Bobbi Goodman also videoed our performance on June 5th, compiling both tunes into a single video.

On Sunday, June 5th, I was honored to be part of an afternoon of music & fellowship in benefit of the family of guitarist Chris Cobb, who lost their younger son Clay earlier this year. It was held at McGovern’s Bar in San Mateo and the music lasted from before 1pm until after 9pm. Some of the featured performers were Stan Erhart, Dave Workman, the Daniel Castro Band with Terry Hiatt, the Chris Cobb Band; there were many others. I played three numbers (one with vocals) with the able assistance of Jeff Kamil on guitar, Pat Tinling on bass, and Jackie Enx on drums, with Gino “Bambino” Emmerich guesting with us on one tune.

Dave Workman took some video of two of the numbers with his iPod Touch:
“That Road”
“Unchain My Heart”

As you can tell if you watch those YouTube vids, both numbers were somewhat shabby. We only had one very brief rehearsal about three or four days before the show. I made a bunch of glaring mistakes. But Pat and Jackie are such strong players that it almost didn’t matter – the groove and the drive were there for Jeff and I to surf on.

I saw the Tedeschi/Trucks Band a week ago last Sunday night at the Warfield in San Francisco.

Almost exactly two years ago I saw the Derek Trucks Band, which was also a fantastic show by a superb band. But this band is a notch or two better. There are a couple of holdovers – the singer Mike Mattison, though now he’s a backup vocalist rather than the featured vocalist, and Kofi Burbridge, the keyboardist and flautist. On bass now is Kofi’s brother Oteil, who has been the bassist in the Allman Brothers Band for many years now. There are two drummers, J. J. Johnson and Tyler Greenwell. There’s a three-piece horn section with trumpeter Maurice Brown, tenor saxophonist Kebbi Williams, and trombonist Saunders Sermons. Finally, there’s one more backup vocalist, Mark Rivers, for a total of 11 folks in the band.

The music was all new stuff to this ensemble, with the exception of the old Derek & the Dominoes song “Anyday,” which the DTB Band did perform, and maybe one or two other covers that might possibly have been in the repertoire in either Derek’s or Susan’s earlier groups. They performed “Space Captain,” the tune that they recorded with Herbie Hancock on his last CD, The Imagine Project, and a bunch of stellar originals, some of which I’ve heard already, like “Midnight In Harlem” which they did on the last Crossroads Guitar Fest DVD. They did a couple of interesting covers, like Jimi’s “Manic Depression” (which Oteil sang lead on) in the first encore, and the Meters song “Just Kissed My Baby” in the second encore.

Second encore! I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a show that had a second encore. They played a bit over two hours in all; I didn’t get home until midnight.

Their debut CD, Revelator, is being released in a couple of weeks (June 7th).

The other day on the way to work I listened to the 40th anniversary remaster of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek & the Dominos.

40 years… whew. I was a junior in high school, a nascent guitar player and a stone Clapton fanatic when I first heard this, and I immediately embraced it as an incredible, near-perfect recording in every way – real emotion, exuberant, passionate playing, great songs, the right balance of rawness and polish, and some of the best-sounding guitar parts ever… 

Over the years I have kept coming back to it, and to this day it still always hits me the same way.

At this period of time Eric Clapton was pretty much at the peak of his powers, and ever since his best efforts have never approached even the foothills of the heights he reached on this recording. The stories are legendary – his (at that point) unrequited love for his friend George Harrison’s wife, the sympatico meeting between Clapton and Duane Allman – and knowing this history helps inform one’s appreciation of the record, but it’s really in the music that was put on tape, and the order in which it was presented, that the rubber hits the road. 

In the Dominos (Bobby Whitlock on keys and vocals, Jim Gordon on drums, and Carl Radle on bass), Clapton had a crack rhythm section and, in the case of Whitlock, a songwriting partner and strong vocalist to serve as a foil. And with the addition of Duane Allman, and the generosity with which Clapton featured him in the songs he played on (more than three-quarters of the album), an already delicious musical stew got some wonderful extra spice and complexity. 

Bobby Whitlock, who has recently been very talkative about this album and his time as a Domino (on the heels of his autobiography that came out a year or two back), says that Allman didn’t really add all that much to the album, that it would have been just as great an album had he not been present, but I beg to differ. I’m sure it would have been a great album (a listen to the first three tracks, sans Allman, demonstrate that), but Allman’s playing in the presence of “God” is inspired, and I suspect Allman’s presence tweaked a bit more divine wattage out of Clapton’s playing too.

That said, one of my favorite tunes has always been “Keep On Growing,” on which Clapton alone plays guitar (as on the first two tracks, “I Looked Away” and “Bell Bottom Blues”) — but a lot of guitar! There are multiple parts piled up here. Several overdubbed rhythm figures drive the song, and cocky fills bristle in between the lines of the verses and choruses. Then, after the last chorus, several guitars improvise joyously in and out and around and through each other. It’s the kind of thing that you would expect to quickly dissolve into raucous cacophony and be an over-indulgent mess, but for some reason it’s magical.

The other day on the way to work I listened to the 40th anniversary remaster of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek & the Dominos.

40 years… whew. I was a junior in high school, a nascent guitar player and a stone Clapton fanatic when I first heard this, and I immediately embraced it as an incredible, near-perfect recording in every way – real emotion, exuberant, passionate playing, great songs, the right balance of rawness and polish, and some of the best-sounding guitar parts ever… 

Over the years I have kept coming back to it, and to this day it still always hits me the same way.

At this period of time Eric Clapton was pretty much at the peak of his powers, and ever since his best efforts have never approached even the foothills of the heights he reached on this recording. The stories are legendary – his (at that point) unrequited love for his friend George Harrison’s wife, the sympatico meeting between Clapton and Duane Allman – and knowing this history helps inform one’s appreciation of the record, but it’s really in the music that was put on tape, and the order in which it was presented, that the rubber hits the road. 

In the Dominos (Bobby Whitlock on keys and vocals, Jim Gordon on drums, and Carl Radle on bass), Clapton had a crack rhythm section and, in the case of Whitlock, a songwriting partner and strong vocalist to serve as a foil. And with the addition of Duane Allman, and the generosity with which Clapton featured him in the songs he played on (more than three-quarters of the album), an already delicious musical stew got some wonderful extra spice and complexity. 

Bobby Whitlock, who has recently been very talkative about this album and his time as a Domino (on the heels of his autobiography that came out a year or two back), says that Allman didn’t really add all that much to the album, that it would have been just as great an album had he not been present, but I beg to differ. I’m sure it would have been a great album (a listen to the first three tracks, sans Allman, demonstrate that), but Allman’s playing in the presence of “God” is inspired, and I suspect Allman’s presence tweaked a bit more divine wattage out of Clapton’s playing too.

That said, one of my favorite tunes has always been “Keep On Growing,” on which Clapton alone plays guitar (as on the first two tracks, “I Looked Away” and “Bell Bottom Blues”) — but a lot of guitar! There are multiple parts piled up here. Several overdubbed rhythm figures drive the song, and cocky fills bristle in between the lines of the verses and choruses. Then, after the last chorus, several guitars improvise joyously in and out and around and through each other. It’s the kind of thing that you would expect to quickly dissolve into raucous cacophony and be an over-indulgent mess, but for some reason it’s magical.

Special editions of a couple of my favorite recordings have come out recently:  John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic and Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek & the Dominos.

The Traffic set arrived on Friday and includes two disks: the original album remastered on Disk 1, and a couple of alternate takes, including a rather different arrangement of the title track, plus a bunch of live tracks from the Fillmore East from 1970, which include Ric Grech on bass along with the core trio of Steve Winwood on vocals, guitar, piano and Hammond B-3, Jim Capaldi on drums and vocals, and Chris Wood on flute, sax, and Hammond B-3.

The Dominos package is supposed to ship tomorrow so I should have it in a few days. In addition to the remastered album, there are also tracks from their appearance on the Johnny Cash TV show and a couple of tracks that were recorded for an abortive second Dominoes album.

I have almost fully recovered from being up past my bedtime after the second SNUG gig in fifteen days. Both were at Murf’s Broadway Cocktail Lounge in Redwood City. Both gigs went well. Not much of an audience – a few friends, and a few other folks… a couple of dancers…

Our fill-in drummer, David Bossler from the local band Funktional Soul, did a great job on our vast repertoire with minimal rehearsal. 

One good thing was that for once we seemed to have gotten SiBon’s vocals loud enough, and the recordings I made with the Zoom H4n came out very well.

Recordings of “Use Me,”  the Bill Withers song which is my one lead vocal with SNUG, and my guitar solo on “Chain of Fools” are posted now on my website. Hopefully SiBon will find a song or two worthy of using as demos and will put something up on the SNUG site.

A rainy first week of spring here in the Bay Area.

The Club Fox jam in Redwood City continues to go strong. I’ve been there virtually every week since it reopened in November except for two Wednesdays when I was back in NY for the Christmas holiday.

Over the last month or so a new Sunday night jam has been taking place at the Pioneer Saloon in Woodside. It features Terry Hiatt, local guitar player extraordinaire and all-around nice guy. Lots of players and singers are showing up and playing for an enthusiastic crowd.

Also over the last month the live jazz at the Turtle Bay Seafood & Grill in Foster City has ceased. I’d been playing there on average of about once a month since last fall.  It’s too bad because it was helping me keep my jazz chops on the road to improvement; I’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.

Meanwhile, the SNUG band has landed a pair of gigs at Murf’s Broadway Cocktail Lounge in Redwood City, the first this Friday and the second fifteen days later. SNUG has not played a show since August.

On the listening front I have recently been listening to John Coltrane’s One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note 2-CD set. The title track, a 27-minute improvisation by Coltrane, is a mind-blowing tour de force. As Elvin Jones is quoted on the slipcase, “it seemed like he was sitting on a mountain of ideas, and they would flake off every three or four seconds.”

I am also looking forward to the first album by the Tedeschi/Trucks Band, especially after seeing their transcendent performance of one of its songs, “Midnight In Harlem,” on the Crossroads 2010 DVD. I also have tickets to see them perform at the Warfield in San Francisco in late May.

Strange that the week of February 6 greeted us here with sunny, beautiful days with temperatures getting up into the low 70’s. This week, more wintry weather is back with gray skies, rain and wind on tap for the rest of this week.

The winter is seeming a bit more bleak than it might otherwise, though, due to the demise of Stan Erhart’s Sunday night “Killa Jam.”  This jam was approaching its ninth year (or was it the tenth?), with a brief hiatus at the end of last summer when the Old Princeton Landing was sold and closed for remodeling. We all worried then that the jam would be kaput, but when the new owners reopened, it was back. Then suddenly in mid-January, they pulled the plug on it. Sigh… back to watching Masterpiece Theatre on Sunday nights…

(… or the new quiver in the bow, the new brush in the paintbox…)

Saturday I picked up a Squier Esprit guitar. These guitars were part of the Squier Master Series, made in Korea for only a year or so around 2005. It has a double cutaway, chambered mahogany body, a carved mahogany top, a 22-fret mahogany neck with a rosewood fingerboard, 24.75-in scale length (like a Gibson Les Paul or SG, and unlike most Fenders, which have a 25.5-in scale length), with 2 Duncan-designed humbucking pickups, a three-position switch, and a pair of volume and tone knobs, one per pickup. This model was based on the Fender Esprit/Elite models made by Fender in the 80’s, and famously endorsed for a while by Robben Ford. The Squier sports a slightly different headstock, and the pickups are not wired so that you can split the humbucker’s coils.

This guitar was previously owned by my pal Dave Workman, a terrific Bay Area blues guitarist, so it’s got some built-in mojo.

Guitar Player magazine reviewed it back in the August 2005 issue, and gave it the Editor’s Pick nod.

I played it a bit when I got it home. After a couple of weeks of only playing my Telecaster (with a 25.5-in scale length), it was quite different in feel, and it took me a while to get comfortable, but the sound was inspiring from the get-go. Played acoustically, it is rich and vibrant, which is always a good sign. Plugged in, it sounds marvelous. Played through a clean amp, it sounds like a good jazz guitar, with a complex character and great definition. Crank up the gain, and the humbuckers sing like a sweet Les Paul or an ES-335. I was impressed with the clarity and definition even when you roll the highs off.

Sunday night I brought it with me to one of the jams that I frequent (Stan Erhart‘s “Killa Jam” at the Old Princeton Landing out on the Pacific coast) and got to play it into a couple of very fine amplifiers (a blackface Fender Vibrolux and an Allen Brown Sugar) through a couple of different pedals. It sounded very inspiring, was comfortable, and a joy to play.