It’s really weighing on my mind. Was the 70s of the 80s the best decade for the guitar solo? I know, it’s the 64 million dollar question and the future of the world depends on the answer 🙂 I was hacking away at some code today which is always a chance to put iTunes on random and see what pops up. Well, I got no closer to answering the question of this (and no other) moment but I did have the opportunity to sample some of the most jaw droppingly fine playing of all time in two of the greatest guitar tracks.
The first track for nomination is Pat Metheny’s “Are you going with me?”. In particular the oft-vaunted performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2003. In my opinion this is the PMG’s best composition with a gentle tempo and a catchy hook which begs for improvisation. Connoiseurs of the solo will note that Pat plays the entire track with his eyes closed, covers almost every note on the fretboard and has his band members gasping in astonishment. No trifling words are needed when there’s this much refined guitar tone audible in every pick, ping and pinch. It’s so good that if I wasn’t to be humorous about it, I’d cry.
The other track is the prog-funk epic “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic. My brother Evan (rather pretentiously in my opinion :D) refers to this as “a sonic landscape”. Even with my tongue bursting my cheek with irony the best I can do is quotation. This is another soulful whail-fest carefully engineered to allow maximum guitar extravagance. It generally starts slow and builds to a crescendo of sonic lunacy. My favourite version of this tune is the live 1983 version with Eddie Hazel and Michael Hampton. This has got the full gorgonzola with a pan pipe intro (SHIT YOU NOT!) followed by Hazel’s soulful playing. Hampton ups the pace with some blazing shred before a dueling-banjos style finale where their fingers catch fire and the stage explodes. Well not quite but it’s not far off.
Why, with all the reality-tv Star-Idol excrement that we’re served up do we NEVER get to see a virtuoso musician auditioning for these kinds of talent contests? I often wonder would Prince, that small purple god of multi-instrumental virtuosity, break through into the current music scene where we’re inundated with photogenic but bland singers trying to be the next Mariah/Whitney/Person-who-won-X-Idol-last-year… By focusing on singers it becomes about the lowest common denominator when it could be more interesting. How about Prog-Idol or eXtemporise Factor ? 🙂
It might actually be entertaining to take some of the great musicians of the past and get them to judge a multi-instrumental talent content to form a REAL BAND ™ of genuinely talented musicians who gel together. They can even have a singer as long as they’re quirky cool. Extra points if it’s Aimee Mann. OK, it doesn’t HAVE TO BE Aimee Mann. Another interesting twist would be to let a member of the public (me!) be on the judging panel.
(This idea is not covered by a creative commons license. If you want to use it you’ll have to pay me millions!)
Month: September 2008
Categories
Fame
I’m struggling under the weight of my new found fame courtesy of the reg. Yes the witty person (sarcastic git) who responded to the reg’s poll to find America’s CTO was me.
My email is reproduced below.
“As you don’t provide Al Gore as a candidate to reinvent the internet, Siegfried and Roy are the only sensible option. Another alternative is a virtual CTO representing a hive mind of random editors. If only the IETF made RFCs available as anonymous wikis! They SHOULD do this.
Or a reality TV show where each of the candidates has to respond to various IT challenges like formatting a table correctly in Word or improving BGP. It’s a serious position so the selection process should be rigorous”
As an email subscriber to numerous IETF mailing lists I think my suggestion may not improve the efficiency of the organisation but it might give implementors who DELIBERATELY misinterpret the specifications for commercial advantage an excuse. They could simply claim “MUST” used to be “MAYBE”. Which leads me to mememoir.org which seeks to remove unattributable modifications which pollute the wikisphere. Neat idea. There’s an uneasy tension between preserving anonymity to protect well meaning truth promoters from pressure groups (for legal reasons I can’t think of any off hand) and protecting commercial puppets who use a public encyclopaedia as a platform for spreading rumours & FUD. (again for legal reasons, examples escape me)
Anyway, I’m off to sign autographs.
Categories
Chrome is delicious – well not bad
When Google launched their Chrome browser all those days ago I was wondering when plugins were going to start appearing. Jonathan will testify that I’m plugin obsessed with plugins for delicious, source code inspection, continuous build management and pretty much anything that might be useful. I really wanted Chrome to have delicious support like firefox but then I remembered it supports webkit.
You can go to the delicious bookmarklets page and add the delicious link to the chrome bookmarks bar. It’s not as nice as the firefox search interface but, hey, it’s a start.
I quite like chrome. It’s minimalist and even with the process/tab overhead it performs quite well.