What’s that society of engineers that does the report card on America’s infrastructure every few years? They have a special on channel 65 and for 2009 the country gets a D. In New Jersey, with some of the highest taxes, 53% of the bridges are unsafe. Today’s photo shows that we in Florida are just as serious about doing our part. We give our word there is a major axle-breaking pothole on every road, and that after 11 years, the Palmetto Highway (only 15 miles long and sporting one of the most tortuous intersections in history) is still not finished. And we keep our word.
The new guitarist came to the shop for a quick lesson, and he is very interested in my duo arrangements. He’d never heard such before (they don’t exactly teach it in guitar school I can guarantee you). I should have realized others may not know what I mean, so I’ll briefly explain. Basically, most guitar music you hear is produced in a recording studio with mixed and layered backing tracks. Such guitar sound is rarely suitable for use in a two-piece orchestra.Yet, 99% of guitarists who hear that music will start trying to memorize the guitar part in isolation. How do you get through to an indoctrinated party who cannot imagine any other way of doing things? Instead you get the ego clash, like the Hippie playing identically whether he is solo or in a six-piece group. Yet the best duo arrangements (I’ve found) often involve the guitarist tactfully underplaying at the same time the bassist has to overplay. And (I’ve also found) egomaniac guitarists won’t stand for such a double attack on their self-image.
The new guy, Jay, stuck around long enough to try out the concept. He was plainly amazed by the sounds. Examples I taught him are my arrangements of “These Boots” and “Spiders & Snakes” where no one instrument plays the beat you hear. Instead I take two instruments playing simple parts in varying syncopation to produce the same effect. And that is what drives the audience wild. Not the guitar or the bass, but the two working in equal combination, that is, a duo arrangement.
One side effect of all this is that I have learned to boost my bass playing whenever I get an uncooperative guitarist. By stealing audience attention I force him to share the show. The dead giveaway I’m going to do this is when you see me turn my volume down on stage. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it makes the guitarist think twice about drowning me out. By then, it is too late, he’s in a duo whether he likes it or not.
Whereas I didn’t invent this technique, I sure as hell didn’t learn it from anyone in this town. Up to now, every Florida guitarist I’ve auditioned has flatly refused to even listen. It took a year to find Jay. As an added bonus, he dislikes tranquilizer guitar, such as, you guessed it, that “Mary Jane” abortion and “Hotel California”, jazz music’s answer to the tsetse fly. I think this guy could work out just fine.
Author's note 2015-06-03: just a few years later, whoever Jay was is history. Can't even vaguely imagine what the guy looked like. Maybe to that great guitarist wannabe stage. It's not in the sky, it's right over here on Johnson Street.
Terrific thunderstorms kept me indoor all day, which time I used to read up on programming web browsers. I could probably do it if I had to, but man, talk about one convoluted arena. It smells of IBM and MicroSoft, where every procedure seems to be shortsighted and every process a patch-up. Only IBM could build a database which treats input and output operations as annoying externalities. And only MicroSoft would endorse a programming language where mistakes are plastered over by adding more code.
My impression of IBM creating a glass of water goes like so. The glass material is perfect, but it has no opening for the water. You have to create an instance of a link to the liquids sub-module, which is in something called a library. And you’re supposed to know where that is. Then MicroSoft says before you request the drink response, you must establish a virtual container procedure and update its swallow pointer. Then you induce a hydration class method. If not untrue, you evoke the object mouth-hand functionality to see if it is enabled. Oh, and don’t forget the error routines at every step. By now the patient has died of thirst.
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