"Now Let's Hear Some Rock And Roll"!!!

[TheGrandWazoo]

Eye patch!!! I bet if you show up to any gig wearing an eye patch, you are guaranteed to have your coolness factor multiplied by a factor of 10!

When I started my trio I decided to avoid jazz altogether. Most audiences 'say' they like jazz when there's probably only 1 in 50 who actually listen to it by themselves. My trio plays "Surf, Spy & Pulp" music from the 50's & 60's. The Ventures, The Shadows, Duane Eddy, Billy Strange, Dick Dale, etc... The focus is on melody and less on soloing. I find the I get to play great/memorable songs and melodies that audiences actually know and respond to while slipping in some bebop lines when I do solo. Win-win.

What till they see my new eye-patch! ;-)

[Larry Feldman]

The eyepatch is the best idea I've heard in this post! I need all the coolness i can get. This made me think of a sax buddy who has a glass eye. I've been trying to trying to get him to wear an eyepatch since people get weirded out on his glass eye, but he won't do it.

[jds1978]

There is a smokin' Western Swing guitar solo in Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock.'

[Larry Feldman]

Maybe if I was from New Jersey I could get away with this cornball routine:

[EightString]

The types of gigs I play are often eclectic.

I usually start the evenings with jazz standards, and if it's a quiet lounge or dinner type setting and the audience is locked in and digging the jazz stuff, I stick with that for the rest of the night.

But often what happens is people get a few drinks in them and want to get lively. Or Sometimes people just want more variety. So I have literally hundreds of songs across just about every genre ready to go.

So while I'm most often steering things in a jazz direction these days, sometimes little detours to Stevie Wonder or Thomas Dolby will let people get it out of their system.

I just checked and discovered I have 5 Judas Priest songs in my list.

[AlsoRan]

Ok folks, what would you have done with this? I'm doing a duo gig with a singer on a yacht. We were hired to do Great American Songbook/Sinatra. As we are into our last set, an obviously inebriated woman yells out "now let's hear some rock and roll!"...

I wonder what she meant by "Rock and Roll?" I immediately think of songs in the vein of Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bill Halley, and Little Richard.

[edh]

AR, you missed one...Jerry Lee Lewis.

[Al Br.]

Being a Jersey escapee I can relate. corny yes, but entertaining in the given light.

[Stevebol]

I would say, R&R? You asked for. I'd play this fast as hell;

I love the way Jimi will switch between all down-stroke and throw in a strum for a few seconds. Everyone has to bash it out. Full throttle all the way through.

[OldGuitarPlayer]

I play guitar and sing in a traditional blues trio. We do a mixture of uptempo swing blues, the odd slow blues, some early west side Chicago style blues and sometimes we play and old standard like "All Of Me". After performing a solid hour of our usual blues/jazz based material, invariably some drunk person (usually female) will yell out they want to hear "Hotel California"....

I'm thinking to myself "like wtf? have you even listened to anything we've played in the last hour?"...lol

[Larry Feldman]

Exactly!

[EightString]

Imagine their surprise if they yelled out, "Now let's hear some rock and roll!!!", expecting Chuck Berry but I played something like this instead...

[rsclosson]

All great suggestions for a combo. However, once time I was playing solo jazz chord melody at a restaurant and a patron who was obviously on a very strict alcohol diet kept shouting out "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird" and offered sage advice like, "You need to tighten up, dude! We came here to party!"

Thankfully the staff came to my rescue and after a bit of a scene, the matter settled down, but on solo guitar, I would have had a hard time playing his requests even if I had wanted to.

[Frethack]

Purist aside there is something really cool about hitting that last chord and while still resonating roll up the volume as amp starts to distort and guitar feeds back. Then jump into a crunchy powerchord laden jam ala Neil Young's Keep on Rockin in a Free World or Nugent's Stranglehold both performed often on hollow or semi-hollow rigs. A 12 bar would work too.

[snoskier63]

Regarding strings, don't sell flats short. They are commonly used on archtops for jazz, but also for blues and rock as well. I use flats on my X-500 and Aristocrat, and while I play mostly jazz they also sound great for low to medium gain blues and rock. Just look at Brian Setzer (various Gretsch archtops), Dave Gonzalez of The Paladins (Guild X-500), and Duke Robillard (Epiphone and others). They each play rock and blues, yet favor archtops. Archtops--they're not just for jazz anymore!