Guitar, Music, Prince

     Let me start off first by saying its good to be back writing after not writing since the 16th. For me that's a long break. I was going to bed earlier and because I only write at night, work on the blog just wasn't getting done. Back to bidness as usual as they say.
     Lately things have been going great. I've been hanging out w/ friends, playing a lot of smash, and I even took up playing Yugioh again. I haven't played Yugioh since I was in middle school. Its a great game but there's not much complexity to it and a lot of the cards are super overpowered. Basically its the opposite of Magic the Gathering but I still like it. I bought myself a cyber dragon starter deck and I've had a lot of fun playing against my friends. We're just a couple of grown ass men playing Yugioh. Straight up nerds XD.
     In addition, I've been keeping up with anime. I started watching Yugioh GX which is the second Yugioh saga of the series. I think there's like two other series of that that are more recent. I just wanted to say that even though I love Facebook and social media I'm beginning to get bored by the feed and all the lame boring crap. I'm tired of the cat videos and the stupid memes people post. I feel like even though I'm a blogger and I post about my posts and stuff, that my content isn't as lame as that other stuff I see all the time haha. Even though everybody and their grandma is a blogger I feel like some blogs are super fake. Read a random blog post online and you'll see what I mean. Not very many real people out here. Anyways, what I really wanted to talk about was music related stuff.
     I've been getting back into practicing guitar. Today I even had a marathon session where I played for like 2-3 hours (w/ a break of course), I actually lost track of time because I was having so much fun. It was amazing! You know things are going great when every lick you play flows perfectly into the next. I didn't work on anything in particular or even play too much of any songs but I still had a blast. I just improvised in a free style. I've come to find that things sound really cool when I mix neo-classical metal shred licks with bebop and fusion lines. Its a nice little mix that sounds good on a clean toned guitar-mainly my Jackson, which has a super fast neck. I feel like if I just keep practicing a couple hours a day and organize my practice to work more on songs I would be on the right track. I haven't played or focused on the guitar for months now. A big part of it was the massive gaming time I was doing but I've learned how to balance it. "Time to tip the scales!" -Lucina
     In terms of listening music I've mostly been listening to a lot of rock and metal. But I'm still keeping up with some jazz as well. Saxophonist Henry Threadgill just got a Pulitzer Prize, so there's that. I'm a huge Threadgill fan so hearing him doing so good and getting recognized is great news. Even though I can't say I quite understand his music, Threadgill inspires me as a musician, peaking my intellectual avant-garde side of jazz being.
     Sad to say that Prince died. Although I haven't listened to much of Prince's catalog, just knowing how good he was as a guitar player makes his death a huge loss for the music community. He was one of the best rock and rollers of all time. His music went through other genres but I feel like he was Hendrix blues/rock guy at heart, especially when it came to his solos. My favorite memory of Prince was when I saw the George Harrison tribute concert on DVD and Prince played an amazing solo over While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Eric Clapton was once asked "what it was like being the best guitarist alive" and he said "I wouldn't know, ask Prince." 'Nuff said. Rest in peace Prince.

Music I

     Lately I haven't been listening to too much cutting edge stuff. For the longest time I had only been listening to the most cutting edge free jazz out there. But now I've kind of reverted to the stereotypical straight ahead jazz kind of listener. I've been listening to a lot of Kenny Garrett for some reason. He's one of those sax players that I always fall back to whenever I just to listen to something and relax. He's a great player too but I've heard some of his work that is a lot more smooth jazz than I'd like him to be. I heard a few tracks of John Mcalughlin's new album and I was a bit disappointed. He was getting a lot of press in the guitar magazines because he's playing a lot of electric guitar now but those tracks sounded way too smooth jazz to me. Right now I'm just chilling listening to a Jimmy Heath pandora radio station. So it plays a lot of Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, etc. All the main heavy hitters of straight ahead jazz. I feel like you have to really go out of your way to listen to more interesting jazz (free jazz) and sometimes you don't feel like listening to it because its much harder to listen to free jazz than straight ahead because of the lack of musical and rhythmic structure. But the last free jazz I was listening to was Tomeka Reid's Quartet with Mary Halvorson. It was really good stuff! Reid's cello playing is a breath of fresh air in the free jazz scene and she's an AACM musician from Chicago, pretty much my favorite jazz collective. I think very highly of AACM because of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They pretty much changed how I see jazz music as whole. They showed me that anything is possible in jazz and that you can do everything, and do it well. A while back I wrote about a Steve Coleman record. It was good but it didn't catch my attention as hard as Henry Threadgill's work did. I'm in a free jazz group on facebook, check it out https://www.facebook.com/groups/342186855874771//. It's a great group and we have over 12,000 members. It's the biggest facebook group I've been in and I've learned a lot by listening to the music other people recommend. Although I have to say that the group is biased and mainly only post European free jazz musicians. I think there's still a lot of great free jazz musicians in Chicago and New York that haven't been discovered or been put on a big radar musically or socially among jazz musicians. The last CD I got was a rock album from a friend at work. It was a Dinosaur JR CD. It was a really good album but I just can't get back into listening to rock again after getting so deep into jazz. I'm just a straight up jazz connoisseur now and its great.

Jack Dejohnette album Made in Chicago Review

    

     This is the latest Jack Dejohnette album in which he comes home to his Chicago roots and plays with some of the guys from the AACM whom he played with in his youth. This includes Henry Threadgill on alto saxophones and bass flute, Roscoe Mitchell on sopranino saxophones, soprano saxophones, alto saxophones, baroque flute, and bass recorder. In addition, there is Muhal Richard Abrams on piano, Larry Grey on bass and violoncello, and of course Jack Dejohnette on drums. What makes this 2013 performance at the Chicago Jazz Festival so great is not the compositions, but the individual and collaborative improvisation of these musicians as a whole.
      In fact, I can't tell that these compositions are even written down at all. It all sounds like improvisation and great improv at that! I've always thought that live jazz is always better than studio albums and this is one case where live performance really shines. The level of nuance and skill is just off the roof. A piece that really stands out is the second song, Jack 5, by Muhal Richard Abrams, where Jack Dejohnette opens up with drum flourishes on the cymbals and toms. What gives Jack such a unique touch on the drums is that he was a pianist when he first began playing music. I really like Jack 5 because when the melody comes in, its an odd sort of droning melody not unlike something Ornette Coleman would do. It's slow and methodical. The bass line is especially interesting. Check out this song online if possible, it is a great piece.  
     Some of the other songs have the same qualities as Jack 5 in that the beginning is a bit slow and the melody goes up and down in chromatic dramatic fashion. But when they start improvising things really go the dogs, or in this case, the cats. With the piano its hard to say what this group sounds like. I would immediatley say they sound like the Art Ensemble of Chicago but I would say this is more melodic and structured than AEOC. That's whats so great about it. This is great music for people that are just getting into free-jazz but it still contains enough free elements that free-jazz fans would love it. It's the best of both worlds. The piano really gives the group a harmonic framework in which to do the improvising. There are moments where the piano is doing its thing and it sounds like a post-bop sort of band.
     The other highlight of the performance for me was the last untitled tune. It sounds like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, all free and what not. I particularly love Roscoe Mitchell's squeaky saxophone playing on this. It's what makes free-jazz great, this piece. 
     I would say this is an important record because most of these guys are in their 70s, almost 80s now and they won't be with us forever. So it's cool to see them come back to their roots from when they used to play with each other in Chicago and now here they are at old age still playing and performing together, maybe for the last time. In addition, this is an important jazz recording because many Chicago jazz greats played at this festival as well. This is one of the best new jazz recording I've ever heard.
 As Jack says at the end, "May the Great Spirit bless you!" It certainly has blessed Jack.