Gear Diary

It seems that whether self-taught or formally trained, most guitarists learn a very rock-centric style of playing based on the music they most enjoy hearing. Through the years they might find themselves limited by this or simply seek to inform their music with different styles. A new Lick Library instructional DVD seeks to provide established [...]

I have already covered other works from Hiromi Uehara over the past few years, including her 2011 release ‘Voice’. That was a great record that featured the same trio as on Move, with bassist Anthony Jackson and drummer Simon Phillips. It would be easy to call this recording ‘more of the same’ or evolutionary, but [...]

I have known about Chris Potter for years, but mostly as a sideman, playing with Paul Motian, Dave Holland and most recently as part of Pat Metheny’s Unity Band. At the same time I have also become more of a fan of his efforts as a leader – his ‘Follow the Red Line’ live album [...]

Pat Metheny is one of my favorite artists, and I am pretty much guaranteed to buy whatever he releases, and have been thrilled with the quality of work in recent years (he lost me for a while in the late 80s / early 90s). I truly enjoyed his Orchestrion release, and the live performance I [...]

I have already complained about Sony for releasing so much posthumous Miles Davis material, but it is really a joke: because what they have been giving us isn’t gratuitous, but rather restored and wonderfully packaged discoveries or items previously only found on low-quality bootlegs. That was true of the 1967 Bootleg Volume 1, which made [...]

OK, so I am a sucker for any new release featuring guitarist Mary Halvorson. Already a fan of Ingrid Laubrock from 2012′s Camino Cielo Echo from the Tom Rainey trio (yes, also with Mary Halvorson), this was an instant-buy for me. And while the band members were all familiar to me, this was clearly Laubrock’s [...]