Music Book Review: Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music by Philip Watson

Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music

by Philip Watson (Music 791.65 Frisell)

 

Bill Frisell is a guitarist who has changed the landscape of jazz music since the 1980s. A true maverick of the instrument, he has contributed to the technique of playing guitar, revolutionized how to use samplers and loop pedals to extend his playing, and created an ethereal, Americana-influenced sound that has inspired generations of musicians. In addition to dozens of his own albums as a solo artist and bandleader, he has played with many other musicians throughout his career, and has played everything from the gentlest music imaginable to the most madcap and brutal. His influence arguably goes far beyond the guitar, as noted by the subtitle of the first biography written about him, which is called Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music. The book, which was written by distinguished journalist Philip Watson, is available at the Polley Music Library.

 

Beautiful Dreamer is a large book as music biographies go — the main body of the text makes crosses over 450 pages. But it feels like things move very quickly, as Frisell’s music and career connect with so many other musicians and entire musical scenes over time. His friendly, welcoming and inquisitive approach to both his own music and collaborations keep things exciting throughout the book. There are fun diversions the author calls “counterpoints” mixed throughout the text as well, in which various musicians and other celebrities who are fans of Frisell’s music listen to a recording of his as a starting point for conversations about their passion for his work. And there is a kind of outer shell to the book, referenced in its title, inspired by a dream that Frisell had many years ago in which he remembers being exposed to a kind of cosmic, universal music. As Frisell is admired for his ethereal sound and approach to music, author Watson returns regularly to the image of him as a “beautiful dreamer” himself, immersed in all kinds of music and bringing back dream-like interpretations of his journeys to our collective ears. The cover photo of Frisell, looking off into the distance from the side while we can barely make him out through a dense fog cover, further helps to establish this mood, too.

 

Other than the “counterpoints,” the book progresses like a typical chronological music biography. Watson doesn’t spend a lot of time on Frisell’s childhood, other than capturing highlights of his early impressions about the guitar and some memories from Bill himself as the two of them drove around Denver in 2017 looking at some of the places he lived as a child. It is worth noting, though, that a lot of Frisell’s early musical development came from playing the clarinet, which he continued alongside guitar into college. He’d also played some saxophone in college. But one of his first early influences, Gary Burton (whose 60s music is a bit of a blueprint for the genre-bending Americana that Frisell has become known for), once noted at a University of Northern Colorado talk that he recommended really focusing on only one instrument. Bill took that advice and chose the guitar exclusively from that point forward. He flailed a bit early on: he went to Berklee College of Music but dropped out, then took lessons in NYC for a few months from his guitar idol Jim Hall, returned to Denver and his guitar teacher there, and tried to make a go as a professional guitarist in Colorado.

 

Then he returned to Boston to give Berklee another shot. This time, things seemed to work out differently, and early glimpses of the artist we know today began to shine through (especially after he bought a solidbody electric guitar, and another student gave him a volume pedal, which went on to become a trademark of his sound for many years). Upon graduation, he spent some time in Belgium, where he felt that his playing finally came together, and where he ultimately met his wife Carole as well. Soon he found himself working with musicians from the European ECM Records scene, an important label for contemporary jazz even today.

 

I’ll spare you the rest of the play by play of Frisell’s career — at the point I just referenced, we’re only about a fifth of the way into the book, and his work as a mature artist is just getting started. But suffice it to say that one of the big takeaways for me from this book is how Frisell has been an important part of a couple of significant “scenes” in his career, yet he always maintains his own unique vibe and a little bit of separation. His time around the ECM scene was the first of these. In the early to mid-1980s, he appeared on lots of ECM releases, and they also put out his first records as a solo artist. While his ethereal sound and approach are generally a great fit with the ECM aesthetic—in fact they have released lots of new titles featuring him in the more recent decade as well — there is just something ineffable about his work that has kept his long-term career a little more distinct than many of his ECM peers. Then from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, Frisell was one of the most significant musicians involved with the NYC Downtown Scene, and in particular he played in many different lineups for well-regarded composer John Zorn. In those circumstances, he sometimes found himself playing styles of music that seem out of character for him: fast music, pieces influenced by punk and metal genres, downright chaotic and dissonant music. Yet even then his voice on the instrument somehow shines through. And during that time, he even maintained a bit of a physical distance, living most of the time in New Jersey and then Seattle while his many bandmates resided in Manhattan. This kind of “otherness” even in the midst of fruitful collaborations is uniquely powerful throughout Frisell’s career.

 

To the present day, his strikingly original voice continues to captivate and inspire generations of listeners and musicians. As attested to in the many “Counterpoint” interludes throughout the book, his body of music has left deep impressions on many listeners, including many of his collaborators and peers. To some extent, one could argue that there are two major periods in Frisell’s work: his approach leaned relatively darker in the first half of his career, and feels a little brighter in the 2nd half. “Beautiful Dreamer” seems to support this general idea, too, as he has become less reliant on effects like volume swells and bits of looped ambient sound in later years, while perfecting his uncanny knack for writing melodies that seem as though they could be folk tunes or hymns from time immemorial. But it’s a blurry line, too, as there are certainly times when present-day Frisell recordings utilize lots of effects, and when early records astonished with their timeless melodic sensibility. All told, “Beautiful Dreamer” is a wonderful literary companion to a gently visionary musician, and from its pages it seems Bill is just as exemplary a person as he a musician and guitarist.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Bill Frisell: An Anthology by Bill Frisell, A Perfectly Good Guitar: Musicians on their Favorite Instrument by Chuck Holley, or the Arcana: Musicians on Music series edited by John Zorn.)

 

( official Bill Frisell web site ) | ( official Philip Watson web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: The Subversive Guitarist by Joe Gore

The Subversive Guitarist
by Joe Gore (Music 787.872 Gor)

The Subversive Guitarist by Joe Gore is hot off the presses, and I’ve been reading through it with a copy of my own at home for the last couple of months. The idea behind this book is to help players get through those periods that occasionally crop up when you feel like your playing is getting stale, falling back on the same old habits. There’s also a tendency I’ve often seen among guitarists to get fixated on “guitar music,” which of course leaves out what can be done studying what other instruments can do, or other styles of music. Author Joe Gore has an incredibly diverse and creative musical background: he studied classical music at UCLA and was into early music as a late teenager, then got his masters in composition at U.C. Berkeley, and went on to play in a wide range of bands in all kinds of styles, from afrobeat to indie rock. He’s played on tons of Tom Waits albums and my favorite PJ Harvey albums, and was also the editor at Guitar Player magazine. He’s worked extensively with Digidesign and Apple Logic, and has a deep knowledge of digital tone-shaping for guitar, and has also been hand-making his own fully analog guitar pedals as Joe Gore Pedals. This is a guy who knows how to avoid musical boredom, and “The Subversive Guitarist” is his prescription for intermediate and advanced players to shake off those cobwebs.

 

Each chapter is its own lesson, with stated goals at the beginning. After a couple of quick introductory chapters, which include a discussion about whether or not it’s worth learning to read sheet music (Gore ultimately thinks that it is, and I’d agree, especially when it comes to situations like breaking old habits by learning new music), he dives into three main subject areas: rhythm, technique, and notes. In the rhythm section, pardon the pun, lessons focus on interesting rhythmic displacements, found more often in Latin or African musical styles, but there is even a great list of popular rock and pop classics that have introductions with deceptive rhythms that lead to surprise when drums come in. There’s a great combination of rhythmic displacement and fingerpicking technique, using common fingerpicking patterns in ways they’re not usually deployed rhythmically. And there’s a great deep dive into emulating the phrasing of great vocalists.

 

In the Techniques section, the deep-dive concept continues, with Gore looking at the expressive subtleties possible within techniques most guitarists already use, like vibrato and fingerpicking. There are even some exercises designed to get players using their fretboard-hand pinky finger more, since many players stop using it especially higher on the neck. And he gets us thinking about an important area of music that electric guitarists often neglect: the use of dynamics.

 

The final Subversive Notes section looks at melodic concepts from several perspectives, including wide intervallic leaps, octave displacement, dissonances, and considering scales. Of all the things in this book, I’m especially drawn to his chapters on considering sequences instead of scales and reconsidering the way guitarists are often taught to conceive of the modal system. For non-guitarists, you might not be aware of this, but many rock guitarists spend an inordinate amount of their youth running through all of the church modes on guitar. Gore points out the monophonic history of the church modes, and their more modern use with sophisticated chord structures like those often found in jazz, and then basically suggests that we just start thinking about basic key signature structures, and what scale intervals might be flexible within a basic major and minor scale. This is a pretty liberating way of looking at these things that gets you thinking about music rather than various incarcerations in scale-jails.

 

My only slight complaint with this book is the layout — it looks like the pages were prepared for a smaller print size then the book was ultimately printed at, and as a result, there is a lot of unused space all around the margins. If the book ever gets reprinted or updated, I’d love to see a slightly larger font that makes some use of that space. But all told, The Subversive Guitarist is a great supplemental book for most guitarists. When you’re feeling stuck, it’s great to have a skilled creative catalyst like Joe Gore at your side to get out of the box.

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick or The Unorthodox Guitar by Mike Frengel.)

 

( official The Subversive Guitarist page on the official Joe Gore web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World's Greatest Guitarists by Eilon Paz

Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World’s Greatest Guitarists

by Eilon Paz (Music 787.87 Paz)

 

Rock and pop guitarists have relied heavily on “stompboxes,” or effects they could control with their feet, since the days of Jimi Hendrix, Since then, players of many other instruments have incorporated them into their work, too. These little gadgets can become essential parts of various musicians’ “sound,” adding something just right and inspiring them to play differently. And in some cases, effects pedals can become instruments unto themselves.

 

These humble electronic devices got their start trying to emulate sounds that engineers would apply to recordings in studios, so that musicians could make similar sounds anywhere they might be playing. Likely everyone is familiar with some of the basics: there are reverb and delay pedals that make the sound appear to be in a much larger room than you might be playing in. There are various overdrive, distortion and fuzz pedals that make instruments sound like they’re overwhelming the amp that they’re being played through, or like a speaker is damaged. And various kinds of effects have become an iconic part of various music genres: slapback echo and gated reverb are a critical part of rockabilly, envelope filters on bass immediately bring funk music to mind, and distorted guitars are the classic sound of rock and roll, to name a few examples.

 

Musicians develop long relationships with the effects they use the most, just like their favorite instruments, and we have a great new book called Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World’s Greatest Guitarists that is a much more in-depth look at the history and mystery of these magical boxes than the title suggests. The first section of the book, taking up a little over half of the page count, delivers on the book title. We get 100 high-quality photos of iconic effects pedals owned by notable artists from a wide range of music genres, along with a page or two of comments from each artist regarding their favorite pedal. Artists are represented in alphabetical order, so it’s easy to flip through this portion of the book to see if your favorites are there without even consulting the table of contents. The photos themselves are a lot of fun, as most of these stompboxes have been heavily used by their owners while touring, and most have the scars of a long life on the road. Many have lines or dots painted on as calibration points for their favorite settings, so each knob can be put back into place throughout the hustle and bustle of travel. We’ve all seen photos of well-worn guitars, but imagine how much more worn objects get when they spend their lives on the floors of dingy stages, and are used by stepping on them!

 

Most of the featured artists are still active, and it’s interesting to see the variety of their choices: some use old classics, while a surprising amount gravitate toward very new designs. Musicians tend to be their most conservative when it comes to choosing equipment, preferring to go with tried and true standards, but stompboxes are one of those corners of the musical world where the newest adventures still go hand in hand with classics. A few deceased artists who were known for their iconic use of effects are also featured, such as Allan Holdsworth, Frank Zappa, Dimebag Darrell, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and of course Jimi Hendrix, who first brought the use of effects with the electric guitar to the level of artistry. These folks are represented through quotations and remembrances of their friends or techs that worked on their equipment professionally.

 

If you’re into effects pedals yourself, or a fan of the electric guitar or guitar players, this much of the book would likely be enough to make it a worthwhile read. But then we get a “Features” section that makes up the rest of the book, with five very useful articles that place effects pedals into a broader historical context. This section gets started with a history lesson written by Dave Hunter, which goes back to the early history of simply trying to make guitars louder, which then lead to amplification. Once electric instruments were possible, the beginnings of effects started to happen through guitar and amplifier design. As technology evolved and the transistor became smaller and more affordable, guitar pedals became a reality in the 1960s. When viewed as part of a larger historical timeline like this, effects pedals don’t really seem so separate from electronic instruments in general—they’re just another aspect of the development of amplified instruments throughout the 20th Century.

 

Next we get a section called “Effects Explained,” which is very helpful to those who might not be familiar with the kinds of sounds generated by different effects by name. This is followed by a roundtable discussion with 15 different effects pedal designers, who are represented answering some general questions about what it’s like to build pedals today. This section acts as a bit of a photo essay, too, as each builders’ work environment is shown in large photos throughout the piece.

 

I think the next section is a particularly important one for a wide range of musicians, as it features an essay about the use of effects pedals on devices other than the electric guitar. Although effects pedals have historically been developed in conjunction with guitar players, they are frequently used by musicians who play other instruments as well, and they also come in handy as production tools in recording studios, where they are often applied to things like drum and vocal tracks. We find several excellent interviews with non-guitarist musicians here, such as drummer Matt Chamberlain, violinist Lisa Molinaro, synthesizer legend Jean-Michel Jarre, and saxophonist Skerik, all of whom use effects pedals both for studio recordings and in their live performances. Producer Justin Meldal-Johnson also chimes in about using pedals in recording studio environments, and there is a short overview about the use of effects pedals for vocalists as well.

 

The final two sections are an historical overview of the role of art and visual design of effects pedals, and a look at some rare pedals that belong to pedal collectors. While I generally get a little queasy at the notion of musical tools as art objects or collectibles, I did find the final collection shown here to be quite interesting, as it highlighted several Soviet-era Russian pedals, not the sort of thing one often sees. It’s a great reminder that these little devices have found musical uses outside of the English-speaking world.

 

As more boutique stompbox builders enter the market every day — a lot of new designers have started businesses during the pandemic—and as the features some of these devices are capable of has in some cases increased to the point where they can be considered instruments themselves, this is a great time to familiarize yourself with their history and where things are now. Stompbox is a great place to start your journey.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Pedal Culture: Guitar Effects Pedals by Megan Pai.)

 

( U.S. publisher’s official Stompbox web page ) | ( official Eilon Paz web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist by Marc Ribot

Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist
by Marc Ribot (Music 781.66 Ribot)

Marc Ribot is one of those guitarists that many people may not know by name, but they’ve probably heard him play. He’s been featured on over 500 recordings, including those by artists like Tom Waits, Marianne Faithfull, Elvis Costello, John Mellancamp, Neko Case, Diana Krall, David Sandborn, Laurie Anderson, and many, many more. For those who do know him by name, he’s led his own bands and solo projects for years as well, crisscrossing many genres of music but always with a lot of soul and a sense of joy and adventure. His very personal yet inclusive approach to the guitar takes him between pop music albums, modern avant-garde works, and all kinds of roots and Americana-based musical forms with ease. And he’s just published his first book, a collection mostly of short essays about his life and music. The book is called Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.

 

Unstrung is an extremely approachable book, and you don’t need to be a musician to follow what’s happening here. Ribot’s style of delivery has similarities to his guitar work: he is direct, he isn’t afraid to let readers peek behind the curtain that often divides artists from their audiences, and he knows how to paint a picture without exhausting every color at his disposal. Novelist Lynne Tillman tells us a bit about Marc Ribot as a writer and thinker in her thoughtful introduction, and then Ribot immediately invites us inside his world with an insightful essay about using guitar amplifiers at high volumes. There are so many memorable observations about the electric guitar and music more broadly in the seven pages of this essay that it feels like its own song, ready to be played back again and again to look for more insight.

 

The book is divided into four parts, and this first part focuses on music the most. There are discussions of musicians’ rights in the era of streaming music, the difficulties of perceiving rhythms from different musical traditions, and heartfelt remembrances of musicians who have recently departed. Of note, two musicians so eulogized here are the first victims of the COVID-19 pandemic that I’ve seen mentioned in new books: bassist Henry Grimes and producer Hal Willner.

 

This leaves us three more parts of Unstrung to explore that are more about life experiences: living in New York and watching it change over time, life on the road, childhood memories. There are some music-related scenarios that crop up, of course, but these are fundamentally glimpses at the human experience. Then we get into pieces of short fiction in parts III and IV. In Part III, they’re all called “Film (Mis)Treatments — short, mostly humorous ideas for short films. In Part IV, we have more general short fiction, sometimes very short, approaching flash fiction territory, incorporating the occasional memory from Ribot’s life but presented in fictional form. These are of varying quality, and they move by quickly — if you’re not digging one, you’re only a page or two away from the next. One of these in particular really stuck with me, “The Man With the Fun Job,” which tells the story of an average, moderately successful musician whose life story might look pretty dramatic if told from slightly embellished angles, but in reality is pretty simple, modest and satisfying.

 

I didn’t go into this book with a lot of expectations, other than having read a couple of Ribot’s musically-focused essays before—that opening essay about loud amplifiers, for example, was first published in the debut edition of John Zorn’s Arcana series of books back in 2001. And I must admit to being a little surprised at first that so much of the book focused on non-musical subject matter. One can’t help but suspect that the pandemic conditions of 2020, the lack of recording sessions happening and the standstill in musical tours, might have led to collecting this material into a single volume. I’m sure that otherwise many parts of this book would have remained strewn about between various magazines, anthologies, and unpublished pieces. But upon sitting with it for a while, I’m glad an opportunity presented itself to collect these writings as a book. The contents are a little mixed up and not altogether stylistically coherent, veering from nonfiction to fiction and back again in a way that folks don’t often behave in print. But in music, that sort of thing is more common, and the coherence of a project comes more from the voices playing the music than the particular stylistic context they’re dressed in at a given moment. And this book is musical in the same rough-and-tumble way as much of Ribot’s music, with an immediately recognizable voice.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene by Tamar Barzel, Arcana: Musicians on Music edited by John Zorn or The History of Bones: A Memoir by John Lurie.)

 

( publisher’s official Unstrung web site ) | ( official Marc Ribot web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

 

Music Book Review: The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port

The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock and Roll

by Ian S. Port (Music 787.87 Por)

 

This is a great book that delves into the early development of the electric guitar, and a popular favorite at Polley for the last few years. The narrative focuses primarily on the history of the two companies who were first to initiate mass-production of electric guitars in the 1950s: Gibson and Fender. The two continued to dominate the electric guitar market throughout the first decades of rock and roll, and their rivalry led to continued innovation. We’re treated to a peek behind the manufacturing curtain at the personalities involved in inventing and perfecting instruments the likes of which had never been seen before.

 

It’s an epic story that has an archetypal folk tale kind of feel, with new ideas coming from a startup Fender company, who suddenly find themselves in competition with the established and respected Gibson. Fender focuses on invention, bringing the first solidbody electric guitar to the market, followed not long after with the first electric bass. Then Gibson moves into the solidbody electric world with what they advertise as more luxurious instruments, built by experienced luthiers using the best woods and upscale appointments like carved tops. Both companies quickly realized that success would come not just from their designs, but also from attracting well-known artists from the burgeoning blues and rock and roll scenes to play their instruments, as the modern concept of celebrity started to gain traction in the early days of rock and roll. In the end, you might say that everyone was a winner, as great artists played great instruments that changed the music the course of music history.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try 60 Years of Fender: Six Decades of the Greatest Electric Guitars by Tony Bacon or The Gibson Les Paul: The Illustrated History of the Guitar that Changed Rock by Dave Hunter.]

[ official The Birth of Loud page on the official Ian S. Port web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: A Perfectly Good Guitar by Chuck Holley

A Perfectly Good Guitar: Musicians on Their Favorite Instruments
by Chuck Holley (Music 787.87 Hol)

 

This is an engaging book of short interviews with 46 guitar-playing artists from a wide range of backgrounds. Some are well-known performers, while others are studio musicians and journeyperson-type players who work with many artists as support musicians. Most interviewees have enjoyed long musical careers, during which many start to gravitate toward one or two particular guitars over years of playing. This book asks them to riff about those favorite instruments: where they came from, why they love them, what kinds of music they’ve been inspired to play with them. There’s quite a variety of guitars represented: some are well-loved vintage guitars, lap steels from the dawn of electrified instruments, or handmade acoustics designed to perfectly fit their hands. But sometimes their favorite guitars turn out to be more sentimental in nature. Maybe they’re inexpensive or common instruments, but they take their owners back to the place where they were first inspired to become musicians. Sometimes they’re reminded of dear friends who gave these instruments to them, or who used to own them and have since passed on.

 

That’s the real beauty of A Perfectly Good Guitar: ultimately it’s not about the guitars at all, but the relationships and musical growth they represent. At the end of the day they’re simply tools, even when we ascribe a little mystical mojo to certain instruments. What’s really happening is these guitars remind their owners of the mojo that’s been inside of them all along.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Strat in the Attic by Deke Dickerson (in print) or The Strat in the Attic 2 also by Deke Dickerson (but only as an E-book).] [ publisher’s official A Perfectly Good Guitar web page ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Talking Guitar by Jas Obrecht

Talking Guitar: Conversations With Musicians Who Shaped Twentieth Century American Music
by Jas Obrecht (Music 787.87 Obr)

As you’ll likely guess from the book title, former editor of Guitar Player magazine Jas Obrecht has interviewed a range of guitar players who have worked in blues, rock and pop idioms, asking them to dig deep into their love for the instrument. There are some crucial interviews featured here by folks who are not well-known but are essential to the status of the guitar in American music culture, like Nick Lucas, who recorded a couple of the earliest solo guitar singles ever to be released back in the 1920s, or Pops Staples, who recorded gospel, soul, and pop albums starting in the pre-rock and roll 1950s. Some of the more well-known guitarists here have since passed on, like Jerry Garcia, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Eddie Van Halen.

 

These are unique interviews compared to the more general questions these artists are typically asked for magazine and newspaper interviews, and you’ll get more personal insights relating to how these artists express themselves through the guitar, as well as their deep love for guitarists who came before them. As a cool bonus, this book also features a CD that has audio clips taken from each of the interviews in the book — considering that many of the featured artists do most of their talking through the guitar, it’s fun to hear them talk about the instrument with their voices, instead.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan by Paul Alan, Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews by Jerry Garcia or Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir by Joe Satriani.]

[ publisher’s official Talking Guitar web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Sheets of Sound for Guitar by Jack A. Zucker

Sheets of Sound for Guitar
by Jack A. Zucker (Music 787.874 Zuc)

 

If you play any kind of pick-style guitar, this book will help you to clean up your technique and get you invested in the logic behind economy picking, or combinations of alternate and sweep picking that maximize the efficiency and control of the right hand. Stylistically, the book focuses on jazz passages, the kinds of fluid phrases one often hears played on saxophone, but the techniques work wonderfully no matter what style you prefer.

 

The book starts with relatively easy fundamentals, simply moving through major and minor scales with a focus on economy picking (carrying through with 2 upstrokes or downstrokes in a row as you switch strings). From there, you’ll break out to various kinds of melodic fragments that move all around the neck, showing you all kinds of potential approaches to the instrument. Exercises are written in 8th notes throughout, though once you’ve learned the mechanics of playing through these pieces, you’re encouraged to mix up the rhythms yourself and find the real music lurking behind the exercises.

 

Of all the pick-guitar books in Polley, I think this one can offer the most toward maximizing your right-hand technique. Work on a few exercises at a time, starting out slowly using a metronome and gradually increasing the speed, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your picking feels more fluid and expressive.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Guitar Aerobics by Troy Nelson, Vaideology by Steve Vai, or Guitar Sweep Picking & Arpeggios by Joe Stump.]

[ official Jack Zucker/Sheets of Sound for Guitar web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!