Blogging » Guitars, blues, rock, jazz and the music biz
This week our roundup of new tunes focuses on new releases from: a renewed and mostly instrumental Santana, top-draw and rising blues star super busy Joe Bonamassa who released something like four discs in the past year, and indie blues guitar slinger Albert Cummings puts out another biting, blustery working man’s blues rocker.
Santana
Shape Shifter
2012 StarFaith Records
Download: Nomad, Canela, Never the Same Again
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Albert Cummings
No Regrets
2012 Ivy Music Company
Download: Your Day Will Come, Drink Party and Dance, Glass House
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Joe Bonamassa
Driving Towards Daylight
2012 J&R Adventures
Download: Stones in My Passway, Who’s Been Talking, Lonely Town Lonely Street
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This week we have a spangly new release from gifted guitarist Jimmy Herring, available a week before its iTunes debut from independent label and distributor Abstract Logix. “Subject To Change WIthout Notice” is Herring’s second solo release and is all instrumental like his debut recording. Jazz, rock, blues, fusion and deep jams are all tightly in the pocket for this American guitarist from North Carolina who has been steadily gaining deserved accolades since he hit the jam band scene in the early ’90s.
Jimmy Herring
Subject to Change without Notice
2012 Abstract Logix
Jimmy Herring first came to my attention many years ago as a member of Jazz is Dead, an excellent ensemble featuring keys wiz T. Lavitz, master drummer Billy Cobham and the talented Alphonso Johnson playing fusion jazz-rock, instrumental cover interpretations of classic Grateful Dead songs! Herring played with Phil Lesh and The Dead (post-Jerry, of course) was also a founding member of jam band Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, and in 2006 Herring took over the lead Guitarist role for Widespread Panic.
Herring in the recording studio
His first solo work, 2008′s Lifeboat, is a terrific record, showcasing his fierce playing, soulful and melodic and at times blazingly beautiful. His playing on the 2008 studio collaboration with John Bell and Widespread Panic was revelatory — fusion meets rock and folk and great songs/lyrics while jamming hard — making this writer a new Panic fan.
The Jimmy Herring Band, 2012
Ten songs, ten different musical explorations. And along the way, Jimmy Herring’s guitar work offers tremendous tone and expressive emotional nuance in every solo. He has an incredible ability to play leads that are silky and smooth, guttural and graceful; and he can also rip long lyrical explosions of speed, never once sounding rushed or simply shredding the keyboard. His solos are tuneful and each one sings, eliciting evocative sonic exclamations.
This new release was aided and abetted by Atlanta-based record producer and pedal steel guitarist, John Keane. Keane is known more for his pop work with R.E.M., Widespread Panic and The Indigo Girls, and here he brings a musical sensibility to the project, helping Herring craft a finely honed musical experience.
Download: Miss Poopie, Kaleidoscope Carousel, Hope, Red Wing Special
New tunes this Friday rather than Tunage Tuesday, blame the delay on band practice. (That has a nice ring to it!) This week we have Blues/Rock artists times three. Hard-hitting Albert Castiglia, known for his work with Junior Wells, newcomer Chris Watson from the D/FW area in Texas cuts his sophomore release, and Devon Allman, Cyril Neville and Mike Zito form a new band.
Royal Southern Brotherhood
Renaissance Man
2012 Ruf Records GmbH
Download: Brotherhood, Moonlight Over Mississippi, Fire on the Mountain
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Albert Castiglia
Living the Dream
2012 Blues Leaf Records
Download: Living the Dream, Fat Cat, Walk the Backstreets
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Chris Watson
Pleasure and Pain
2012 Gator Music
Download: Pleasure and Pain, Going Home, Check it Out
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Second installment of our new music roundup. Four great new releases: one from a dead guitarist (with the help of some “friends”), one from a shredding jazz fusioneer but with vocals on all tracks, one from a band formed by two renowned studio and solo guitarists, and one from the Allman Brothers drummer who sits on the left side of the stage (from the audience’s perspective) and is nicknamed J.J. And you can listen to tunage from these albums through the player at the top of each page here.
Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band
Renaissance Man
2011 Lil’ Johnieboy Records
Download: Leaving Trunk, Laurie Ann Blue, I Believe I’ll Make a Change
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Frank Gambale
Soulmine (feat. Boca)
2012 Frank Gambale
Download: Forbidden Kiss, Keep Leadin’ Me On, Sun Will Shine
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Renegade Creation
Bullet
2012 Esoteric Antenna
Download: All Over Again, Bullet, Greedy Life
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Tommy Bolin & Friends
Great Gypsy Soul
2012 Esoteric Antenna
Download: Smooth Fandango, Crazed Fandango, Flying Fingers
Tunage Tuesdays is a new feature where we roundup the best and most eclectic blues, jazz and rock music releases and downloads for your viewing pleasure.
This week is rich with discoveries, new players, new releases from established players, new bands, and new tunage.
Mitch Laddie
Burning Bridges
2012 Mystic Records
Download: Mr. Johnson Revisited, Paper in Your Pocket, Inner City Blues
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Sonny Landreth
Elemental Journey
2012 Landfall Records
Download: Gaia Tribe, Passionola, Brave New Girl
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Squackett
Squackett
2012 Esoteric Antenna
Download: A Life Within a Day, Divided Self
New prog rock supergroup debuts lyrical, intelligent, riff-laden and symphonic rock
This blog’s last post talked about new supergroup, Flying Colors, formed by four stellar prog rock musicians joining forces with a younger alt rock singer/songwriter. The release is a tour de force of powerful music combining glittering and gritty guitar work, monster drumming, killer keyboards, driving bass and emotive and rich vocals.
Flying Colors features the guitar work of Steve Morse, front and center. And he delivers a master class with blistering and titanic guitar solos on nearly every song. Morse is one of the hardest working, innovative and rocking guitarists around, winner of Guitar Player Magazine’s distinguished Guitar Player of the Year award five times in a row during the eighties before they retired his availability. His work as founder of The Dixie Dregs and the Steve Morse Band coupled with 18 years as lead guitarist for Deep Purple is practically unmatched for longevity, creativity and chops.
Steve Morse & his "frankentele"
The music weaves Morse’s eclectic playing with a panoply of keyboards and piano work from Neil Morse, no relation to Steve, tied into great hooks, lyrics and vocals from newcomer singer/songwriter Casey McPherson. McPherson fronted two of Austin’s best indie rock band, Endochine and Alpha Rev. Completing the quintet, bassist Dave LaRue and drummer (and Dream Theater founder) Mike Portnoy lay down a dramatic, driving and intricate barrage, foreshadowing a furious and tight rhythmic foundation for powerful and well-written tunage.
The album opens with a raw yet powerful intro to the opening track, Blue Ocean, a great intro to Flying Colors flavor of rock. The 11 songs cover a musically wide swath. Shoulda Coulda Woulda and All Falls Down show off their hard rocks chops, with laser-precise drumming from Portnoy in lock-step with Morse’s guitar licks. But the melodic and lyrical rockers, Kayla and The Storm, are truly “Flying Colors’ songs, and deliver passionate rock and all the requisite trimmings, great melodies with driving and intricate musicianship. Mid-tempo rocker Love Is What I’m Waiting For is a beautiful homage to Queen with sensitive phase-tinged vocals, and a riveting Steve Morse solo, stately, soaring, stunningly melodic.
Flying Color’s debut takes prog rock to a new level, encompassing and deftly integrating contemporary rock, prog rock, progressive metal, and alt rock, offering mainly short-form songs. The melodies, lyrics and vocals are unique yet harken back to the glory days of Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Yes’s Jon Anderson, Genesis’s Phil Collins and even Toto-like vocals and harmonies. The instrumentation, soloing, and song structure feels uniquely their own, but also makes you recall fondly their pedagogical underpinnings.
Flying Colors
All involved with the Flying Colors debut found the process of creating the songs daunting, given the caliber of musicianship. Here are a few select quotes from a recent Steve Morse interview by Jeb Wright, Classic Rock Revisited.
Everyone was really pushing everybody. I was working close to capacity during those moments where the songs were changing. Normally, I can spit out ideas really fast but Neal would just say something like, “I think an F# minor would work better over this part” and Casey would go, “What about doing this?” I would have the scenario change twice within one minute and it was really hard to keep up. Nobody was shy in the band. Like I said, we had some lively discussions. Sometimes, we had to pull it out of Casey. We would all be going, “This is really great” and then we would see Casey sitting there like he was lost. We would go, “What is going on?” Casey would say, “There is something about it that is not selling me.” It was good for the project and really made us work hard.”
Casey McPherson
Ultimately, it is the addition of a multi-talented alt rock and pop singer that pushes this quartet of prog rock superstar musicians who more normally play instrumental music. The songs are catchy, even singable, but not too pop as to turn off their core audience and something that you do not associate with symphonic and metal rock, McPherson has silky and strong pipes, able to carry both falsetto and growling rock phrasing. We hope Flying Colors keeps flying.
Standout tracks: Blue Ocean, Kayla, Love Is What I’m Waiting For.
For fans of: Dixie Dregs, Spock’s Beard, Transatlantic, Dream Theater, Queen, Yes.
Ever since Clapton, Bruce and Baker joined forces as Cream, Rock has celebrated many supergroups. It’s March and we already have a release from a new supergroup, Flying Colors, helmed by prog rockers Steve Morse, Mike Potrnoy and Neil Morse.
Chickenfoot
The return of the rock supergroup may have started in 2009 with the formation of Chickenfoot featuring Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony both of Van Halen fame, guitarist extraordinaire Joe Satriani and drummer Chad Smith, longtime and current member of Red Hot Chili Peppers. This hard-rock group released its second album last year.
Them Crooked Vultures
Mr. Big
2009 also saw two other supergroups; Them Crooked Vultures with John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Dave Grohl of the FooFighters, Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) and the reformation of Mr. Big by founding bassist Billy Sheehan (known for work with Steve Vai, David Lee Roth) and guitar shredmeister Paul Gilbert.
Black Country Communion
In 2010, we saw the formation of hard-rock supergroup Black Country Communion. They have cut two discs and toured, releasing a live CD this year and now recording their third studio effort. Comprised of Deep Purple bassist and vocalist Glenn Hughes, master blues-rocker Joe Bonamassa, drummer Jason Bonham (Foreigner and son of Led Zep’s John), and Derek Sherinian (DreamTheater, Billy Idol, Alice Cooper), this group is the idea of producer Kevin Shirley (Black Crowes, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin).
After a quiet 2011 on the supergroup front, excluding Van Halen’s re-emergence late in the year, we now have our first supergroup formation and CD release of 2012: Flying Colors. Their promo site describes the band thusly: born out of “a simple idea: virtuoso musicians and a pop singer joining to make new-fashioned music the old-fashioned way.”
Flying Colors
Bill Evans, prog rock exec producer, came up with the idea of pairing famed and acclaimed Dixie Dregs founder guitarist Steve Morse with Spock’s Beard and Transatlantic keyboardist Neil Morse (no relation to Steve), drummer Mike Portnoy formerly of DreamTheater and Dregs bassist Dave LaRue. Not coincidentally, Mr. Evans represents Steve Morse, Neil Morse and Dave LaRue.
Evans engaged producer Peter Collins for the project (Rush, Bon Jovi, Jewel and Elton John) and the four musicians joined with the production team to seek a singer and complete the band. After striking out several times, they turned to relative newcomer singer/songwriter Casey McPherson, and Flying Colors was born.
Unless you have lived in a bubble, you’ve heard of Van Halen’s reunion. First it was the stealth reunion concert at small club Cafe Wha in New York City, which was the announcement that frontman, singer David Lee Roth was uniting with Eddie Van Halen once again. Then the single relase of Tattoo, and next the album, A Different Kind of Truth released this February 7th. Video clip.
Eddie Van Halen & David Lee Roth, Pictured in the 'old days' and at Cafe Wha NYC 2012
Much talked about, much anticipated, and now it is here with reviews and a #2 Billboard slot. A bit controversial, too, likely a good things for sales. Some love it, some hate it, some are in the middle. Heavy metal rock is not my bag, but EVH is a genius guitar player. Worth the price of admission on this release. What about the web and print press? Here’s a sampling of reviews.
Van Halen A Different Kind of Truth
This review is positive, calling it a “frequently thrilling return. These songs crackle, fizz and bulge with priapic exuberance.” I mean, c’mon, how often do writers get to use ‘priapic?” Guardian.co.uk
LATimes.com’s Pop & Hiss blog has an intriguing spin on the release, working to fit the music into one of three categories:
“Now the dilemma isn’t just, should you spend money on the CD ($14.99 list price) or a digital copy (also — frustratingly — $14.99). It’s also, how much are you willing to commit to buying in? Will a few dropped bucks on a handful of the best individual tracks suffice? Or will “A Different Kind of Truth” be the perfect Spotify streaming album, not good enough to pay hard money for but worth a mouse-click when you’ve got a spare few minutes? Or should you just ask your computery friend to Sendspace you a pirated copy?”
The writer goes on to fit A Different Kind of Truth as “a perfect rock record for the pick-and-choose era.” Damning with faint praise? Actually, he likes half the album, I guess — “half of the record rises to the level of the band’s glory days is a testament to the ingredients that made up Van Halen circa ’84, and ‘Truth‘ is a confirmation that this band wasn’t a fluke.” The L.A. Times Music Blog.
Shawn Hammond, editor-in-chief of Premier Guitar magazine, had a more critical slant on the release and the guitar player.
“Truth’s most memorable moments are dizzying technical displays during solos and breakdowns. These parts have a lot of verve—you can really tell Ed, bass-playing son Wolfgang, and Alex are stoked to finally be kicking out new jams—but even the admittedly raging solos and breakdowns are usually bookended by verses and choruses that feel like a cleverly crafted mélange of riffs from past albums and the aforementioned bootlegs and demos. (For example, the beginning of the “As Is” solo sounds exactly like the first tapping section of “Eruption,” and there are numerous examples of the same old ascending tremolo-picked licks we’ve heard a zillion times over). There’s also a fair amount of wah-pedal work that often sounds very Satriani-like. That’s no slam on Satch, but that’s not what I want my EVH to sound like.”
Hammond does praise some of EVH’s playing, as here: “The wild, spiraling rotary-speaker tones on “Bullethead” provide one of the album’s rare, death-defying thrill rides.” All in all the writer finds A Different Kind of Truth a mixed bag.
Regardless of the reviews, ya gotta love the #2 slot on Billboard, 187K sold in first week. Take this Twitter poll and let me know whether you thought A Different Kind of Truth is a Like or a Fail.