Mistakes Were Made

I was listening to Leo Sidran's podcast The Third Story this week, in particular his interview with pianist and harmonica virtuoso Howard Levy. It's a great interview, including, among other things, Levy's explanation of how the...

Jazz Algebra

The little mom 'n pop music store where I took guitar lessons in high school is a real estate office now. And Jeff W., my high school guitar teacher, is still around but, as continuing evidence of the immense aura of wisdom that...

I guess everyone in the immediate vicinity of Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins referred to Mr. Hopkins as "Lightnin'," but just thinking about that got to me wondering about blues and jazz musicians without a nickname. It's all downhill and shady once...

Use the metronome to callibrate time, and learn to hear the click on beats 2 and 4.

Gypsy Jazz And String (Tie) Theory

As a steel guitar player in the early 1990s, I went through a brief but unfortunate bolo tie phase, one in which I found confirmation of the notion "like attracts like." Which is to say, once the news is out...