Slightly OT: Les Paul on PBS

I'm not even a guitar player but since many of you are:

I see from the PBS magazine that they will be doing a feature on Les Paul July 11 at 9PM (in the Wyoming/Colorado region). Presumably it is also aired other places though I don't know when.

Sam

Cool. Do you realize how old that guy is now? I'm pretty sure he's got to be arouond 90.

He's always been a great innovator, hope somebody records it:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=foXSXOAfB4U

Tonight's the night, 8:30 central time.

I'm glad he's still kicking and playing. It was a great bio on him.

Would LOVE to see it. Don't they have some online dept where you can watch reruns or something?

And yes, IIRC Django played with only 2 fingers, the only ones he had left on that hand after some accident, whatever. Amazing perseverance, think most people would give up.

I hope these comes out of DVD some day. It's the PBS "American Masters" series and most of them are fantastic. I wish I had recorded.

I taped it and will probably put it on my YouTube channel at some point

Yeah, normally I wouldn't really pull such stuff either, but this is public property, sortof, so you've got my full moral support. The man's a legit legend.

Those guys just love to hear their own voices, they are 'making' the program, after all. Ask incredibly lengthy 'interesting' questions, and then go to a commercial break halfway the answer. Rrrright.

Well, I'm sure sorry I missed it. But it brings to mind a track I have on a Chet Atkins CD. Les and Chet are playing. Les plays a dozen or so bars of a song. Chet says, "Les, I've always been a great admirer of yours, you're a true gentleman and a heck of a guitar player. But, you're not playing the darn thing right." Chet busts out with his version. Les says, " That's pretty good, but here's how you do it." And they start swapping licks back and forth, laughing and hootin' and hollerin and having a good old time. Great recording.
Mark

Oh yeah: and Django was startlingly good

But it brings to mind a track I have on a Chet Atkins CD. Les and Chet are playing.

They did two albums together that I can recall. The first one figures into this documentary a little bit and it shows them accepting the grammy they won for it.

Ah, thanks for this. 2 hrs, but worth it. Fortunately it's not one of those voice-over type jobs. They give the man center stage, that's good. One of the most get-go 90-year olds I've seen in my life, BTW.

Also, I never realized that a large part of his search for innovation (the tinny speed-up thing was a joke, of course) was given in by the need for him to stay ahead of the copycats, initially. He was succesful, and everybody was on the radio playing 'his' sounds, without him getting any of the credit or the money, so he had to do something about that, quick. Makes eminent sense. Geniuses rarely develop in a vacuum, IMO.

I really enjoyed it (and taped it, of course). Besides the already mentioned Django anecdotes I dug the stuff about other jazz folks like Art Tatum and Charlie Christian. I also thought that Tommy Emmanuel was very entertaining while demonstrating his love for Les' and Chet's music, (as well as showing off his own guitar playing skills). For a guy who's been alive for over 90 years I think the documentary did a decent job of trying to cover his many accomplishments.

Thumbs up.

Richard

ORIGINAL: Joe Bravo
...these runs he's doing are incredibly difficult and very fast. very few people can do them at all...

Far more impressive is that his performances were offhand improvisations, not merely technically very advanced, but musically sophisticated, complex, and played artfully and with nuance and sensitivity. His *improvisations* were not one-note-at-a-time affairs of plunking through scales, but elegant, composed, and multi-voiced fugues that just spilled out of him.

I remember hearing a recording of a startlingly baroque and florid piano arrangement he recorded of "somewhere over the rainbow," and learning that the recording was of a performance he gave a few days after attending a screening of the Wizard of Oz, which was his only prior exposure to the song. The harmonies and internal melodies he had going on in this thing were staggering.

He is the definition of the modern jazz/popular music virtuoso.

Thanks for that NPR link for Art Tatum. I don't know what else to say -- mind-boggling stuff.

ORIGINAL: Roflcopter

somewhere over the rainbow

You can find it here (and a few others), officially it's 'Over the Rainbow' BTW (not as if I knew that, never worry)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6434701

I love this quote on Tatum's lack of a big-name legacy:

"...There's no Tatum songbook, because he rarely composed. In fact, it's said he was so original that he re-composed every song he ever played. His piano playing was so advanced almost nobody can copy him."

The extraordinary thing about his excruciatingly deft and difficult playing is that he does it so casually, so off-handedly. It's entertaining, poppy and fun. It's not a solo, it's just the song, ornamented. A casual music fan could listen to Tatum and not even have it occur to them that they were listening to "difficult" or "serious" music. It's what God would play if he sat down at the parlor piano for a dinner-party sing-along.

It's the inverse of showy guitar virtuosos who must have the whole world stop while they mechanically reel off box patterns in rigid meter with flat dynamics over ham-handed changes. There is nothing at all persnickety, uptight, or pompous about his playing. These incredible harmonies and complex counter-melodies just roll off his wrists like a funky player might accidentally hit extra notes in lucky spots. His playing is a waterfall of musical ideas, and the speed is just incidental to pouring out all that musical vitality in a 3-minute song.