Articles by Kevin Johnson - Page 791

Lefty jazz bassist Jennifer Leitham has released The Real Me Live on DVD. Directed by Mark Lewis, the performance was taken from the bassist’s performance at Franklin Park in Riverside, California in July 2010. The DVD is a compliment to her 2006 CD of the same name and features the same music. The Real Me Live includes a bonus music...

Joe Naylor has introduced a new gadget for instruments with heavy necks, called the Axe Balancer. The product is a small, 7-ounce tungsten steel block with a non-reactive foam bottom that mounts to your bass under the strap button. The gadget acts as a counterweight at the farthest point from the headstock, preventing neck dive to save you from holding...

Lemmy Kilmister is a rock icon. This clip of “Stay Clean” from Motörhead’s DVD is an example of why.

Peter Hook will be bringing his band, The Light, to North America for a string of concert dates in which the group will play Joy Division’s albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer in their entirety. Hook, who was the bassist/founder of the post-punk outfit, took a similar tour late last year, but was only showcasing the first Joy Division album. Closer...

Stanley Clarke will be honored with the Miles Davis Award at the Montreal Jazz Festival on June 26th, just before his performance with Return to Forever IV. He will be the 18th recipient of the award, which started in 1994 to recognize “a great international jazz musician for the entire body of his or her work and for that musician’s...

AweSome Musical Instruments has introduced the T4-Board Kit, a mod using their Pickup Tone Multiplier switching system to provide a total of 68 analog pickup tones for instruments with 4-pickup coils. That includes instruments with two 4-wire humbuckers, one 4-wire humbucker and two single-coil pickups, or four single-coil pickups. The system consists of six switches on a 1″ x 3″...

Everyone could use a little reggae groove to chill out to. Here’s a clip of Steel Pulse from 1990 playing the songs “Blues Dance Raid” and “Soldiers.” Bassist Alvin Ewen, who was with the group for 22 years, holds down the groove with a nice, big fat tone.

Black Country Communion has released their second album, aptly entitled Black Country Communion 2. The group, which started as a supergroup side project, features bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes (ex-Deep Purple/Black Sabbath/Trapeze), drummer Jason Bonham (Foreigner), guitarist Joe Bonamassa, and keyboardist Derek Sherinian (Dream Theater). The band has grown closer, saying that the sophomore album is a band album, not a side...

Rock bass legend Bob Daisley is working on his autobiography, with plans to release it later this year. The bassist’s storied career includes laying down the low end with Chicken Shack, Mungo Jerry, Rainbow, Dio and others. Maybe most notably, Daisley worked with Ozzy Osbourne throughout his early career, contributing bass and writing lyrics to the iconic albums Blizzard of...

Pete Skjold had been playing bass for several years when he realized that to get what he wanted, he would have to design it himself. Eleven years after his first design, he began building full-time under the moniker Skjold Design Guitars, producing around 35 handmade basses annually. A bass enthusiast to the core, we first caught up with Skjold at...

Concord Music Group has once again released re-issues of Paul McCartney‘s archive collection with the remastered deluxe versions of the bassist’s first two solo albums, McCartney and McCartney II. Both projects were supervised by Macca himself, which were remastered at Abbey Road by the same team who recently revamped the Beatles’ catalogue. The records are available in multiple formats. McCartney,...

SKB has added to their 3i line with the release of two new watertight bass cases, called the 3i-5014-44 and 3i-5014-OP. Featuring injection molded interiors, the cases are built from a polypropylene copolymer resin and even meet US Military standards for tactical operations. The cases are waterproof, air-tight and submersible while being corrosion resistant. The case interiors are filled with...