Good morning! It's 9:43 on this dismal Saturday the 14th. We got what should've been yesterday's weather today. My brother was born on a Friday the 13th, reportedly during an electrical storm. If he were a blues artist, he could say he was "born under a bad sign" My favorite blues lament, though is "if it wasn't for bad luck and trouble, I wouldn't have no luck at all".
Music news. Mindlessly flipping through YouTube videos, I discovered a tenor sax phenom- Melissa Adana. Originally from Chile, now living in NYC. The first cut I heard of hers was Without a Song, done as a trio with no chord instrument. Smokin'! Found a different cut of hers with a terrific guitarist on it- Lage Lund. As the name would suggest, he's from Norway. This makes three(3) fine guitarists from there, at least that I know of. The other two-Jostein Gulbrandsen and Asle Roe-are Facebook friends of mine. I share their stuff, especially Jostein. Those two Melissa Adana cuts are both on my Facebook page. Enjoy!
As for me. I'm still puttering away here in the Lab. Working on a couple recording projects, and trying to keep my guitar skills up. Hearing a player like Lage Lund, who has great control and thus great fluency keeps me in the practice room, humbly plugging away. What I'm after is not their arsenal of lines and ideas but more their fluency. The flow.
One challenge for me right now, working in the Lab, is keeping everything fresh and new. You get to liking certain sounds, certain timbres, and they become regular components- like the 'clavinet' sound(which probably just shows I've watched too many pornographic videos). Lots of my tunes have that going. It's one thing to have a "trademark" sound, and quite another to just be endlessly repeating yourself. So I endeavor to find something new to add to each of these 'nondescript' clavinet n' guitar pieces.
So that's the story for now. Thanks as ever for stopping in and reading. Happy Saturday to you! For now, I'm outa here. More later. PS Today's pic was taken on the road, and we were in motion as this was taken. We were aboard a converted School Bus(like the Partridge Family- or was it the Cowsills?), heading to our next engagement. Today's tune is called Twitchin' in the Kitchen, and is from my CD Oop Bop Sh' Bang. Me, Andy Burtschi, Craig Russo. The title came from Don Udey, during a Poker game at my house. The twitchin' referred to my dog Lester. It's one of the few times I had a song title before I had a song. 