Don't tell anybody but my call on the Gibson was just a guess from the
sound!. I used to do jazz riffs with a friend in grad school who had a blonde hollow-body beauty.
p.s. I am heading up to St. Louis with the fretless this weekend to see my main man Peter James and do some jammin'...
p.p.s Get a load of this...some guy stopped me in the music store today and asked me if I would be interested in playing in Japan....can you believe it? The only thing he knew about me was that I was armed with a Fender Precision...he musta heard somethin'
What would I tell my wife and kids???!!
The whole late Seventies era in the LA music scene was really amazing. I didn't realize just how priviledged I was, until recently.
I never saw a punk show, or what went of as "New Wave," but after the posers like Chick Corea and Stanly Clarke introduced a new generation of Jazz Fusion, the real guys, like Carlton, Ritenour, Laboriel, Jaco, Steve Gad and others, finally got the recognition they deserved.
The truly amazing thing is that a person could see these guys a few chairs away, any week of the year! This was the time when Mesa Boogie amps were brand new, and huge improvements in sound systems were coming about. A small club, like the Baked Potato, was basically turned into a direct-to-disc recording session. It made arena rock seem like a garage band! These guys could play live with perfection.
My favorite music from that era has to be Steely Dan's Aja, and Gaucho, as well as Joni Mitchell. All the heavyweights played on those albums.
Major highlights, for me, would include larry Carlton's solo on Third World Man, from Gaucho, and anything Jaco, as long as he was with Joni.
There's nothing in the music world, at this moment, that I am aware of, that compares with the scene in LA at that time. (of course, I'm pretty out of touch, but I still have friends in the business, and they aren't real excited either.)
When I hear the same music I listened to in Highschool played at my kids' highschool, I have to wonder. Could it be that the slacker generation isn't as creative?
Brent
