BB King and guitar music

     Today was a long day at work but on my lunch break I turned on PBS and there was a BB King documentary on. It was fitting for me because lately I've been listening to a lot of great guitar music. And in addition, its black history month, and who better to celebrate than BB King. We just lost him recently in 2015, he's safe, and he just might have been the greatest blues musician of all time.
     What I really like about BB is his guitar playing. His vibrato sings so sweetly and his guitar tone is so light, smooth, and jazzy. He's the most jazzified blues guitarist I've ever heard. He adds a lot of chromatic notes into his lines and its more interesting stuff than what other blues guitarists were doing. It sounds like BB listened to a lot of jazz at some point. For one thing he plays a semi-hollow body Gibson guitar and that gives him a big round tone that is more typical for a modal jazzer than a blues man. It was great to see a documentary detailing all of BB's accomplishments and seeing that his memory is still with us. Long live the King!
     Lately, I've been listening to a lot of great guitar music. John McLaughlin, Eric Johnson, and Robben Ford. This guy that comes to my work also told me to check out Mark Knofler's live version of Sultans of Swing .I'll have to check that out sometime but I've heard that Knofler is a phenomenal guitar player. I gotta say that I really dig Robben Ford's guitar style. He seems jazzy yet he plays such simple sounding stuff at the same time. Its a very interesting style where he never overplays. He's an interesting picker and at one point early in his career he played with Miles Davis. Listening to John McLaughlin has been a blast. I heard a while back that he had an album called Black Light that just came out but I haven't gotten it yet. I will get it because I'm tired of just listening to stuff on youtube, pandora, and soundcloud. I need new albums! I've already got a super big collection full of great stuff (mostly jazz, rock, and metal) and it wouldn't hurt to get more.
     In addition to guitar music, I've been listening to a lot of game music. I love the music selection from Smash 4, its just awesome! I particularly love the music from Metroid, Fire Emblem, Midgar stage, Legend of Zelda, Mario Bros themes, and Dream Land stage theme. I love it all really haha. I really like the idea of playing video game songs and turning them into jazz standards with interesting chord changes and voicings. Think of how awesome that would be to play that live!  Music has always been that one constant in my life. As Frank Zappa said,"music is the best."