The highlight of 2014 for me was seeing Brad Meldau Trio and the Bad Plus at CSUN in early December. I don't think it could get better in terms of seeing a jazz group live in performance. In addition I met some new musician friends through the internet. One guy is a guitar player like me but who is more interested in music theory than myself. When I take solos I don't really like to think too much about music theory and chord scales and what not. This guy is the opposite of that. But he loves all the same jazz music that I like, which is pretty rare in young people these days unless your studying music at Uni.
In addition, I met this old timer jazz musician who plays clarinet and bass clarinet but also plays about 30 other instruments. He's an old dixie-land jazz type of musician who cites people like Sidney Bechet and Benny Goodman as influences. We've been playing together off and on for a while now and its going pretty well. He's a great musician but we still need to play more together to jell better. Also, we need to find a bass player because right now its just us two playing jazz standards like Ain't Misbehavin', Georgia, those kinds of tunes. He's told he actually saw Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane together on the same bill! But he's not a fan of modern jazz, and by modern jazz I mean bebop from the 40s and 50s like Bird, Diz, Miles, and Trane. He's a great musician and I hope we can play more and meet with more musicians to start gigging this year. He inspires me to practice the guitar more.In 2015 I'm looking forward to a couple of concerts. Mainly Allan Holdsworth, Mike Stern and Eric Johnson, and Bill Frisell. I'm going to try to go to every one of those shows. Here's a bit of examples from each of those musicians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcPbmPM7epY Holdsworth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNpE8VSG-TY Mike Stern and Eric Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrM-WmB2kdI Bill Frisell
I'm mainly a jazz listener and trying to get more into playing jazz guitar but I'm still interested in rock music, even some metal. So I'm planning on practicing more guitar and getting better, especially with metal shred techniques like sweeping and string skipping, and of course jazz chord voicings, and improvising over chord changes of standards. I'm even thinking about teaching myself classical guitar because that's more of a solo instrument.
Also, I plan on reading more science fiction novels and doing a lot of gaming. I might even start streaming on twitch again. I used to stream starcraft 2 all the time even though I wasn't the greatest player on the American servers. Who knows I might even go on a diet in 2015.
