The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #51

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    Another reason I do not buy or read Rolling Stone.

    Jimi Hendrix did not influence me ... never liked his music, I was at Monterey.. next. He was a flash in the pan in the history of guitar and guitarists.

    Eric Johnson , just as an example, plays Hendrix better than Hendrix and I'll wager Hendrix could not keep up with Eric Johnson.

    As to Burt Cocaine.. er Kurt Cobain.. another flash in the pan.. a fleeting novelty.. just like Hendrix. I disagree about Hendrix' impact, I think it overblown.

    Stand on a street corner and survey passers by who was the greatest guitarist of all time.. then ask them to name 10 guitarists..

    As was mentioned by someone who is in the /Publishing trade..
    " lists sell ".

    I am not disappointed so much as resigned to ignorance as demonstrated by the choice of Jimi Hendrix

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  3. #52

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    Lists like this are so dumb. The "greatest"? Everyone knows that Hendrix was an innovator especially in the use of distortion. Was he more of an influence than Django, Christian or Segovia? A "better" guitar player than Bream, Paco or Burrell?
    Rolling Stone will never graduate from the 60's.

  4. #53

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    Miles decided to add guitar to his electric groups because of Jimi. I'm sure John McLaughlin is forever grateful.
    Last edited by cosmic gumbo; 11-27-2011 at 06:40 PM.

  5. #54

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    Hendrix being first on that Rolling Stone list I can agree with. Hendrix was Waaayyyyy ahead of his time. You can listen to much of his music and it could still fit in with the rock music being made today. Now that's being waaayyy ahead of your time. You definitely cannot say that about most rock music from the sixties whether you like that other music or not.

    Also, interestingly enough, Hendrix' famous "meandering" rhythm style demonstrates a masterful use of chord extensions as well as chord substitutions. Some things we jazz players spend a lot of time working on as well. Granted it was in a rock / blues rock format but still a masterful demonstration of the same concepts used alot in great jazz playing.
    Last edited by Double 07; 11-27-2011 at 08:44 PM.

  6. #55

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    Happy Bday Jimi!!!



    say what you will about their list. what he plays on this cut (at roughly 6:00-7:00) is about as close as ANY guitarist (jazz, rock, or whatever) has gotten to playing like Coltrane on the guitar. Its fluid. Some of the Best Jazz EVER if you ask me! as usual, Miles knew what was up. all we can do is sit back and dream about what that would have sounded like.

    3 years worth of music and 40 years later people are still scratching their heads or (like me) crying. 1967-1970. Enough said. Thank you James! (November 27, 1942–September 18, 1970)
    Last edited by mattymel; 11-27-2011 at 08:57 PM.

  7. #56

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    y'all got your panties in a knot over this, mission accomplished rolling stone.

  8. #57

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    Quote Originally Posted by Buster Loaf
    y'all got your panties in a knot over this, mission accomplished rolling stone.
    I don't think Rolling Stone cares about a bunch of jazz musicians complaining about the list so long as the stereotypical rock fan is happy. Either way, it's pretty funny to see how easily some people get swept up in music elitism, whether it is about genres, sub-genres, guitarists, old vs new, etc...

  9. #58

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    Quote Originally Posted by mattymel
    Happy Bday Jimi!!!



    say what you will about their list. what he plays on this cut (at roughly 6:00-7:00) is about as close as ANY guitarist (jazz, rock, or whatever) has gotten to playing like Coltrane on the guitar. Its fluid. Some of the Best Jazz EVER if you ask me! as usual, Miles knew what was up. all we can do is sit back and dream about what that would have sounded like.

    3 years worth of music and 40 years later people are still scratching their heads or (like me) crying. 1967-1970. Enough said. Thank you James! (November 27, 1942–September 18, 1970)
    Thanks for posting that Mattymel, just great worth listening to again

  10. #59

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    Quote Originally Posted by mattymel
    Happy Bday Jimi!!!



    say what you will about their list. what he plays on this cut (at roughly 6:00-7:00) is about as close as ANY guitarist (jazz, rock, or whatever) has gotten to playing like Coltrane on the guitar. Its fluid. Some of the Best Jazz EVER if you ask me! as usual, Miles knew what was up. all we can do is sit back and dream about what that would have sounded like.

    3 years worth of music and 40 years later people are still scratching their heads or (like me) crying. 1967-1970. Enough said. Thank you James! (November 27, 1942–September 18, 1970)
    Yeah right, say, got any youtoobs of Jimmy improvising to Giant Steps?

  11. #60

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    Any of you guys into pizza? Like, different kinds of pizza? I had this pizza tonight that had jalapeno, grilled chicken, avocado, and bacon! So good, not greasy at all, no tomato sauce either. Classy pizza. Still have some leftovers, can't wait to be hungry enough again to tackle them.

  12. #61

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    A few years ago, Jazz Times had a cover article on Jimi: with the headline something like "Jimi Hendrix: Jazz Guitarist?"

    Short answer: No, but it made for good sales. Branford M. said, "Jimi was great , but the only changes he knew were 'the Times, which were a-changin'"

    Personally, as mentioned before, I got no beef with Jimi--but some of the others on that list leave me speechless.


    Ah yes, here we go, I think:

    Jazz Articles: Jimi Hendrix: Modern Jazz Axis ? By Bill Milkowski ? Jazz Articles

    Relevant quotes:

    "When I first started to play guitar—this was before Hendrix—there was a chord known as the “Hold It” chord, an E sharp 9. It was based on a break tune that came from an older generation, a Bill Doggett song from the ’50s. And then Hendrix started to play this chord and it became known as the Jimi Hendrix Chord. You can hear it on “Purple Haze.” So the “Hold It” chord became the Jimi Hendrix Chord in 1968. Now, that’s a big influence right there.

    I remember first hearing Hendrix’s music on the radio. It was on Murray the K’s show in New York. It was the tune “Fire.” I didn’t know anything about him. The first album had just come out and I heard this on the radio and was instantly knocked out. It was coming out of a little transistor radio but it completely blew me away, so I went out and bought Are You Experienced? the next day. I wasn’t a jazz guy yet; I was into Clapton and Jeff Beck. But Hendrix seemed to be on another level. I never heard anything that strong and I was just fascinated by it—the guitar playing and the beat and the whole thing. It seemed to me to be an extension of soul music and psychedelia combined with great blues guitar playing that related to B.B. and Albert King. I became a devotee and bought the next two albums—Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland—and I remember listening to those first three records all the time, trying to learn the licks and being totally into it.

    And then I went to see Hendrix with the Experience at Hunter College in early ’69. I took the train in from Connecticut and it was a really, really incredible show. The way he played was so phenomenal and so loose and so soulful that I actually gave up rock ’n’ roll guitar and decided to become a jazz musician because of him. I remember thinking, “I can’t do that. I’m just a little white boy from the suburbs. Forget it. It’s all over. This guy is so outgoing and incredible that I might as well give up on trying to be like that because my personality’s not that way. But maybe these jazz guys like Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery—if I practice hard enough, maybe I can get there.” Later on I was able to absorb some of that Hendrix influence and let it come through in my own playing but at the time I was far too intimidated to do that.

    I never thought of Hendrix as a jazz guitarist but I did think of him as an incredible blues player and an improviser in that tradition as well as someone who was improvising on a sonic level, experimenting with feedback and coming up with some incredible new sounds on his instrument. I didn’t see him as a guy playing rhythm changes, I saw him as a new branch of rhythm ’n’ blues—R&B and psychedelia combined. It was this magical trip that he was going on with letting the music expand. And we all followed, to some degree.

    ---John Scofield

    Other quotes:

    Branford Marsalis

    (Saxophonist-composer from jazz’s first family.)

    As a kid I remember hearing “Purple Haze” on the radio but I didn’t really think of it as anything really earth-shattering. But the Band of Gypsys—now that was earth-shattering! At the time I couldn’t think of why it spoke to me but it did, immediately. First of all, it’s live performance so it’s not a bunch of overdubs after overdub after overdub. And it was at that line where rock ’n’ roll could still be free, and that’s the thing that I dug the most. The shit was just funky the way Led Zeppelin was funky and the way The Beatles had a little groove to their shit, too. But those two groups never could get their bottom to have that funky-ass stank groove the way the Band of Gypsys did. Listening to Mitch Mitchell [with the Experience] it was clear that he was coming from a jazz background, particularly an Elvin Jones thing with all those triplets over everything. But listening to Buddy Miles just keep that pocket was really staggering shit for me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t dig the other shit like “If 6 Was 9” and “Manic Depression.” I dug it, believe me. But Band of Gypsys affected me in a much more powerful way. I would suspect that just by the energy on the stage that he really had fun with Billy Cox and Buddy Miles. Because, you know, if he had been playing with Buddy Miles from the beginning, songs like “Manic Depression” would not have worked. I don’t think Buddy Miles would know what a 12/8 feel was if it fell on him. But I think at the end of the day, Jimi was a groover, which is why songs like “Who Knows?” and “Machine Gun” are so killing. I mean, you gotta be deep in the pocket for that shit to work. Those were his roots, and he smokes on that record.

    Hendrix might have had an influence on individual musicians in jazz but he wasn’t a jazz musician himself. I mean, he had an influence on my jazz because everything that I listened to as a kid I think creeps in to the shit that I do now. When I hear Hendrix’s shit today it just reminds me of the blues on acid—hyper, hyper blues. He had all the elements of jazz because you know all the elements of blues are in jazz when it’s played right—spontaneity, creativity, improvisation, the blues itself, groove. He was definitely an improviser but he couldn’t play “How High the Moon.” And he didn’t need to. He always heard some other shit.

    I don’t know if Jimi would ever have become a jazz musician. In a lot of respects, jazz probably would’ve been too limiting for him. You know, too many rules and shit. He just wanted to go up there and do whatever the fuck he wanted to do—all the time. Jazz is such a different aesthetic. He would’ve had to go into a serious amount of woodshedding, away from the scene. There’s just so much other shit he would’ve had to come back to—almost like starting from scratch. And I don’t know if he would’ve been able or wanted to do that. Or that he should have. The thing I love about him was he wasn’t a jazz musician but he was a grade A-1 bona fide fucking musician. That couldn’t be disputed. I can understand why Miles, being the forward-thinking cat that he was, particularly in the pop sense of the word—that was very smart of Miles to align himself with a cat like Hendrix. Jimi had his hit with “Purple Haze” but for the most part he was a counterculture cat, the fringe dude that all of the other cats went to check out, including Miles.

    Randy Brecker

    (Trumpeter-composer-bandleader and former sideman for Horace Silver, Billy Cobham, Jaco Pastorius and Frank Zappa, he co-founded Dreams in 1969 and the Brecker Bros. band in 1974.)

    Do I consider Hendrix a jazz guitarist? Ahh—no! But he was the epitome and essence of rock ’n’ roll! Although he listened to jazz and was a great improviser, the parameters, vocabulary and sensibility were different and sometimes extremely divergent. Jazz is about finesse; Hendrix was as raw as it can get. Pitch, time and dynamics were not important in the Hendrix Experience—and quite frankly, remembering back, sometimes I had difficulty reconciling these items when I heard him, especially live. But the strong points of that group—raw energy, originality, balls, amazing tunes, conception and volume—were so overwhelming that the other points were literally blown away. I still get chills when I put on those records.

    Probably the first time I heard Jimi was when he was jamming at The Scene in ’67. I also heard him at Electric Lady before it was turned into a recording studio [for a brief time it was a big club]. My first reaction was to run and stuff pieces of a napkin in my ears. I mean, that shit was loud! But it was also completely unforgettable from the second he walked on stage. You have to remember we had never seen anyone even dress like he did. This was back when you had to wear a suit to play bebop but really didn’t want to.

    Jimi’s tunes and the words and his singing all were big influences on my own music. I loved his stream of consciousness lyrics and his singing because it was untrained and functioned as an organic part of the music. After I heard “Up From the Skies,” for instance, which was one of his most jazz-influenced songs, I wrote “Imagine My Surprise,” which became the title song of the second Dreams record. That was one of the few times in fact that I wrote something with only one influence and song in mind. His playing was an influence, too, for that matter. When I plugged into my effects [wah-wah pedals and delays] I always had him in mind along with my jazz influences.

    Had he lived, I think Jimi would have played and recorded under different settings, including some very jazz-influenced situations such as his collaboration with Gil Evans, which was on the drawing boards right at the time he died. I also think his playing would have continued to develop but within a rock format and not really radically change that much. The last thing I would hope for him to become would be anything but what he was—the greatest and most original rock guitarist ever.

  13. #62

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    Mike Stern

    (Guitarist-composer-bandleader apprenticed with Billy Cobham before joining Miles Davis’ band in 1980. Also played with Steps Ahead, Vital Information, the Brecker Bros.)

    I really dug tunes like “The Wind Cries Mary” from Are You Experienced?, which was the freshest-sounding album of its time, and “One Rainy Wish” from Axis: Bold as Love. Jimi’s playing on those tunes is so incredibly lyrical. It has that same singing quality that I dig in Jim Hall’s playing or in Wes Montgomery’s playing, but the thing about Hendrix was he had that sound, he would articulate that lyrical feeling with a fatter sound on his Strat than you could get with a regular hollow-bodied jazz guitar.

    Jimi was definitely a legato player, and whether he intended to or not, he started a movement among guitar players with his long sustaining, legato lines. He sounded more like a horn player than anyone before him, and he influenced everybody that followed him. I’m after that same hornlike quality in my own playing whether I’m playing in a straightahead bag or in a more rock vein. When I was playing with Miles he was always saying things to me like, “Play some Hendrix! Turn it up or turn it off!” Miles loved Hendrix. Jimi and Charlie Christian were his favorite cats as far as guitarists are concerned.

    Al Di Meola

    (Guitarist-composer-bandleader and member of Return to Forever in the mid-’70s.)

    One of my favorite Hendrix songs was a very pretty, very underrated tune he did on his first album called “May This Be Love.” He does this solo that sounds like his guitar is underwater, which was so totally foreign to me at the time. I mean, there I was, 13 years old in Bergenfield, New Jersey, learning everything from jazz to bossa nova to classical from my mentor and this guy comes out with underwater guitar sounds! It was so revolutionary at the time. Hendrix was such an innovator. He was just into experimenting with sounds and taking tunes out with long solos that took you on a little bit of an adventure. And this is what is gradually slipping away in the music industry today, not so much in jazz but especially in the music you hear on the radio. It’s so hip to be able to be as free and experimental as Hendix was, but today the pressure is on so much for anyone who’s into the business of selling records to make pop music in the A-B-A form. And I don’t think that pressure was on as heavily back then.

    As far as Hendrix the player, his soloing was definitely in the jazz tradition and a lot of members of the jazz community picked up on it. Not everyone, of course—there’s a lot of players from the old school who couldn’t stand to listen to Hendrix. But of my generation, most everyone will admit that Jimi was a leader.


    Vernon Reid

    (Guitarist, and one of the foremost exponents of the Hendrix legacy, was a member of Defunkt in the late ’70s, Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society and Living Colour in the ’80s. His current band is Masque.)

    For me, it was Band of Gypsys. I was in high school in the early ’70s. There was a kid in a couple of classes above me, a senior, who said, “You play guitar? You oughta listen to Hendrix.” I remember seeing Hendrix on the Dick Cavett show because back then if anyone black showed up on TV it was news—like “gather the family around.” I remember he was wearing all blue and I thought, “Wow, that’s so different.” But I was just a kid and my focus was elsewhere. I was more struck by the sight of him; I wasn’t really listening so intently to the music. But later on I started listening to Hendrix and it blew my mind.

    This was at the time when the Vietnam War had been going on so long that I was actually wondering was it going to last long enough for them to draft me. It just seemed like there was no way out of it—just this endless quagmire. So hearing Jimi’s “Machine Gun” [from Band of Gypsys] really made quite a statement at that time. It was like a movie about war without the visuals. It had everything—the lyrics, the humanism of it, the drama of it, the violence of it, the eeriness of it, the unpredictability of it. I can’t imagine what it was like to have been in the Fillmore East and have that happen in the second set. If you were there it had to have changed your life, if not forever at least for a little while.

    As far as electric lead-guitar soloing, Hendrix was one of the only cats to do that activity and have it extend beyond the notion of chops and scales or anything to where it literally melded itself into the fabric of society and the big questions of the day. And to my mind he did it twice. He did it with “Machine Gun” and he did it with “The Star Spangled Banner.” And in both instances, his playing, his improvising was woven into the fabric of the times. It was like Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Those were the kind of times that they were, and it seemed like only those times could have produced him.

    On a playing level, Jimi was coming from a blues aesthetic, but he was a modernist. He took on Hubert Sumlin and Albert King but he was also of his time, the ’60s —and all that meant. He was certainly a great improviser but when you listen to Hendrix’s solo there’s a certain palette harmonically that he works with. It’s basically the blues—a lot of dominant chords, major and minor, the occasional altered dominant chord like a 7th, D sharp 9, 11th chords. But it’s not like he’s dealing with the same palette as Wes Montgomery. He’s not dealing with bebop. At the same time, he’s not limited by anything. He just plays. You put him in any situation, I think, and he would play something profound. Because he’s not thinking about “This is wrong.” He’s not coming from “I’m wrong here and I need to fix it.” He just plays.

    Hendrix arrived at some special place in the mid-’60s. He obviously worked very hard and he took a genius leap. Because there are recordings of Hendrix with Curtis Knight and King Curtis and he sounds like a decent rhythm-guitar player. But he took the same fundamental leap that Charlie Parker took in his own right; that Ornette Coleman took. He took the great leap forward. And I think it’s fascinating when individuals do that because it seems like an individual is doing it but it’s like a whole network of things coming together to make that happen. There’s a whole community of voices in an individual coming together that are informing what ultimately results in him taking a leap. Leaving Seattle was taking a leap. I mean, we are a nation filled with Charlie Parkers and Jimi Hendrixes. The question is, Who is gonna take that leap into the great nowhere? And the great nowhere is [this]: no one approves of it. There was no agreement on Hendrix’s greatness when he first came out. Even when you read reviews it’s like “the guy’s playing too loud, who does he think he is, he’s a clown, he’s jumping around.” He obviously took some moves from T-Bone Walker’s playbook but he had a vision thing, too. He went forward, forward, forward. He’s daunting in that he really always poses a challenge, like Picasso: “OK, this is what I did. It’s there in your life. Now you got to find it.”

    Hendrix was a series of collisions and accidents and chances taken and leaps of faith. Plus, he had a certain kind of unassailable integrity that was always under assault, even by his fans, because everyone wanted him to be the Hendrix that they wanted him to be. So he was in constant turmoil with the management scene, with relationships, all of that. So if Hendrix hadn’t choked on his own vomit—well, he woulda had a life.

    I would love to commission artists to come up with alternate histories of Hendrix. Hendrix is turned over, he doesn’t die, what happens then? Does Hendrix join Emerson, Lake & Palmer? Does he hook up with Miles Davis? Does he join King Crimson? Does he break his band up, go to Jamaica and become a Rastafarian? Does he move to India or Morocco? Does he go into retirement? Does something even worse happen to him— “Foxy Lady” wine coolers or whatever? Does he get married and have a daughter who is a brilliant saxophonist who becomes the next Coltrane? Does he do the soundtrack to Five Easy Pieces. And what would happen to the music as we know it? Does Hendrix go completely underground or does he get together with Soft Machine or with Patrick Gleeson or Kraftwerk? It’s up for grabs. I would like to think the Hendrix in the early ’70s would’ve done something incredibly progressive for that time period. Like, in another world, maybe it would’ve been Jimi instead of Tommy Bolin playing on Billy Cobham’s Spectrum. Who knows? If Hendrix had lived, would he have hooked up with Marvin Gaye? Good god almighty!

  14. #63

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    Dave Holland

    (English bassist-composer-bandleader, moved to the United States in 1968 to play with Miles Davis.)

    I knew him very slightly. He played on a number of festivals that we were appearing on with Miles’ group and he was in New York at the same time that we all were. The opportunity I had to play with him was a call I got one afternoon to come down to his studio and just have a jam session with John McLaughlin and Buddy Miles. It was very loose and a lot of fun, and that was the extent of it. It’s interesting though—he had this really long cord and he would walk up to cats and give them a little riff to play and then he’d walk up to someone else and give them a little riff to play, and that’s exactly what Miles did, that same kind of intuitive orchestration.

    I think I first heard Hendrix on record when his first album came out in 1967. I just thought it was great because of the looseness, that the music was very improvisational; it wasn’t as regimented as a lot of the music that was being listened to in that period. Miles was interested in all of the music going on around him at the time. He liked Sly Stone’s band and Jimi’s a lot. And I heard rumors—I never spoke to Miles directly about it—but I heard rumors that there was some idea that there may be a collaboration. But it was never more than a rumor, as far as I know.

    Hendrix was in Woodstock a fair amount in the late ’60s and he had a musical project that he was doing with local musicians from this area—a more freewheeling kind of thing. His music was growing all the time and there was a sense that he was looking to really expand the horizons of what he was doing. He already had, but I think he still had more of a vision of a collective kind of thing. There was something about his playing that had very much to do with groups and collective playing, interactive playing, which of course is part of the jazz tradition. Well, it’s all coming from the same root, which is the blues. That’s where jazz shares common ground with rhythm ’n’ blues and funk and all these different strains that have developed out of the blues. I think that Hendrix was sort of playing off the older blues styles—very loose, the interaction with the voice and the guitar. He had some very strong roots in the Delta blues stuff, which is why he might’ve gotten on with jazz musicians. There’s a common ground there.

  15. #64

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    Quote Originally Posted by princeplanet
    Yeah right, say, got any youtoobs of Jimmy improvising to Giant Steps?
    nah...but i got about 5 versions of guys playing Giant Steps that are great players and still sound like crap over that tune. and i also have some Trane playing blues thats way cooler than a bunch of 1235s...

    name one guitarist that plays more complex and interesting rhythms than Jimi plays on that blues...just cuz it aint in the jazz section doesnt mean you can't learn some jazz from it, dude...are you experienced? or what?
    Last edited by mattymel; 11-28-2011 at 05:10 AM.

  16. #65
    Jake: as far as I'm concerned, pizza margherita is the best type of pizza you can eat. Damn, that's good.

  17. #66
    Nuff Said Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by JakeAcci
    Any of you guys into pizza? Like, different kinds of pizza?
    No, the greatest Pizza in the world is from a small shop in a back corner of Rome. I won't listen to any other Pizza.

    Nuff

  18. #67

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    By the way, if anyone is interested, there is STILL, to this day, some incredible unreleased Hendrix recordings out there--sessions he did in Woodstock, NY with the great Sam Rivers in the late 60s.

    In an interview, Mr. Rivers said that someone from Hendrix's estate must have copies of these recordings. Furthermore, he noted that he had no problem playing with Jimi--the lingua franca between both musicians was the blues.

  19. #68

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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
    Jake: as far as I'm concerned, pizza margherita is the best type of pizza you can eat. Damn, that's good.
    That's awesome, that you enjoy that pizza, and I enjoy mine. What a great place the world is!

  20. #69
    Yes!

    Wouldn't it be horrible if we all agreed on things and tried to force our opinions on other people?

  21. #70

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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
    Yes!

    Wouldn't it be horrible if we all agreed on things and tried to force our opinions on other people?
    Which is why it is okay to express the opinion that Hendirx wasn't much of a player and that musical opinions expressed in the Rolling Stone are stupid...Even if other people don't like to read/hear that...

  22. #71

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    Not much of a player?
    It is to laugh.

    Why not present a list of your "top 5" players?

  23. #72

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    Yo CJM..When you can play "Castles Made of Sand" nuance for nuance then you can rip on Jimi...Popstar?

  24. #73

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    Ah, the "put up or shut up" argument never works...



    I do think Hendrix is one of very few Rock players that I never get tired listening to. I just think what it had to be like to first hear Jimi, back when nobody else was making the sounds he did...

  25. #74

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    Someone made the comparison to Eric Johnson being a better Jimi player than Jimi. I think that this misses the point entirely. Technique wise and definitely versatility wise Johnson is definitely more well rounded. Probably theory wise too. But that misses the point. I would prefer to listen to Hendrix on the level of the beauty and depth of his playing. It sounds more real to me. More free and wild. The bends are more electrifying ad honest sounding. The rhtymic feel and phrasing more transenent and fascinating, in MY opinion.
    I still see Hendrix as gifted technically on a lot of levels, but admittedly, he is no shredder or going to play through Ginat steps or something. But it doesn't mean some of us can not believe his playing is better that guys that are more musical on different levels.

    But I see no point to get upset about it. On some levels good art is debatable, and on some levels I think it is more personal or intangible. Not everybody is going to be reached by the same stuff or share the same values. I think Hendrix had a tremendous amount of soul. Some may hear it as sloppy and prefer the soul of a laid back solo on Kind of Blue. Some may like both (like myself). Some may not like later Coltrane, some may say later Coltrane is the best. It is hard to declare people right or wrong in that kind of discussion. Sometimes one persons tastes will go in a direction anothers will not. But I still think it is fun to try to defend your views and do what you canto get others to hear what you hear. I think that the more music we can appreciate legitimately the better. To me the best measuring stick is if I think a player is "saying anything" I think Hendrix definitely was, and a lot more than most have or will at that. But I do not think it is even fair to compare it to what Wes or Jim Hall is saying. I would argue that they are all saying something important, and that is what makes them all great, even if you can't compare the worthiness of what it is that they were saying.
    Last edited by exarctly; 11-28-2011 at 04:03 PM.

  26. #75

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    A lot of people around here probably respect Pat Metheny. Here is a quote of him regarding players he liked when asked in a 1985 interview for Guitarist Magazine, Note there is room in his taste for Jim Hall and Hendrix. He puts Jim Hall as his number one, but he uses the word love for Jimi's playing after using the word like for most everyone else.

    John Scofield, Michael Gregory Jackson, Allan Holdsworth, Van Halen, Jim Hall, I’d put him number one, Stevie Rae Vaughn and there’s a young blues guitar player in Oregon who’s starting to make some waves and I’m sure he’ll become real big, named Robert Creighton, I really like Stevie Morse a lot, especially when he plays solo, which most people haven’t heard yet. We had him open up for us a bunch of gigs, just by himself. I like Larry Carlton a lot and I love Jimmy Hendrix. I like some stuff Henry Kaiser has done. Pat Martino, George Benson, I actually like Earl Klugh, although a lot of people put him down, but he’s got a real feel and nice sound. I do wish he’d try a little harder, but he’s got all the stuff there. I like Viv Campbell, who plays in Dio, with the two hands all the time but he uses like all five fingers or four on the left hand and five on this, he’s a Heavy Metal guy. Actually I’ve only heard one solo of his but it was really happening! I like McLaughlin, especially his work with Shakti, Leo Koitke.

    http://www.joness.com/gr300/metheny.htm
    Last edited by exarctly; 11-28-2011 at 04:02 PM.