cultivating technique and the way I understand the way music works. The great thing about the blues is that at its most basic, it's very easy to put together--12 bars, three chords and one little box pattern. I remember putting it all together for the first time. "Hell," said my 15-year-old fingers to my 15-year-old ego, "this is EASY!" Soon, I was spending my evenings and afternoons playing what Frank Zappa would call 'shitty teenage leads'. It was fun. I found that the blues scale would work in most pop and rock contexts and convinced myself I was the world's baddest axe maniac. I soon went to college, and began SERIOUS music study, and suddenly felt less like a shark and more like a plankton. My interests soon included jazz, as is the case with most blues-based musicians, since that music has its roots in something I thought I understood. While I wasn't thrilled with the tones favored by most straight-ahead jazz guitarists, nor the seeming lack of expressionistic tools favored by blues and rock players (such as string bending and wrist vibrato), I loved the harmonic and melodic sophistication. My mission became to meld the expressive, rhythmic, dynamic and timbral aspects of the blues with a more sophisticated melodic and harmonic understand learned from jazz. Since I wasn't all that turned on by the overall sound of jazz guitarists, I started looking to horn players for inspiration. The sound of a saxophone was timbrally closer to a solidbody electric guitar than a hollowbody guitar was, at least to my ears, anyway. I became very interested in the music of Charlie Parker around this time. I was surprised to see that the song form used in about 50% of the alto sax giant's repertoire was the 12-bar blues song form. There were variations, in the form of chordal substitutions, and various kinds of turnarounds. From listening to Charlie Parker, it became apparrent to me that jazzmen liked the blues form because its simplicity opens itself to any number of improvisational approaches. What had been a simple way of learning how to play lead guitar really quickly now became a means for exploring a more sophisticated approach! One of my instructors at college, Dave Hansen, showed me something really cool. Conceptually it was very simple, but it turned out to be the springboard for the next step in helping my musicality grow. Each chord-change in a twelve bar blues can FUNCTION AS ITS OWN TEMPORARY KEY CENTER! Jazz started making a little more sense. And just like when I first found out how to use the blues box over that simple three-chord progression, it really made me want to practice, and learn to apply it in other contexts. Using the key of G as a starting place, a 12-bar blues looks like this: G7 //// //// //// //// C7 G7 //// //// //// //// D7 C7 G7 D7 (or turnaround) //// //// //// //// A traditional bluesman's soloing approach would be to find the G blues scale (spelled G-Bflat-Bnatural-C-Dflat-Dnatural-F) and milk it over the whole song form. With the right phrasing, feeling and attitude, it'd sound killer (listen to Buddy Guy for a guy who does this better than anyone). A more sophisticated and varied (and therefore more surprising and fun) approach would be to treat each chord change as it's own little key. The first four bars of the song form are G7, for which we could go for our standby scale, the G blues (spelled above). The first four bars look like this: G7 //// //// //// //// However, the next four bars are another

Hello! I'm sitting here, at a temp job I got through Kelly Services, with not much to do. The mail is sorted, the payroll alphabetized, and the phones are currently silent. The daily reports to which I've been assigned cannot be done due to an error in the software. Normally, they would be the first things I would do. So--what to write about? I'm rediscovering the joy of playing again. For a while, it was no fun, and I didn't feel like I was breaking any new ground. I listened to a lot of players I admired and HATED my tone, and HATED my phrasing. My phrasing sounded like a guy who'd been spending lots of time working on his scales and right-hand technique. I asked myself, when was the last time I really enjoyed playing. Not the last time I'd recorded a solo I liked after I'd had the opportunity to live with it for a while, but when was the last time the physical act of bending strings, It was when I was in college. Ironically, it was the unhappiest time in my life, but I had unlocked the mysteries of "making the changes" during my sophomore year, and was melding it with the blues style I had already developed. My phrasing was fluid and melodic, and was melded to my tone, which I had finally managed to arrive at and be happy with. It wasn't until I started fussing with my tone, and ignoring my phrasing at the expense of building my chops that things started to go south. Chops are important, no doubt, but not at the expense of musical ideas that are expressive and make sense to the player. So, I've stopped 'practicing'. For the time being, there will be no picking excercises, nor running of scales. I might learn the odd lick or two, as long as I can find ways to extrapolate interesting ideas from it that I can apply to my own playing, For the time being, I'm going to spend my time "playing"--enjoying the feeling of my hand around the neck, bending strings, playing melodies, and trying to MOVE people, starting with myself, with my playing. There might not have been a lot right about college, but my playing was one of the things that was. Time to recapture and refine it.