When I saw João Bosco would be performing at the Birdland jazz club in Manhattan in 2017 – his first show in the US in about a decade – my wife and I had a flight booked from Milwaukee to New York that same day!
João Bosco is a former civil engineer turned guitarist/singer/songwriter/bandleader. He’s become one of the most important artists in Brazilian music over the past five or so decades, and for good reason.
Continue reading Partido Alto Samba with João Bosco
“The Stairway Lick” is my name for the opening sequence of notes in Jimmy Page’s famous solo on Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”
This lick, it’s variations and closely related phrases make up a significant chunk of blues and rock pentatonic vocabulary. Virtually every player has a version of it in their bag of tricks and uses it to great effect.
Of course one could find examples of its use that predates Jimmy Page in 1971, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find it opening up a more famous solo.
Continue reading The Stairway Lick
Even if you wouldn’t describe yourself as the “shreddy type,” we all secretly dream of our hands flying all over the neck unencumbered by technical limitations. Many people will take off, only to sputter, stall and careen into the side of a mountain.
What’s missing is an important yet often overlooked step in getting your technique off the ground: synchronizing the two hands. This might sound obvious, and it is. But very few of the people I meet actually sit down and purposefully practice this aspect of their playing, much less make it a regular enough part of their routine to keep the rust away.
Continue reading Synchronization