Wes Montgomery Blindfold Test

Bill Williams relays this page from a 1967 issue of Downbeat. It’s from a guitar-centric issue that included articles on George Benson, Larry Coryell and Howard Roberts. It was a very good year.

It’s only a single page pdf, so going to rapidshare seems a waste, but I don’t have an alternative right now. Alternative soon come.

        Blindfold Test - Wes Montgomery

Jazz Styles and Analysis - Guitar

This volume of transcribed jazz guitar solos was originally published by downbeat publications and edited by Jack Peterson. In the 70’s I bought every damn thing I could get from them and ate it like candy. This was their 14th publication. They published a volume for alto sax, guitar and trombone in this series. I got the first two but never saw the trombone volume. They intended to produce volumes for trumpet, piano, vibes, clarinet/soprano sax and drums. I never saw any but the first three.

Jazz Styles and Analysis contains a single guitar solo by practically every old-school player up to that time, as well as Metheny, Carlton and even Jeff Beck. Only a single solo by each, and no attempt to pick the greatest solo they every played or anything like, but still very interesting stuff. A good document for the ages.

At one idiotic point in my life, having acquired much sheet music and LP’s but still living as an itinerant musician, I thought I could got cut down on the baggage of life I was compelled to cram into the jalopy du jour by putting LP’s onto 3 3/4-speed reel-to-reel tapes. For the sheet music and methods--I literally tore out pages I wanted to keep, while dumping the detritus (so considered) into the trash. God what an idiot I was. I’ll have to wait another 20 years to find how much of an idiot I am right now.

In the 30 years since, the reel-to-reel machine and tape have both rotted away and I have done well in reclaiming antique LP’s. Kudos to the internet for that! But the old sheet music is more dicey. As mentioned, I got everything that Dave Baker published, as well as boatloads of other stuff. Once absorbed or “picked over” it was passed on to other musicians or dismembered and discarded. Some have come home but I find they are not so useful. Still, you can never tell when you’ll be ripe to digest an idea.

I sure think it would be great if some volumes now lost were floating about on the net. Thankfully the Vincent Bredice volumes on Guitar Improvisation have been re-published in a single volume by Mel Bay. Also true, for the two volumes comprising the Johnny Smith “Approach to Guitar”. Kudos for Bill Bay’s continuing loyalty and determination!

Unfortunately this is not the case for myriad publications by small companies, including Barney Kessel’s “The Guitar” and many others that didn’t start out at Mel Bay. I was going to mention a couple of other oddballs, but find both of them currently available as “new”: Don Sebesky’s “Contemporary Arranger” (though without the audio), and Russell Garcia’s “The Professional Arranger Composer”.

So I’m not complaining! If you peruse what is currently available for guitar on Amazon it is staggering; clearly 10 or 20 times the volume of info we had in the 70’s.

Friend, contributor and all around good guy, James Seaberry provided this document for his brethren. Eat hearty!

        Jazz Styles and Analysis - Jack Peterson (1979)

Teen-Beat Blues

Rmmgj participant Bill Williams contributed this to the dusty archives:

“I picked up this book in a Cork city music shop in the mid 60’s and it has travelled with me round the world since (hence the rather worn state).

“Most of these blues were featured in the repertoire of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The first four are credited to WC Handy. Barnyard Blues  (AKA  Livery Stable Blues ) by Nick LaRocca  is notable for the musicians imitating various farmyard animals. Wabash Blues was a million seller in the 20s,  Mournin’ Blues can be heard here and Satanic Blues here."

        Teen-Beat Blues (’64)

For any other budding archivists, let me know if there is some out-of-print gemstone (or gnarly curiousity!) that you’d like to share with others here.

Garoto - 15 Choros

Garoto was a nickname meaning “the kid”. His real name was Anibal Augusto Sardinha. As stated elsewhere, and frequently, I’m a big fan of Garoto. He maintains a curious place in Brazilian music history. He played guitar and electric guitar as well as bandolim (mandolin), banjo cavaquinho, tenor guitar, Hawaiian guitar, and likely many other instruments. He was a mentor and close friends with both Luiz Bonfa, and Laurindo Almeida. Almeida met Garoto when he was 13 and recuperating in a hospital after a civil war in Sao Paulo, where Garoto had come to perform for the patients. Garoto was also from Sao Paulo.

Here’s a great old postcard from Almeida to Garoto from 1935. He calls him “Sardine”. The translation is pretty bad, as I’m providing the google-translated link. Take note that “Boy” is the way the software has translated Garoto’s nickname.

He played guitar in some of the early movies of Carmen Miranda in the USA and appears on film in these scenes. Prior to this, and again afterward, he was a staff musician at major radio stations in Rio. He performed on many recordings by the Miranda sisters as well as hundreds of other singers and instrumentalists.

Because of the solos that Paulo Bellinati recorded in 1991, Garoto has come to be associated with nylon-string guitar and this solo work. Some of these pieces were culled from a reel-to-reel tape recordings commissioned by professor Ronoel Simoes in 1950, and recorded in his home in Brazil. These remained in his private collection for many decades afterward, I believe until the doctor’s death.

But I think it’s useful to note that, as Almeida states elsewhere, that Garoto started on banjo, switched to tenor guitar (tuned in fifths) at a time “before the nylon string era”. My point being that he was always a pick-wielder, which is explicitly not the way we think of Brazilian guitarists anymore.

In any case, the recording Bellinati produced and the folios of transcriptions that followed are priceless documents worthy of study by any guitarist from any medium. Bellinati’s research and reclamation is just stunning.:

        The Guitar Works of Garoto (Recordings)

        The Guitar Works of Garoto Vol. 1 (Transcriptions)

        The Guitar Works of Garoto Vol. 2 (Transcriptions)

Many of Garoto’s original solo recordings can now be heard on a CD of historic recordings. It should be generally available for another brief blip of time before someone realized their not making enough spare change on the project: Garoto Historical Recordings

In the late 40’s and 50’s there were ongoing debates over who was the most skilled bandolim player: Jacob do Bandolim or Garoto. Around 1951 a volume of solos, all of which are single-line pieces, was published by Fermata in Brazil. It was updated along the way, since Garoto’s years of birth and date are published on the front page in my copy. Fermata seems to have been most active in the 60’s. So I assume this volume actually came off the press then.

I bought it in Rio at Guitarra da Prata in downtown Rio in 1992, while plundering their dusty and forgotten shelves in the corner where sheet music goes to die. I don’t speak much Portuguese but distinctly overheard two clerks at the counter nearby discussing my “archeology”, and wondering what I could possibly be looking for in that junk heap. I came out with a half suitcase of treasure.

I have the impression that a book such as this was initially published for use by bandolim players, flautists, violinists and others inclined to choro. It’s good reading stuff for a guitarist and great choro lines.

        15 Choros de Garoto

The Phantom - The Brazilian Guitar

I call this the phantom because it seemed it was only in some small sheet music shops for a very brief period of time and then vanished. It has never been republished. In Brazilian music chat groups for years, prior to rmmgj actually, there were people desperately looking for this volume. It was transcribed and/or adapted from the composers own scores by Brian Hodel. He went on to write another book that has remained in print all these years, “The Brazilian Masters”. It does not include the same pieces.

I’ve never been sure why the original volume, so greatly sought, was never republished. I assumed it had to do with rights to the material. Perhaps, as an early venture by Hodel, there may have been errors that had proved embarrassing. This was all just guessing on my part.

I found this on line:

“The Brazilian Guitar, transcribed and edited by Brian Hodel (1983)

“1,000 copies, 9 x 12, saddle-stitched, cover by William McMillan. Co-published with the author, the book consists of brief biographies of noted modern Brazilian popular composers, along with transcriptions for classical guitar of some of their most well known pieces, arranged by Hodel (winner of the Henry Mancini prize for composition in 1994). The composers include Luis Bonfa , Paulinho Nogueira, Laurindo Almeida, Sebastao Tapajos, Baden Powell, and others. First and only edition.”

Since they will likely never republish this (and 29 years out of print is about as “never” as one can get), I’m glad to provide the volume. If a related party wants it yanked--it's yanked!

I don’t know where I found this on the net but it was over 10 years ago. What I found totally confounding was that it is clearly a copy of my own volume. It has my very personal handwriting on page 4 for the tune “Brazilliance” by Laurindo Almeida. I know my handwriting and that’s it. Ain’t that a bitch! I suppose Iloaned it to someone who made a PDF out of it, (without question this would have been in the mid-90’s--no later), and then someone released it into the digital world. Amazing.

        The Brazilian Guitar - Brian Hodel (1983)

 ---===---

Enthralled with Brazilian music, in 1980 I also did some transcriptions. 30 tunes in 30 days. I did it on over-sized manuscript (Schirmer #61 - 24 staves, 11” x 13.5”) and initially in pencil. As I worked my way through the month, and through Roemer’s “The Art of Music Copying”, I concluded with Osmiroid pens, India ink and a transparent ruler grafted to my left hand. It ended quite pretty! The first page included “O Grande Amor”, “Vivo Sonhando (Dreamer)" and the first half of “Doralice”. It’s notable because through it all I was using a slash across the 7 to indicate Major 7 chord, as I had learned it 12 years before from John Mehegan's books. The triangled 7th was a “regional style” from Boston as far as I was concerned. :-)

Some 4 years later in Dallas, Texas I met a sax player, Vicio Vincente, a Venezuelan. He was playing a great Latin/Brazilian set with some locals in a restaurant. I chatted with him during the break, and was eager to scope out his charts. He welcomed me to dig through the book. I quickly ran across my 30X30 tunes. I was shocked and asked, “Where did you get these?” He laughed and said, “I got them from a flautist from the Miami Symphony when I was down there last year. Aren’t they funny, they used crossed 7’s to mean Major 7th chords!” And remember--this was a long time before the internet was a glimmer in some geek's third eye.

You can never tell where your stuff will wind up.

Baden Powell Collection

This is a 870-page pdf file that provides a staggering number of transcriptions, 133, in both legit and tab notation, of Baden Powell’s solo work. I first encountered it in December of 2006 on the web when it was a lean 578-page document. At that time I seem to recall both sons, Philippe and Luis Marcel, saying they were delighted to find their father’s music would be living on beyond him and that the world at large had access to the raw material.

I find now, some six years later, that the website from which I first fetched it lives on in even more focused detail on the artifacts of Baden Powell’s life. It now includes a detailed discography as well as a large archive of interviews and articles about the bossa nova master, his life and music. And the material has has swollen by a full third.

That website is Brazil-On-Guitar in Germany. I can see no person’s name directly related to this immense project so can only assume he wants this labor to remain anonymous.

Each song is individually available at that website under the tab labeled “Tabs”. One can also download collections containing each tune in its own pdf file. The “complete” version is only in the proprietary format used for scoring (Power Tab). So I snatched the whole lot of pdf's, threw them into a single pdf together and added a cover.

Note that these are not to be confused with the exceptional folios, “Baden Powell Songbook”, produced by Tonos Darmstadt, and published in three volumes in 1976, an undated vol. 2 (~1977), and 2001. Those are seemingly not out of print, though, as Tonos seems to make a press-run about every 15 years or something. Perhaps they made a new run with the master passed away in 2000.

I have consistently bumped into copies at the GSP (Guitar Solo Publications) store in San Francisco. By the way, the crew at GSP are great folks, great products, great online service; great. I see that all three are still there and available. These were, of course, published with his own editorial input, one would assume.  I further assume residuals go to his estate. 

It sure would be swell if Mr. Brazil-on-guitar would turn his laser-beam focus to Sebastião Tapajos, another incredible bossa novista that seemed to have migrated to France/Germany as did Powell, and also published three folios through Tonos Darmstadt. Sadly.  Sadly none of those are available at GSP.

        Baden Powell Collection (2012)

84 Chorinhos Famosos

I’m not sure how many jazz guitarists know or care anything about Brazilian choro. Most have heard, at one point or other, of Heitor Villa-Lobos pieces that include the word “choro” and have some loose idea that is it is a form of sorts; a piece of music, generally sad, for performance on guitar.

Choro does indeed mean “cry” in Portuguese, likely borrowed from Portugal (who is crazy for fado and other heart-rending sad musics), but choro as a style of music doesn’t really have sadness as a specific component any more than any other style. There are some ballads, and plenty of uptempo tunes, but they entire lot of it is known as “choro”.

Wiki gives a good but somewhat limited indication of what it is. Their indication of “choro instruments” seems locked on what choro as become in its last 40 years of it’s existence. But it’s been around since the mid/late 1800’s. Their reference to compositional structure is a fine general idea, but then there are many tunes that violate that format. Somewhat similar to what “blues” or “ballad” means as a form in the USA: A general guideline.

Choro’s development was similar to ragtime in the US, though it pre-dates it. It started, very generally, among educated musicians, though most were not full-time musicians however often they performed at parties and events. The music rapidly became highly improvisational, if it didn’t actually start there. The approach to the music evolved with the skills of the musicians that practiced it. It started with European forms and materials, but absorbed local Brazilian stylistic mannerisms and can be said, as with ragtime, to have absorbed many African-Brazilian folk music elements.

These forms merged with mazurkas, polkas, waltzes and many regional styles and forms such as maxixe, tango, samba and plenty of others.

Anyway, I love this stuff and maybe you will too.

        84 Chorinhos Famosos