Random acts of music....

After more failed attempts than I can remember I may have figured out how to post some music mp3s into this blog.

I've been playing guitar since I went to college at the start of the 1970s. Given the amount of time that's passed I really can't explain how little progress I've made. OK, I'm a profoundly lazy guitar student. That should explain it. I've never been interested enough to learn things off the records I like; even now when Youtube is bursting with free guitar lessons, I find that my focus fades after 20 seconds or so. The result is that I like to play what I like to play.

I play the guitar for the same reason people meditate. In the morning I'll sit with a guitar, put it into some alternate or open tuning, and spend a half-hour to an hour just messing around. I'll find an interesting pattern here and there, most of which I'll never find again, but when I'm done, I feel calmer.

This first piece is called "4 a.m." even though it was recorded around one in the afternoon. I've released three albums under the band name, Many Bright Things. The first was released in 1997 in a pressing of 300 copies on clear vinyl in a box set with all sorts of inserts. In 1998 it was issued on CD by a small label in San Antonio, TX. The album is mostly electric guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, but one afternoon my friend Ray Pierle who I recorded the album with came in with a new acoustic guitar he'd just bought off a local guy. It was a Takamine 6-string and was strung with very light gauge strings that buzzed slightly because the action was a bit too low. I put the guitar in a D tuning and started fooling around, Ray set up a microphone and recorded this short improvisation which became the final track on the LP.




Also from 1998-1999 is this next short improvisation I call "The Abby" because it was inspired by walking through the Abby atop Mont St. Michel at the edge of Normandy, France in November of 1998. When I got back I saw a small performance by a Florida guitarist, Sam Pacetti, who played in an odd tuning in which the strings are tuned, from low to high, C G C G C F. That tuning, and thinking about what playing alone in the enormous stone rooms at the top of the Abby would be like, produced this:



If you leave the high-E string alone, that same guitar tuning becomes Open C, a particularly pretty tuning on the acoustic. This next piece is the title track of the third Many Bright Things album, Many Bright Friends. It's played on a nylon string guitar, is just over 20 seconds long, and is followed by a cover of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's "East West" that is just over 20 minutes long.



At one point I had my friend, Ron Esposito, drive over from Cincinnati to overdub a bowed bass part onto "The Abby" instrumental. While that never quite worked, while he was here we fooled around a bit in the studio and recorded about a half dozen improvisations for guitar and acoustic bass. This one is called "Brazil" because it sounds just a little Brazilian.



Ron and I both are big Bob Dylan fans and with the time we had left we recorded a version of Dylan's epic, "Desolation Row." Sometime later my friends Larry Demyer, Scott Ballantine and Tom Woodard overdubbed some other instruments on it. When Larry and I were mixing the last Many Bright Friends album we found the tape and did a quick mix. I like it. My vocals and guitar and Ron's bass were recorded live.