Newsletter Vol. 3 # 18 – March 15, 2006

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #18 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• News and Announcements
• New Articles and Lessons
• Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
• Forum Findings
• Buried Treasure Of The Internet
• Event Horizon
• Reviews
• Random Thoughts

News And Announcements

Beware the Ides of March! Or not. Your choice, after all…

A hearty welcome to our mid-March Guitar Noise News! For our readers in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is merely a week away. In some places it’s kind of hard to tell that, though…

Spring, at least in my household, goes hand in hand with ‘Spring Cleaning.’ And guess who’s been so wrapped up in cleaning that just about everything is now neatly put away instead of being close at hand to his computer?

Guilty as charged!

I am actually writing this whole newsletter bright and early in the wee hours of March 15, 2006, so it goes without saying that we’re going to fly through this issue!

Onward!

New Articles And Lessons

Beginning next week, you will see a bit of a revival of lessons and articles. In the upcoming months, look for both Easy Songs for Beginners, such as Friend of the Devil, As Tears Go By and Brain Damage, as well as Intermediate Song Lessons on Time After Time, Cinnamon Girl, Sunny Afternoon and the long awaited Wish You Were Here (part 3).

There will also be lessons from all your favorite contributors as well as new pieces from first time writers for Guitar Noise.

Plus, be on hand for the return of the Guitar Noise Guitar Column! We’re going to start out with a multi-part series revisiting ear training – this time using MP3 examples to help you get to the point where you can figure out music without relying on tablature.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

Here’s the latest tip from Darrin:

Here’s a pattern that introduces us to approach tones. Approach tones are those notes used for melodic embellishment that happen before the note you actually want to play. For example, if you’re going to play a C, E, G (C major arpeggio) you could dress it up by instead playing B, C, Eb, E, Gb, G. This is just one example of approach tones. There are many different ways of using this type of melodic embellishment.

Let’s work with the F major arpeggio:

|------------------4-5-|-7-8-4-5--------------------|
|--------------5-6-----|---------5-6----------------|
|----------4-5---------|-------------4-5------------|
|------6-7-------------|-----------------6-7--------|
|--7-8-----------------|---------------------7-8----|
|----------------------|----------------------------|

This pattern can go equally well over a Dm7 chord. Try to play this by first stressing the first note in each 2-note group. Then, play again but stress the 2nd note.

If you like working with this exercise, you’ll probably want to create other patterns based on the common open position chords as follows: a major arpeggio pattern with root on string 5, under finger 2. Then, major arps whose roots fall here:

string 6, finger 4
string 6, finger 2
string 4, finger 1.

We’ll learn a dominant 7 pattern for approach tones next time.

Thanks for reading.

Darrin Koltow

For those of you who might like to know more about Darrin, let me direct you to his website, Maximum Musician and also to his page here at Guitar Noise.

Forum Findings

There’s been a lot going on over at the Forum pages the past month. First off, I’d like to welcome Elecktrablue back as a Guitar Noise Moderator. She’s always been a bright light on the Forum pages as we’re truly lucky to have her rejoin the ranks.

The first bit of business she took upon herself was to clean up ‘The Other Side’ Forum page.

The revamping has done it a world of good. Someone even managed to (finally) write a good blurb about the page:

Women play guitar, too! This page is specifically for the discussion of women’s topics on music in general and the guitar in particular. All genders invited to discuss things!

So come on over to the Other Side and join in the discussions.

Some of you astute readers may have also noticed that the normal list of moderators has disappeared and been replaced by ‘The GN Support Team.’ No, it’s not a corporate takeover! Owing to the humungous amount of traffic on the Forum pages (at seemingly all hours of the day), it seemed like a very smart idea to allow each moderator the ability to police every forum page.

If you’re worried about the ‘faceless’ nature of the support team, just click on the icon and you’ll get a list of individuals you can contact either via PM or email. We’re still the same folks you knew yesterday.

Buried Treasure Of The Internet

People may wonder why so much effort, volunteer effort at that, goes into Guitar Noise. Not only the forum pages, but all the lessons and articles and reviews and the technical stuff that keeps the place running as smoothly as possible day in and day out.

That’s because just about everyone who visits Guitar Noise realizes how special a place it is. And what a sense of community it has. Our readers are, far and away, the most important part of the community. After all, all of the volunteers (writers, moderators and all) have come from the ranks of the readers.

So I’d like to spend the next few months pointing out a different type of ‘Buried Treasure of the Internet,’ beginning with GN Forum member Mike, who has taken a new approach to supporting Guitar Noise. Check out his ‘auction’ on the Swap Meet page.

A big thank you to Mike, The Dali Lima and everyone participating in these auctions. I think you’ll be very happy to hear Paul’s ideas for the funds raised for the site.

Event Horizon

Supporting Guitar Noise and the Guitar Noise community is not always about money or time. Sometimes it’s about being there. Literally. As musicians, it’s always good to support each other simply by being at a gig if it’s at all possible.

One thing we’d really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

So please feel free to write me if you’ve got some gigs coming up. Remember that Guitar Noise News is sent out on the first and fifteenth of each month. Usually I will have it ready to be sent out a few days ahead of time, so plan accordingly. For instance, if you’ve got something coming up in the last two weeks of April (that is, after the fifteenth), then let me know by the tenth or the twelfth.

If you’ve already got a show in May, let me know, too! It’s never too early to plan for things!

Send your gig dates to me at dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header.

If you’re in the Midwest, you probably already know there are many GN members scattered all about. Bish hails from the Illinois/Iowa border and his band, Hap Hazard, play very regularly in the Quad Cities area.

You can catch Hap Hazard this Friday, March 17 at Blue Port Junction, located at the southeast corner of I-280 and Highway 61 Interchange just west of Davenport. Music runs from 8:30 PM ’til 12:30 AM. Have a safe Saint Patrick’s Day, okay?

And don’t forget we’re an International Community, as evidenced by our next item:

Bill MacPherson, of Native Vibe, will be playing in Nosara, Costa Rica with his new acoustic band “The Medicine Show”:

Every Tuesday night- The Gilded Iguana in Nosara- 7:30 – 10:00pm
Every Thursday night- Blue Dog Surf Club- 8:30 – 11:00pm
Every Saturday night- The Beatle Bar- 8:00 – 10:00pm
Every Sunday night- Cassa Tucan- 8:00 – 10:00pm

The Medicine Show is made up of all acoustic guitars and one mandolin. Conga drums and other percussion instruments round out this 5 piece band. The music is an eclectic mix of jazz, blues, bluegrass/country, acoustic rock and folk rock. The Medicine Show is the hottest music in this small foreign tourist area and has been filling music clubs to capacity. The crowd seems to really dig the mix of music and they dance like crazy. Email junglejoe33040@yahoo.com for more info.

Reviews

Reviews go up almost all the time here at Guitar Noise. But we also know that what we post is, pardon the cliché, the very tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to pass along a review of an album, concert, DVD (tutorial, concert or otherwise), book or even a guitar or guitar/music product, feel free to drop me a line and look for a slew of reviews coming up in the next two weeks – there’ll be CD reviews of the latest from Beth Orton, notes on Ray Davies’ first solo album, Other People’s Lives, and more! There’ll also be reviews of CDs from some of our staff and readers.

We’ll also have product and tutorial reviews online in the next week – read about a new method book on hybrid picking as well as Dennis Corbin’s take on a new guitar stand.

Random Thoughts

I got a hold of this from the London Times, courtesy of alerts from Teleplayer324 and Alan Green:

The Times March 08, 2006

Ali Farka Touré 1939 – MARCH 7, 2006

Brilliant African guitarist who won international fame and influence without ever losing touch with his roots

WHENEVER Ali Farka Touré was asked to state his profession, his preferred response was that he was a farmer. He owned and cultivated extensive lands in Mali in the semi-desert region of Niafunké, where in later years he was also the mayor. But he also happened to be arguably the finest guitarist Africa has ever produced.

A virtuoso on both the acoustic and electric instruments, he won a Grammy award in 1994 for Talking Timbuktu, his collaborative album with the American guitarist Ry Cooder, and he had just won another with Toumani Diabaté, for their In the Heart of the Moon. Touré’s intricate, fluid playing was acclaimed by such Western rock guitar legends as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, who were often seen in the audience at his concerts.

He was in his late forties before he found himself lionised by a Western audience and began performing in some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls. Yet even after his international success, he retained not only his African dress but also his ancient tribal beliefs and customs. Whatever his Western managers, agents and record company executives proposed, they knew that he would consult the spirits of his ancestors before he accepted their more earthbound advice.

Born Ali Ibrahim in 1939 in the village of Kanau on the banks of the River Niger in northwest Mali, he never knew his exact date of birth. The tenth son born to parents who claimed noble descent, he was the first to survive infancy and as a child acquired the nickname Farka, meaning donkey and indicating not slow-wittedness but strength and tenacity. When he was still a boy his father died while serving in the French Army and he moved with his mother further south along the river to Niafunk é, the village that, apart from a few years spent in the capital, Bamako, in the 1970s, was his home for the rest of his life.

Brought up as a devout Muslim, he had no formal schooling and spent his childhood farming. But in Mali Islam co-exists with an older belief system that holds that under the waters of the River Niger there is a world of spirits called ghimbala or djinns who control both the spiritual and temporal world.

At a young age he became mesmerised by the music played at spirit ceremonies in the villages along the banks of the Niger. Through the power of music it is believed that the spirits can possess those present and those who have the gift to communicate with the djinns are called ‘children of the river’. Influenced by a grandmother who was a famous priestess in the region, Ali was deemed to be such a child and his interest in the music of the spirits led him at the age of 12 to fashion his first instrument, a single-string traditional West African guitar known as a djerkel, which many years later he presented to Cooder.

For a time he planned on becoming a priest, not in his Islamic faith but in the local djinn-based religion, before he eventually decided the powers of the spirit world were too dangerous to meddle with. ‘These spirits can be good or bad to you, so I decided just to sing about them,’ he explained many years later. ‘But it’s our culture, so we can’t pass it by.’ As a teenager he worked variously as an apprentice to a tailor, a taxi driver, car mechanic and a pilot on the river, while continuing to play music in ceremonies and for pleasure, mastering a number of traditional instruments.

At the age of 17 he saw a performance by the touring National Ballet of Guinea, whose orchestra featured a Western guitar. The experience left a lasting impression and he was soon learning to play on a borrowed guitar. When Mali gained independence from its French colonial rulers in 1960, the new Government established professional arts troupes in each of Mali’s administrative regions and two years later Touré joined the Niafunké district troupe, singing and playing guitar in a huge group of musicians and dancers that numbered more than 100. Yet it was not until 1968 that he was able to buy his own guitar, when he travelled to Bulgaria to represent Mali at an international arts festival and purchased a cheap Soviet model.

In 1970 he moved to Bamako, taking a job at the national radio station as an engineer and playing in the Radio Mali orchestra. His guitar playing on the airwaves brought him attention and acclaim across Mali and, encouraged by the response, he sent recordings of the broadcasts to a record company in Paris. It led to the release of his first album and six more followed between 1974 and 1979, each of which was recorded in Mali and the tapes then sent to Paris.

His tradition-based music also began to reflect subtle elements of outside influences, including the American soul of singers such as James Brown and Otis Redding, the jazz of Jimmy Smith and the blues of John Lee Hooker. It was not so much that he imitated any of them, more that he claimed to recognise African roots in all three forms and derived confidence and affirmation of his own art from the fact. In 1980 he returned to Niafunké to work on his land and did not travel again for another seven years. By then the reputation of his 1970s albums and the mid-1980s ‘world music’ boom had made him a cult figure among European audiences and, in 1987, the British promoter Ann Hunt travelled to Bamako to find him. She eventually tracked him down in Niafunké after Radio Mali broadcast an appeal for him to get in touch with her, and his first tour of Britain and Europe followed. It was only the second time in his life that he had left Mali and his guitar mastery and charismatic presence made him an instant success everywhere he played.

That same year the London-based World Circuit label issued his first self-titled recording made outside Africa. The River – a reference to the spirit world beneath the River Niger – followed in 1990 and three years later came The Source, which included guest appearances by the American bluesman Taj Mahal and the British-Asian fusionist, Nitin Sawhney. These records established him as one of the biggest African names on the European and American world music scene, but even better was to come when, in 1993, he travelled to Los Angeles to record an album of guitar duets with Ry Cooder. Their collaboration proved to be inspired and on its release the following year the resulting album, Talking Timbuktu, won a Grammy award and established Ali not merely as a great African artist but one of the world’s foremost guitarists in any genre.

Ironically, at almost exactly the same time as Talking Timbuktu was making him an international star, he developed an increasing reluctance to leave his farm. As a result he did not make another album for five years, when the World Circuit owner Nick Gold, who had despaired of ever getting him back into a Western studio, travelled to Niafunké with a mobile recording unit. Sessions, in an abandoned school, were fitted in between the demands of tending his crops and the resulting album, Niafunké, was released to more rave reviews in 1999. Four years later he appeared in Martin Scorsese’s documentary film Feel Like Going Home, which traced the history of the blues from the Mississippi Delta back to the banks of the Niger. Once again, the film director was forced to travel to Mali to find him.

In 2005 he released his first recordings in six years on In the Heart of the Moon, a wonderful album of guitar and kora duets, recorded in Bamako with Toumani Diabaté, widely regarded as the finest player of the West African harp-like instrument. The same year he also played his first European concerts in five years and began work on a new solo album, by which time he had been elected mayor of the Niafunké region as a representative of the URD party (Union for the Republic and Democracy).

He is survived by a wife and 11 children.

Ali Farka Touré, guitarist, was born in 1939. He died on March 7, 2006, aged 66

It strikes me that, because the world is such a large place, even with all the wonders of communication, we still know so little about so much of it. This is certainly true in the circles of music. Even with the ability to listen to songs from all over the world, many people may never listen to more than the smallest fraction of it. The raging sun is seen instead as a pinprick of starlight – breathtakingly beautiful, to be sure, but still miniscule proportion of the glory that’s there to be heard.

This is where the Internet community can raise to the occasion. Write and tell us about music we might not otherwise ever get a chance to hear. Send them along to me and we’ll put together some articles to highlight your suggestions. Pass them along to me and please put ‘music for the world’ in the title. I look forward to sharing your music with every one of our readers.

Until April Fools’ Day, stay safe and play well.

And, as always,

Peace