Vid: Joe Pass - Just Friends
Paul Mitchell Brown
featuring JP, OP, NHOP and Drew P :-)
heat...@gmail.com
wrote:
> Stellar quality clip from the Oscar Peterson series "Words & Music"
> featuring JP, OP, NHOP and Drew P :-)
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShBxQuwM7LY
Wow!!!
Bg
guitar.
No fret buzz on that one!
I wish he played it all the time.
Bg
TFPainter
Mannn...doesn't he sound fantastic on that guitar! The Ibo JP makes me
cringe.
Dan Adler
It's a great guitar, but it can only be played by people who actually
pick the way Joe did, i.e. over where the neck pickup is usually set.
You can see it clearly in this video. The reason he had it moved is
that when you pick in that position you are always hitting the pickup
with the pick and it adds unwanted clicks. Moving the pickup was an
ingenious solution to Joe Pass' problem, but then when it's played by
people who pick "between" the neck and bridge pickup locations, then
they end up playing right above the pickup and have exactly the
problem he was trying to solve on top of a brighter tone. So, this
guitar really only works for people who pick close to the neck.
ScotGormley
Awesome--thank you for the link.
ScotGormley
You're right, Dan. I've played several of the JP20s over the years and
only found a good sound when I moved my hand up by the neck. That does
produce a unique sound, though, and the string tension is lower there.
So it feels really good with heavy flatwound strings like 13 - 56. It
would be interesting to hear John McLaughlin play on a JP 20.
Gene Bertoncini one of those "working man" plywood guitars, too (like
Joe's in the video), and I think the pickup on Gene's is pretty far
back, too.
Dan Adler
charles robinson
Thanks man. To me that is Joe at his best we sometimes forget that he was a
monster even when he was only playing single string. .
Charlie
pmfan57
wrote:
His single string work on Pacific Jazz stuff is legendary. That's
some of my favorite jazz guitar.
pmfan57
wrote:
> Stellar quality clip from the Oscar Peterson series "Words & Music"
> featuring JP, OP, NHOP and Drew P :-)
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShBxQuwM7LY
That is some of the best Pablo era single note playing I've heard by
Joe and what a clear sound he's getting. That looks like a D'Aquisto,
but has the name covered. Notice the pickup is away from the
fingerboard. Super. Hopefully this whole show will be on a DVD soon.
Bg
Ibanez here, it's his only rarely seen D'aquisto?
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TFPainter
Yup, that's definitely the D'Aquisto. According to "Acquired of the
Angles" he only made 50 or so laminated archtops.
Paul Mitchell Brown
> That is some of the best Pablo era single note playing I've heard by
> Joe and what a clear sound he's getting. That looks like a D'Aquisto,
> but has the name covered. Notice the pickup is away from the
> fingerboard. Super. Hopefully this whole show will be on a DVD soon.
What's the story behind the headstock name being obscured? I've
noticed that one some pics of Joe with his 175. Was it part of his
contract with Ibanez?
Paul Mitchell Brown
lick at 1:24. Maybe it wasn't what he intended but it's cool how the
phrase starts and ends in key (C#/Dbm) and kind of mutates in between
(G#-B-G#-E, G-Bb-Gb-Eb, Gb-A-F-Db, E-G#-E-C#).
TFPainter
wrote:
The name is actually on the pearl inlay "banner", it's the same with
Jim Hall's D'Aquisto too I think.
pmfan57
wrote:
He's getting a nice sound out of it here (and playing amazingly). I
saw him play it live in a solo situation at the Top of the Gate and it
sounded awful, with the low E buzzing like crazy. Joe looked really
pissed.
Bg
wrote:
The trading of Fours on this vid are a hoot as well.
Bg
dwilliams
I never noticed it before, but my ES-165 is set up the same
way...single pickup mounted about the same distance from the
fretboard. It does present some picking issues.
David J. Littleboy
FWIW, both the following ES-175s have noticeable space between the 20th fret
end of the fingerboard and the pickup. This puts these pups at about the
same place the floater is on my 22-fret Ibanez, but closer to the bridge
than the L5 pup.
1965: http://www.walkin.co.jp/guitars/124521.htm
2006 (single pup): http://www.walkin.co.jp/guitars/124543.htm
--
David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan
Johnny Asia
I remember someone here posting a few years ago about a classical
guitarist they knew who asked, upon hearing a Joe Pass record, "Is he
a beginner?", or something like that. Did I imagine reading that?
The guitarist who supposedly said that was Royal Conservatory trained.
I just found this article:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1532239/a_jazz_guitar_legend_joseph_anthony_pg4.html
So great in skill and talent was Pass that in a 1980 Sydney 2-week
guitar seminar where Pass held 2-hour workshops, John Williams,
renowned classical musician, humbly stated, "Here I am, supposedly one
of the world's finest classical guitarists, and after seeing Joe Pass
and his students, I thought I knew the fingerboard."
Five Sharp
sounded like one) play a great, great piece of solo jazz guitar. I was blown
away. Until I discovered he could not improvise two notes in a row. Or play
the simplest of blues solo. He was a classical player who had studied and
memorized this.
Since that time I am a bit suspicious of chord melody playing :)
#####
pmfan57
Of course Pass could do the same song solo three times in a row and do
it different each time.
Mark Cleary
it make the guitarist less than real?
--
Deacon Mark Cleary
Epiphany Roman Catholic Church
drthoma...@gmail.com
A lot of great players in jazz history have played more or less
precomposed solos.
Five Sharp
> So is that bad or good in terms of the guitar and the player, and does
> it make the guitarist less than real?
We have discussed this earlier. If you consider improvisation as the
hallmark of jazz (which I do), he's not going to be a jazz musician. But
that's just me. Feel free to disagree.
#####
Five Sharp
> Of course Pass could do the same song solo three times in a row and do it
> different each time.
Yes, that's why he is the real thing.
#####
Five Sharp
> precomposed solos.
Yes, but now name one great jazz player who could not improvise.
#####
335
I think a lot of "chord melody" playing in jazz guitar is still
influenced by Johnny Smith's approach. AFAIK Johnny didn't really
improvise his chord solos although he may have played variations at
times. And he could definitely improvise single lines when he wanted
to. Barney Kessel also took this approach to solo playing: he worked
things out in advance and stayed fairly close to the arrangement with
some improv.
However, I consider Barney and Johnny to be jazz guitarists; even
though they played things that were prepared, they could improvise
too. Even if you consider players that are more influenced by Joe
Pass... say when you hear someone play a walking bass line with chord
punctuations the way JP did, it's probably not really "improvised."
Most likely the player has done some wood shedding on walking bass
lines and knows how to apply that to a chord progression in solo
guitar. I'm not sure that's really pure improv, but it's part of the
jazz guitar language.
OTOH when I hear a guy play the exact same arrangement every time with
no variation in rhythm or harmony, then yeah, I would consider that
sort of a pale shadow of the real intention of jazz guitar.
Paul Mitchell Brown
Martin Taylor, for instance, has admitted that his arrangements are
about 85% pre-arranged. The variations between each live performance
are mostly restricted to the single line fills rather than the more
chordal-based passages.
TFPainter
wrote:
Where getting into the "what is improvisation" waters...dangerous
stuff!
I'd agree to play an entire preordained chord melody solo the same
exact way each time is pretty uninspired...BUT solo guitar that is
compelling at all is HARD to do, if you come up with something good,
it's difficult to throw it all away. I think one thing to consider is
that if a player already has a "mature" style, to an extent, we pretty
much know what he or she is going to do (perhaps before they do!) If
you listen to a player long enough, usually you can kind of predict
what they would play in a certain situation. Does that mean it isn't
improvised? I'd say no. I think that is part of the charm of jazz, to
figure out what elements of the "language" a certain player uses and
has made a part of his or her style. I mean when we speak are we
improvising? Someone else taught us the words, how to string them into
sentences, and later straightened out our grammar...
Tom
Five Sharp
> Where getting into the "what is improvisation" waters...dangerous
stuff!
I'd agree to play an entire preordained chord melody solo the same
exact way each time is pretty uninspired...BUT solo guitar that is
compelling at all is HARD to do, if you come up with something good,
it's difficult to throw it all away. I think one thing to consider is
that if a player already has a "mature" style, to an extent, we pretty
much know what he or she is going to do (perhaps before they do!) If
you listen to a player long enough, usually you can kind of predict
what they would play in a certain situation. Does that mean it isn't
improvised? I'd say no. I think that is part of the charm of jazz, to
figure out what elements of the "language" a certain player uses and
has made a part of his or her style. I mean when we speak are we
improvising? Someone else taught us the words, how to string them into
> sentences, and later straightened out our grammar...
I realize that lots of chord melody stuff will be pre-fab. Heck, all my
chord melody stuff is just that! But all my single line stuff is usually
improvised, often 90-100%, though I sometimes incorporate some pre-fab ideas
or licks. I have no problems with a certain degree of pre-fab. My original
point was that classical player who had ZERO improvised content in his jazz
playing. So I was addressing the extreme end of the spectrum. Is that jazz?
Heck, but earlier I vowed not to indulge in discussions before New Year!
#####
TFPainter
The classical player playing a jazz arrangement of a tune is just
that...in my experience, if the player has not absorbed the language,
their "jazz" will sound pretty hokey.
I remember overhearing a classical trumpet professor in college
advising one of his students to use this magic "octatonic" scale to
improvise over any chord. He was a fantastic classical player, but his
jazz playing was cringe worthy.
Tom