Hank Garland w/Eddie Arnold

That’s a rare video by the way.

Incidentally, there is a movie about this amazing guitarist. See movie poster below and check out the trailer here.

According to this source, Ray Scherr and Steve Vai are executive producers under the Favored Nations production banner. Favored Nations is a label owned by Steve Vai which has signed many outstanding guitarists such as Tommy Emmanuel and Mimi Fox. For more information on the history of Favored Nations, click here.

The film marks the directorial debut for Rick Bieber, following his prominent career as a producer on such acclaimed features as “Flatliners,” “Made In America,” and “Radio Flyer.”

Last but not least check out Hank Garland’s myspace page, which features great music. By the way Hank Garland has passed away, so body else must have created that myspace page. You must read more about the tragic life of this amazing guitarist here.

Been meaning to post this for some time.

This two posts: Happiness Formula and The Meaning of Meaning , from The Dilbert Blog make interesting reading.

Now, reading about happiness reminded me of MCC’s definition of happiness as expectation met or exceeded. Up till now, I can’t think of a counterexample to his definition. This is rare. Either it’s a really good definition or my brain is slowly atrophying from working too long in Government.

Are online music schools any good?

Read this exceptional post (an interesting argument from analogy) on YJGG by Alisdair MacRae-Birch discussing this question.This discussion on online music schools was prompted, I believe, by an announcement of the newly opened Jimmy Bruno Guitar Institute, which by the way costs only $45USD for 3 months. I’m thinking of joining.
Here’s an extract from the post:

You are the instrument”. What you end up playing is a reflection of you. Musical realities are internal processes. Learning music is a process of self-transformation, it is a process of increasing your auditory understanding and knowledge. A musical instrument such as guitar is merely a machine, a device.

We now live in a world where the visual sense is heavily emphasized. The internet and navigating the internet involves using our visual senses to move around.

Some instruments such as guitar, other fretted instruments and piano by their nature appear to be open to visual learning – finger patterns, fret diagrams, scale diagrams etc. It is much harder to teach visually other instruments such as horns, non-fretted strings etc. For those instruments that can be taught using visual means – the visual learning is seductive – it can be seen!

The internet helps emphasize this visual learning, scale patterns, chord charts, picking patterns, visually learnt phrases etc. Students get seduced into studying the external, technical and mechanical aspects of study, chord pictures, picking, hammer-ons, etc. Things that can be visually shown. (These aspects are important but must go hand-in-hand with developing audiation).

Unfortunately this is not the most direct way to transform the student into a musician. The internal hearing, audiation, and it’s linkage to the body/soul of the musician is changed only after many years reflected back on the output played on the device – the instrument, if at all. Sadly, for many students they never get transformed, they simply become (extremely) good at mechanically executing scales, arpeggios, patterns, licks, chords on the device. This appearance itself is seductive, the student feels they are learning more and more, they know more patterns, more scales, more shapes, can mechanically execute playing tunes, copy solos, it certainly looks as though they are getting there. Even their friends are impressed with their mechanical execution skills. Internal aural transformation is not flashy, it cannot be seen visually, it is ephemeral, but it can be heard.

A metaphor may help explain things better (I fully appreciate that this metaphor does have weaknesses):

You decide you want to write a novel in a language that is unknown and foreign to you (Your desire to play music). You desire it to be a certain genre – a detective novel (Jazz). You’ve heard that some of the best novelists in the field use a Dell PC(!) to produce their award winning novels (The specific jazz guitar that you are hankering after). You research the benefits of the different types and models of Dells! (Discussions about guitars and equipment). So you purchase the
Dell. There are foreign novelists you admire, and they seem to be able to produce many novels on their Dell’s, so you decide you need lessons on how to operate your Dell. The Dell operator training course gives you exercises in typing, keyboard sequences, where to place your fingers on the keys, passages to type out including whole chapters written in the language that you want to write your novel; you copy them word for word on your dell. You’ve now written your first chapter of the foreign language novel, albeit it is copied from the book. With great stamina, you continue the typing process….

No-one in their right mind would advocate this approach to writing a novel in a language that is unknown and foreign to you. It would be best first to learn the language aurally, listen to it, speak it, try interacting with it immediately, try conversations, the dialects within the language and then try writing it, then how to produce a novel, the last part of the process would be buy the output device, the PC etc. The parallel in music is guided listening, then singing, speaking rhythms, sung improvisations etc.

So where does this leave us. For a student to succeed in music they must transform and enhance their internal auditory processes. A teacher’s role is to guide a student in that transformation. There are many aspects to be worked on, but the main role a teacher has is to be an auditory problem solver for the student – overcoming any obstacles and difficulties, helping them change their internal auditory processes – guiding their listening, guiding the student to understanding what they are hearing, developing their audiation. As the internal auditory processes transform over time, step-by-step, teach them necessary execution skills on the instrument to realize these sounds. Singing melodies, speaking rhythms, recognizing and hearing harmonic changes are all part of that transformation.

Jazz and many folk music’s have an aural/oral tradition. It has traditionally been taught orally by auditorially experienced musicians guiding auditory in-experienced musicians in their listening, pointing out harmonic, melodic, rhythmic aspects. Helping the student step-by-step develop their internal auditory processes. The chosen instrument, the device, is used as a tool to increase/experiment with the auditory understanding.

Shadows Medley

Secret Love

From 1999.

Tommy Emmanuel – Groove Discussion

Tommy Emmanuel – True Stories – Chapter 1 of 19

Video above is documentary interview with Tommy filmed for MusicCountry Cable Television in Australia includes Keith Urban, Troy Cassar-Daley, Tommy’s mother Virginia and many other greats of Australian music.

Tommy Emmanuel – Talking Heads ABC TV - PART 1 of 6

Early Tommy Emmanuel with Jack Jones of Southern Sons – Imagine

See video here (video seems to work properly only with Internet Explorer and not Firefox) for footage of Tommy at the Blue Note in Milan. More TE videos from TE manager Gina Mendello here.

TE is coming to Singapore again in July. Details here.

THELONIOUS MONK’S RUBY MY DEAR

THELONIOUS MONK’S CREPESCULE WITH NELLIE

BILL EVANS’ WALTZ FOR DEBBIE

I record that I read Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” a few days ago, probably last week.

According to Flaubert, “A Simple Heart” “is quite simply the tale of the obscure life of a poor country girl, devout but not given to mysticism, devoted in a quiet sober way and soft as newly baked bread. One after the other she loves a man, her mistress’s children, a nephew, and old man she nurses, then her parrot; when the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she is on her deathbed she takes the parrot for the Holy Ghost. It is in no way ironic (though you might suppose it to be so) but on the contrary, very serious and very sad. I want to move my readers to pity, I want to make sensitive souls weep, being one myself.”

I can’t say I like the story. It’s about how one fucked up thing after another happens to someone who doesn’t deserves it. It’s about how a good, simple and pure hearted woman gets taken advantage of by those she loves. The story is manipulative.

A normal person with an ego would hate to be someone like her, constantly being taken advantage of by the person he or she loves. Yet, there is never any complaint from the lips of the protagonist. I don’t know whether to pity the protagonist or to admire her. To pity her for her misfortune and ignorance at the intentions of others. To admire her for her stoic, uncomplaining acceptance of all that happens to her. Is it good for a person to be insulted but not feel insulted? I don’t know.

What I do know is that such a person has a very different concept of “self”, perhaps very little sense of “self” and that is in my opinion a good thing. I wish I can give up more of my “ego”, my self. That’s another reason I admire Buddhist or Zen training. They help you to let go of your “ego” and allow you to be closer to reality and to truth.

Stumbled upon Desert Pen after learning about it from muser.

Read Baghdad and Bach, which struck me. Here’s an excerpt:

All Marines struggle to find a precious balance between the light and the darkness, between our jobs and ourselves. Aside from the actual business of fighting in hostile, remote corners of the world, the most difficult challenge we face is striking a balance between the competing demands of wartime military service, our friends and families, and our own needs.

As Marines, we’re trained to be the “tip of the spear” in America’s wars —- quite simply, it is our job to kill those who oppose the American people’s will, whatever that will is and wherever it takes us. Ours is an unequivocally ugly business, and as such it requires that we be fortified mentally and psychologically in ways that civilians might find shocking or distasteful.

At a point, it becomes necessary to separate the two sides of ourselves. While we want our friends and family to continue understanding and loving us as the good, kindhearted kids whom they raised, training for and participating in combat hardens us in ways that they might find difficult to understand. Consequently, we learn to segregate from our family and friends the grittier, darker side of ourselves which has evolved in response to the unique demands of our job.

This is why civilians commonly understand Marines to be well-mannered, clean-cut American boys, while Marines commonly understand Marines to be more or less barbarians.

Although my experience and thus my authority is limited to the Marine Corps infantry, a small enough field within the overall U.S. military apparatus, I dare say that every military man and woman ultimately finds that their circuitry has been re-wired a little. Within my field, I am surrounded by a handpicked, carefully cultivated group of aggressive, alpha-type personalities, and the effects of working within this rather extreme culture have left their stamp upon me.

In this place, one quickly learns that respect is the currency that pays the bills or leaves one bankrupt. Left unchecked, the smallest breaches in discipline can grow into insubordination and disorder among the ranks; on the battlefield, the consequences of this are lethal.

Within this environment, Marines who want to be effective leaders grow hawkish. Disrespect is quickly detected and unflinchingly crushed until the pecking order has been codified and each person knows his place. As the years pass, an ad hoc professional persona gradually emerges, a part that we play everyday in order to maintain order, and unfortunately this persona is often of a rather tyrannical disposition.

The problem is that when one plays a part every day, the act inevitably becomes part of the actor, no matter how vigilantly one observes the line between himself and his job. Of particular difficulty are lengthy, stressful combat deployments, during which the act is constant and without intermission.

We come back in some ways maladjusted to dealing with loved ones. Hence, a common complaint among ex-wives is that they simply grew tired of being treated like Marines by husbands who were as much pit bulls as they were men. So widespread is this that upon returning from Iraq, all of us without exception attend compulsory classes to relearn how to interact with families and friends, just as brain-trauma patients might relearn the simple abilities that they formerly took for granted.

Ok, now for some metal and rock guitar.

Here’s an interesting video of Paul Gilbert, Marty Friedman and Rolly playing a game on Rock Fujiyama.

The game is this: One guitarist (Call him Guitarist 1) gets to “roll” or call a band (say Deep Purple), points to another guitarist (say Guitarist 2), who has to name the guitarist from the band and then point to the third guitarist, who has to play a riff from the rolled guitarist (Say Smoke On the Water). The loser is whoever fails to react in time. The penalty: Drink a cup of green yucky stuff.

See also another Marty Friedman interview on TV here, which I first came across via this post from The Guitar Bar.