I didn’t know that but thanks to Guitar Players Center website I found out about it, I really didn’t know when Joe Satriani’s birthday is.

And honestly I didn’t know he is 52 yo, man, how time flies!!!

So, a short and warm Happy birthday to you, Joe! and I think I speak for everybody when I say you don’t show your age and I wish you create beautiful pieces of extraterrestrial music at least for the next 52 years to come!

Happy birthday, Joe!

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We have this popular TV show here in Romania, called Happy Hour, presented by a very popular guy here.

We have the TV show’s band that does a very good job on the show playing/singing every day.

We have this very popular and appreciated pop/jazz singer, with musical studies with a lot of international awards.

We have this stupid, low class, kitsch “musical” style that is played/sung by gypsies, but unfortunately appreciated by a lot of people. I won’t comment anymore about this. Don’t confuse this with traditional gypsy music, which is another kind of thing, but can be considered the root of the previous one, the “classy” version of it maybe?

Well, this classy girl has a big show with a big band and all the fuss where she plays a song with one of the famous singers of this crappy kitsch style, for “anti-discrimination” reasons, she says. OK.

Because of this show, she received a lot of negative appreciations and in my eyes she lost a  bit of my respect for doing this. That’s my opinion. It has nothing to do with discrimination, just that she shouldn’t have associated her name with that style. Period. But, again, this is my opinion.

She comes to that TV show, and she receives a very good treatment from the presenter (I say that since he respects good artists while the bad ones he just destroys right there on spot with no mercy in an hour of very high audience).

So she is invited to sing a song (a lot of the invited artists sing with the band of the show) and she starts to give sheet music to the guys in the band, here’s the one for guitar, here’s the one for drums…the guys in the band had their moment of confusion, clearly looked at the sheet music lost and with no clue and told her that they don’t read sheet music. Well, she says, the other band (my note: the low class, kitschy one) played the song on the first take from sheet music. But I didn’t want to embarrass you, sorry for that.

Sorry, my ass! She clearly wanted to make a stand but I don’t get it! You don’t go to a rock band (they are a rock band, even if in the show play mostly pop) with printed sheet music asking them to back you up live, right there on spot, in the most popular daily TV show and you say you didn’t try to embarrass them.

Because the guys admitted they can’t play on the first take the song, she sang with a negative (what I am sure she was prepared to do right from the start).

For me, the one who lost (again) here was the singer, not the band. You could say I am subjective, I can’t read music either. Doh, what a surprise! An electric guitar player who can’t read music! But if you really wanted to sing the song with the band, you could at least send them a copy of the song and the sheets before coming there, giving them a bit of time to get the song right. Otherwise it’s a situation where nobody really wins.

The band lost a bit of it’s shining look while the singer ended the show as the queen of music, extraordinary voice, master of piano, but with big issues on her popularity. She (still) is a very appreciated singer, but I think she should not do this kind of things anymore. She clearly wanted to make a stand, probably somebody from the band made some kind of joke on her singing with “the other band” and she wanted to make them pay for it.

Well, I think she payed for it also.

The video is right after they admitted they can’t read music and she used the negative. If you look behind her, some of the guys in the band still keep the papers in their hands (probably masking the guns pointed to her, or some kind of middle finger).

Here’s another one where she sings and plays the piano, for a full picture.

And because I believe in equity, here’s on of the videos of the band.

By the way, do you read sheet music or not?What’s your opinion on that?

Dr J, this question is not addressed to you

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I am quite excited everytime I read something about fingerstyle guitar players. I don’t play this way, but I enjoy every second watching one of these guys playing. I have posted here a couple of videos of Sungha Jung, a fingerstyle guitar player of only 11 yo, I have posted about Andy McKee also, I have posted about Phil Keaggy, which I consider to be one of the best ever…

Today I have seen this video of Don Ross, a true artist! Here’s a beautiful performance, a beautiful song and a very smooth way of playing the guitar!

Enjoy and comment!

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A quick and happy(for me) news now: yesterday I placed an order for a brand new guitar!

Yep, for real! I ordered one of those modeling guitars that I’ve got so crazy about, I have ordered a Line 6 Variax 600 Blue, the guitar in the picture here.

But since the color is not so “usual”, they don’t have it on stock for the moment, so I have to wait for 2 weeks to bring it from wherever they bring it, Germany or UK, I think. I am usually the typical customer to buy a black (electric)guitar and in the beginning when I saw this color, i said WTF is that? The most stupid color ever!! I have first seen it on Fender, along with a crazy green, but after looking again and again, I’ve fallen in love with this color for good! It has a vintage look…

However, my band mates still think it looks stupid…

So, two long weeks of waiting…oh, well…

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This video is just unbelievable, I couldn’t believe it, really! And not for what they do here, but because I have realized how complex Queen’s music really is.

How many of the bands playing today would dare to compose and arrange something of that complexity nowadays?

Well? What do you think?

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Call me stupid, call me uninformed, call me whatever you like, but I swear I didn’t know about this girl, Tal Wilkenfeld, who at only 22 yo!! has been touring with Jeff Beck, Chick Corea, Eric Clapton, Herbie Hancock, Steve Vai, and the Allman Brothers. Damn!

I have found out about Tal Wilkenfeld by reading Little Rock Jam’s blog and once again I realized why I love blogging about music so much! Everyday I get the chance to find out about something new and wonderful in this world! That is why!

So, who is Tal Wilkenfeld?

Tal Wilkenfeld has been playing the bass since less than five years! She started playing the guitar at 14 in her native Sydney and switched over to the electric bass three years later.

“I’ve always just picked up any instrument and been able to play it―I could sit down at the drums or the piano and just play for fun…But as soon as I started playing bass I knew it was my instrument. It was like, ‘Yes this is it. I don’t even want to play guitar anymore, this is amazing.’”

I am not going to reproduce the original article since this is not the idea of this post, you should visit Little Rock Jam and read it for yourself there, but I am going to post a video here so you get my point!

By the way, here’s her MySpace page and also her website.

Well, what do you think about her?

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Recently I’ve felt a big joy, like some kind of balloon suddenly inflated inside me. This happened because I have suddenly felt proud about a particular thing that recently happened! Let me tell you about it:

I was traveling with my wife and a few friends by car a few weeks ago and listening music while driving. My friend was driving the car, his car, that is, and in the CD player it was one of his CDs, so his music, not mine. A bunch of great rock chops so I started some kind of “recognize the song/artist” game that almost all the time I won since none of my friends or my wife are really passionate about music or something. However, I could not stop myself “explaining” them what makes the difference between Santana’s sound and licks compared to Satriani or Slash. I didn’t think it will make much of a difference but I couldn’t help it not to observe one thing or an other related to the music that was playing.

And now the reason that started me…These last days I had the surprise to hear my wife telling me, while listening some music in the car, indeed, Santana has a particular sound that I now instantly recognize!!! Damn! I looked at her with THAT look on my face! Indeed, one of the recent songs of Santana was playing on the radio, I didn’t know the song, my wife didn’t know it either, but SHE RECOGNIZED THE GUITAR!

I should tell you, if this doesn’t seem like a big break through to you, that my wife does not know too much about guitars(other than hearing me playing) and she has no interest in rock music! She couldn’t tell a band from an other one, unless the band is one of the highly promoted monsters of rock that really is different one way or the other (something like Queen, Guns, probably Metallica, etc).

So I really felt like winning a really big battle this time, since she managed to recognize THE GUITAR PLAYER out of a feature song, you know, the kind of songs Santana makes lately, in a different style, with different singers.

I guess I feel like a teacher that realized his students payed attention.

Man, how good it feels!

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This is wicked! 2 Japanese musicians playing rock music on those guitar-like traditional instruments! I must admit, they made my day and I watched this video twice (so far)!

I especially loved the energy and dedication!

Aren’t these guys great, or what?

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I discovered Dusty Ciggaar (what a name!) reading JP’s Stratoblogster blog and I was very surprised to see how well this guy knows his way around the guitar. He seems to be only 17 now but has such a fluency and feeling, plus the fact that he has some complex licks that are not everybody’s chops, if you know what I mean.

The videos I have seen featured him playing at 15 yo so the guy has this in him since a long time.

For the moment I don’t know much about Dusty Ciggaar, I have seen on MySpace he plays in a band called Rhythm Chiefs and they do it good! He lives in Netherlands and this year appeared on a jazz compilation and man,this guy is all booked up!

Dusty Ciggaar won ALL age categories of the Sena Guitar Awards when he was just 14 years old! Imagine that!

I would have loved to put here the first song on his MySpace page, at http://www.myspace.com/dustyfc, but I can not. So, you go there and listen that first melody cause it really made me blue. The picture with Jimmy Vaughan stands as an interesting social proof! I wish I had such a picture myself

Enjoy!

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Today I had to take my wife to the local county hospital for a minor surgery, she needs to remove a limp on her wrist. What made me write this here is the fact that we went to the same hospital, same floor, same doctor that operated me 10 years ago for a cut tendon on my left hand.

It was funny(in a not so funny way) to see again those places after ten years because they brought back so many unpleasant memories. I remember I was thinking about how my life as a guitar player is over and how I won’t be able to play the guitar again. How would I play the guitar with an injured tendon on my left hand? What should I do?

I had a couple of ideas while recovering from the surgery, like trying to play left handed, but I would have needed to start all over again learning the guitar and all those processes in my brain needed to be reversed also…I have also considered starting playing drums since I used to love playing drums at that moment.

The good thing is that after the surgery I was able to recover well and I’ve got back to playing the guitar. In the beginning I remember my pinky had no speed and precision, I wanted it to press a particular fret at a particular molment but my pinky used to think something else.

But after a while, I’ve got back to normal(I still have an issue with that finger but I have managed to live with it) and playing the guitar actually was the best thing I could have done since I needed exercising that finger and guitar playing gave me all the reasons in the world to do that while actually playing. By the way, 4 fingers playing sucks big time!

So today, while seeing again those places made me remember all these and how the doctor said that comparing to the patients there, I have not such a big problem(and how right she was) and she will do her best because I play the guitar. Thank God I do!

PS: My wife still haven’t had the surgery due to doctor being very busy today with urgencies so I am going to go there tomorrow again. Brrrr….

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