Music
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Ralph Towner I don't think I had even heard Ralph Towner's name when I saw Blue Sun in a record store sometime back in the 1980s and bought it on the strength of the cover art. I don't know how well you can make out the photograph that occupies the center of it, but it's a…
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Jim Thomas Who? Well, allow me to introduce you to The Mermen. Don't be too quick to turn up the sound. They're an instrumental trio who began around 1990 as a sort of neo-surf band, but they've gone far afield from that, though you can still hear some of it in their sound, which…
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Albert King Here’s the third of the Three Kings. Albert is maybe the least striking of the three: not as sophisticated as B.B., not as fiery as Freddy. But just as satisfying, and pretty much perfect as a representative of pure straight-up blues. “Born Under a Bad Sign” contains one of the immortal complaints of…
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The statement: The black-and-white image of a pyramid on the cover of Conversations tells you almost everything you need to know about Woman’s Hour’s music. The image: You mean it's about pyramids? Well, she did say "almost." You can read the entire review here.
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Freddie King Of all the black blues players from whom the English and other young white kids of the 1960s learned, Freddie King is probably the one who will strike a new listener as sounding more like, for instance, Eric Clapton, though the influence is of course the other way around. He has a loud…
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B.B. King It's time for the Three Kings: Albert, B.B., and Freddy. B.B. is by far the most famous outside the blues world, but that's not why I'm featuring him first. It's because it only took a few minutes for me to find three good YouTube clips for him, and I need a bit longer…
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Bill Frisell Like his contemporary Pat Metheny, Frisell has done a huge amount of recording. He also shows the influence of rock on their generation of jazz players (they're both in their early 60s). Unlike Metheny, though (as far as I know), Frisell has often taken to the noisy effects developed by rock guitarists. I…
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Pat Metheny I've been thinking that I should include some more jazz guitarists, because there are certainly plenty of them who are very impressive musicians. But I really don't have a lot of acquaintance with their work, which is because I don't listen to jazz guitar all that much, which is because I don't really…
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Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore and Lee Rinaldo) I'm cheating; this week's installment is actually two guitars. But I can't separate them–they don't alternate solos or anything like that, and they produce one sound that I doubt could be produced by either of them alone. Perhaps one of them is more responsible for the strangely appealing…
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Phil Keaggy CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) is not the place you'd normally go to hear some shredding. That's part of the reason why Phil Keaggy's name is not widely known outside the circles of CCM and guitar aficionados and players. (He converted to evangelical Christianity as a rising rock musician with the band Glass Harp,…
Light On Dark Water 