When I left New Jersey and headed for Gotham back in the mid-1970′s, I managed to land a job in a top recording studio, and since then I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with many of the world’s best guitarists. But I’ll put John up against any of them.

You tell me. Here’s how John plays the blues. And here’s his version of the immortal Voodoo Chile.

Tom Ardolino just whacked the hell out of the drums, and played the biggest, loudest, fattest grooves you ever heard. What I loved more than anything about his playing was the way he’d find a place somewhere right in between straight four-on-the-floor and a shuffle, and just hammer the crap out of it. Kind of like this.

I always hate it when great musicians die, but this one hurts extra bad. Dammit.

We just posted a couple of NRBQ videos a week or two ago. Go watch ‘em again.

Man, what a band.

On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime comes from a delegation of Neapolitan officials, who inspected the apartment the following day. On the floor of the bedroom, they found the body of Don Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, whom a contemporary described as a “model of beauty,” one of the handsomest young men of his time. The officials’ report stated that the Duke was wearing only “a woman’s nightdress with fringes at the bottom, with ruffs of black silk.” The corpse was “covered with blood and pierced with many wounds,” Lying on the bed was the body of Donna Maria d’Avalos, the famously alluring wife of Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa. Her throat had been cut and her nightshirt was drenched in blood.

Interviews with eyewitnesses left no doubt about who was responsible for the murders. Gesualdo had been seen entering the apartment with three men, shouting, “Kill that scoundrel, along with this harlot!” The report ended with the observation that Gesualdo had left town. A prince being a prince, there matters rested.

Don Carlo Gesualdo was more than just a vengeful prince, however: he was also a composer, as one contemporary observer noted, “of infinite art”. He wrote choral music — madrigals — of a sort that had never been heard before, and the like of which was not heard again until the twentieth century. His compositions, which I had never listened to before last night, seem to occupy two worlds at once: a familiar and beckoning realm of sublime and uplifting harmony, and a strange, alien dimension of unnameable dissonances and constantly shifting keys. Listening to his music is a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory experience; no sooner has the spirit come to rest in a pool of limpid sunlight than the scene shifts, through brief passages of swirling and often terrifying darkness, to the next open glade. The music is never still, and to surrender to it is to be borne away to a dreamlike place of lonely, haunted beauty.

Wikipedia’s article on Gesualdo notes:

The evidence that Gesualdo was tortured by guilt for the remainder of his life is considerable, and he may have given expression to it in his music.

Surely he did. Go to YouTube, search for ‘Gesualdo’, and listen.

I saw Mr. Motian play many times, and had always hoped that I would have a chance to work with him in the studio someday, but never did.

His genius was attentiveness, understatement, nuance, and elegance. There was nobody else like him.

Here he is with his quintet — featuring Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano, Marc Johnson, and Bill Frisell — back in 1995.

HT: Devin Townsend.

Enjoy.

What a voice. What a song. Enjoy.

As one of YouTube’s commenters said: “this is like porn for drummers”.

Older Musicians Experience Less Age-Related Decline in Hearing Abilities Than Non-Musicians

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2011) — A study led by Canadian researchers has found the first evidence that lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians.

While hearing studies have already shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians, this is the first study to examine hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians across the age spectrum — from 18 to 91 years of age.

The study was led by Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and is published online Sept. 13 in the journal Psychology and Aging, ahead of print publication.

Investigators wanted to determine if lifelong musicianship protects against normal hearing decline in later years, specifically for central auditory processing associated with understanding speech. Hearing problems are prevalent in the elderly, who often report having difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Scientists describe this as the “cocktail party problem.” Part of this difficulty is due to an age-related decrease in the ability to detect and discriminate acoustic information from the environment.

“What we found was that being a musician may contribute to better hearing in old age by delaying some of the age-related changes in central auditory processing. This advantage widened considerably for musicians as they got older when compared to similar-aged non-musicians,” said lead investigator Benjamin Rich Zendel at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. Zendel is completing his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Toronto and conducted the study with senior cognitive scientist and assistant director of the Rotman Research Institute, Dr. Claude Alain.

The article doesn’t mention recording engineers, but I’m sure the effect is just as strong for them, if not stronger. Over the years people have often said to me what good hearing I must have to have had a long career as an engineer; I’ve always told them that one doesn’t need exceptional hearing (in fact I had both of my eardrums punctured as a child, to relieve a stubborn middle-ear infection), but must rather be trained to listen. And it seems that training makes a big difference as one’s auditory organs become less sensitive in later years.

They’ve been playing this joint for 31 years.

Dr. John is a walking encyclopedia of the American musical heritage, and probably the foremost living exponent of old-school New Orleans piano-playing. In this video clip, he demonstrates some serious left-hand “trickerations”. Check out those tenths!

I asked for just one choice apiece, because once you get started it’s hard to stop. Just off the top of my head I’d name as candidates Sgt. Pepper’s, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Bitches Brew, Live/Evil, One Size Fits All, Overnight Sensation, Absolutely Free, Led Zep I, Led Zep IV, Axis: Bold As Love, Electric Ladyland, Truth, Kind Of Blue, Avalon, Tommy, Who’s Next, Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Disraeli Gears, The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East, Innervisions, Abraxas, American Beauty, Synchronicity, Fragile, London Calling, My Aim Is True, In The Court of the Crimson King, Trout Mask Replica, and… well, I could just keep on going, including a bunch you’d probably agree with, and probably some you’ve never heard of.

A few people have written to ask why I chose Close to the Edge. What can I say? It’s easily the best prog-rock album ever made, one of my all-time favorite bands at the apogee of their creative arc. It’s really just about a perfect record, and it includes the best song Yes ever wrote: the incomparable And You And I. Even the Roger Dean cover design is a masterpiece. If there’s anything at all I would have changed about that album, it would only have been the sequence, which I think was exactly backwards: the title track should have been all of Side Two, and Side One should have opened with Siberian Khatru and closed with And You And I. But that’s just a teensy quibble.

Yes, it was hard not to pick Sgt. Pepper’s, in deference to what is surely the most influential and important album of all time, but there’s just something about Close to the Edge. It just kills me, every time. Still.

Anyway, thanks to those of you who named names. For those who didn’t, the thread is still open.

What’s the greatest album of all time? (I originally wrote “rock album”, but let’s just make it “album”.) You only get to pick one.

All readers, even the most casual visitors, and all of you who usually stay on the sidelines, are invited to comment on this one.

The headliner, Malcolm Rebennack Jr. (A.K.A “Dr. John“), is a national treasure, and needs no introduction. The opening act, however, is someone you may not have heard of, unless you’re a fan of the Washington, D.C. musical subgenre known as “go-go”: the unspeakably funky Chuck Brown, now 74 years old.

I was fortunate enough to do some recording work with Chuck Brown back in 1985, and together we confected a bouncy little single called “Sho Yuh Right”. (I found out later that producer Maxx Kidd had listed me on the credits as “The Mighty Malcolm”, which pleased me no end.) You can enjoy it here.

(Technical note: this track contains high levels of what is known, in the arcane patois of the trained music-biz professional, as “stank”.)