From the category archives:
It was Australia’s loss when Leonard Williams brought his family to Britain in 1952 to open a guitar school in London.
Leonard Williams emigrated to Australia in the late 1930s where he met Marlaan, a Chinese/Australian, daughter of a well known Melbourne barrister through their mutual love of jazz, and later married her. Len was a [...]
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When a successful session musician discussed the creation of a new group and was told it might go down like a big lead balloon, he didn’t turn back. He went to form what may be the most successful band of all time. Who was it? Read on.
Cookham, Clewer, Heston and Epsom are classic examples of [...]
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The Harp guitar is one of the most interesting variations on the standard guitar, it has a very beautiful sound and can be found in both electronic and accoustic versions.
I came across a word with an interesting sound the other day, one I hadn’t really heard before. The word was ‘retronym’.
A retronym is essentially a [...]
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What is Jazz? Ultimate performers genre? Irritation to the Ears? Read. Decide.
What does ‘jazz’ mean to you? Even the word is controversial. Where does it begin, what is it? There seems to be no clear definition. Some attempts have been made at defining jazz as as truly American art form, but this belies the influence [...]
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Many of the blues greats were penniless musicians who were later exploited by record companys and only acheived a degree of fame if they lived into old age. One notable exception is Blind Lemon Jefferson, a self-taught guitarist whose unique voice and guitar technique made him the most popular blues musician ……………………of.the 1920’s.
The stories of [...]
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What’s the weirdest thing about the guitar? It’s not the shape (though there are some weird ones around) and it’s not the sound, though maybe an instrument that doesn’t make any audible sound (for example an electric guitar) is pretty peculiar. No, the weirdest thing about the guitar is that, if you think of all [...]
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What is it about jazz? There’s something sensual, slightly dangerous, artistically edgy about jazz in all it’s forms. Is it the fact that no two true jazz performances are alike? Some argue that to record jazz, to freeze those unique performances in time so they can be repeated, is heresy, and perhaps it is, but [...]
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Easy to find, just look in any music shop, web site or even ebay or craigs list. But suppose you had some money to spend and were looking to start a collection? What would be your idea of the most money anyone should spend on a guitar? You may be surprised.
How do you make something [...]
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No, this isn’t the story of Blues music on America’s highest mountain, this is the story of influential blues musician McKinley Morganfield, a virtuoso of slide guitar.
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Slide guitar is also known as bottleneck guitar because bottlenecks were the first materials used to produce the effect. Normally a guitar player varies the pitch of notes by [...]
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According to Eric Clapton, Robert Johnson was ‘the most important blues singer who ever lived’. He is number five in Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, but the man himself is still part legend, part mystery.
Almost the only concrete things we have of Robert Johnson are his recordings, made in 1936 [...]
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