Archive for August 2015 - Page 4

Fourplay founding member Lee Ritenour’s guitar work is all over popular music — he’s played more than 3,000 sessions, with everyone from Pink Floyd to Dizzy Gillespie, earned a Grammy for his 1986 collaboration with Dave Grusin, and netted 17 more Grammy nominations besides. The jazz player’s latest album, A Twist of Rit, sees him join with an all-star band...

How do I play that bass line? Why do I have to use my pinky? Can’t we skip all the theory stuff? These are just some of the questions raised by a student in a recent lesson. Some of these are easy to answer… like the usefulness of the pinky finger (two heads are better than one, four fingers are...

Without a doubt, Motown’s prolific output yielded some of the best in-the-pocket bass lines in history. Songs from the label often had deceptively complex grooves, often provided by the late great James Jamerson. Bruno Tauzin decided to string together 30 of his favorite Motown bass riffs into one awesome clip as part of his new “Best Bass Riffs” series. “I...

Famed bassist Gary Willis, well known for his work with the band Tribal Tech, has released his fifth solo record, Larger Than Life. The fusion-funk record pairs Willis with drummer Gergo Borlai, Tribal Tech band mate Scott Kinsey (keyboards), Steve Tavaglione (saxes and EWI), Claudia Bardagí (voice) and Llibert Fortuny (tenor sax and voice). Willis, Borlai and Kinsey form the...

Godlyke, Inc. has introduced the Pivot-All 180-degree rotating audio plug. The 1/4-inch audio connector’s shaft can be continuously rotated over a 180-degree arc for making connections in tight spaces and awkward angles. The Pivot-All plugs are sold individually or pre-wired with Mogami cabling with silver soldering. Each plug features gold-plated audio connections for transparent signal transmission. “Pivot-All plugs also help...

“Beastly” is the opening track from Vulfpeck’s first EP Mit Peck. I’ve loved this piece since I first heard it and it’s been on my “transcribe list” for a while now. Fortunately, the isolated bass track cropped a while back, making the task of transcribing it a little easier.

Bassist Elin Sandberg and vocalist Tracy Robertson took Chick Corea’s “Spain” (with lyrics by Al Jarreau), and turned it into this impressive bass and vocals duet. The intro is from Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”. Wow!

If you missed Nate Watts laying it down on Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life tour, you’ve got one more chance. The R&B legend has announced 20 new North American dates to the tour, which celebrates the ground-breaking album by performing it in its entirety. The trek continues on September 30th at Montreal’s Bell Centre and focuses on...

Q: I’ve been messing around with playing over the changes, but I always stumble upon an issue: chords lasting 2, 4, 8 or even 16 bars! I know there’s a ton of different ways to approach this, but I have problems with approaching chord tones. Things like enclosures, double chromatics, diatonic and chromatic approach notes. How can I practice these...

Snow Owl, aka Juan Garcia-Herreros, is a bass player that I can’t get enough of. His outstanding chops and ear-bending musical compositions are always intriguing. Here’s the bassist throwing it down with his band at the Nisville Jazz Festival. The group rips through “Touched” and “Pequeña Samba” with Snow Owl mixing things up with a pitch shifter before slowing things...

Cannibal Corpse, anchored by metal bass legend Alex Webster, have announced a fall tour in continued support of 2014’s A Skeletal Domain. The tour kicks off October 8th at Underbelly in Jacksonville, Florida before snaking up the East Coast, heading west to California, and back east across the South. While most of the performances will be in theaters and clubs,...

Meet Jon Hallam, a bassist who I believe has the funniest “sex, drugs and rock and roll” stories in history. Joking aside, Jon is doing the serious work of a bassist, who found his calling after dropping the guitar. Here’s his story. Bio: I started quite late on – when I was 17, one of my best friends at school...