Tag Archives: Les Paul

Ford updates the blues tradition

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Acclaimed guitarist Robben Ford has an affinity with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band of the mid-1960s that featured the duo guitar lineup of Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield. I can relate to that.

robben-ford-live-1That was one of Ford’s earliest influences and he has kept that foundation of blues and blues-rock alive in his music, combining it with jazz sensibilities to form his own brand of fusion. Throughout his career, he’s played with many diverse, high-caliber musicians from Joni Mitchell to Miles Davis, and Ford’s varied skills have been consistently on display as a solo performer since the late 1980s.

At the Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk, Connecticut Sunday night he devoted a large portion of his approximately 80-minute set to his latest album Soul On Ten, released last week. All but three of the album’s 10 tracks were recorded live at The Independent in San Francisco. The rest were recorded live in the studio.

Ford, a multiple Grammy winner in the blues genre, is a virtuoso who has embraced recording his latest offering live with no overdubs because he and his band are fully capable of producing perfectly executed tracks in a single take that capture the spirit and feel of a live performance, something that is so often lacking in layered studio recordings. Continue reading Ford updates the blues tradition →

So long Les

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Les Paul was not only a virtuoso guitar player, he was also an innovator and inventor who brought electronics experimentation to the music scene that enabled many of the sound devices we now have in rock ‘n roll. Yet he wasn’t a rock player. He primarily played jazz.

Paul, who died from complications of pneumonia at 94 Thursday, developed some of the early amplifiers for guitar, overdubbing — in its early stages called sound-on-sound — various delay and phasing effects and tape looping copied by such companies as MXR and Line 6, among many others. And, of course, let’s not forget he created the original design for what became the Gibson Les Paul guitar, synonomous with rock ‘n roll and originally rejected by Gibson.

In the video below Paul duets with country legend Chet Atkins on Avalon, both showing off their considerable skill and technique.

 

In the next clip, Paul demonstrates the Les Pulverizer, his tape loop machine. Continue reading So long Les →