Bass Pattern

The title of Breaking Stretch is a concise representation of Brennan’s envelope-pushing ambitions. Breaking references her desire to push herself and her bandmates to their limits, to mine the transcendent results of virtuosic imaginations confronted by unexpected challenges. Stretch captures her music’s intense elasticity, its ability to stretch from the taut and minutely focused to the wide-angled and reaching. Those extremes are depicted in the album’s striking artwork, a mix of astronomical and volcanic images, placing the cosmic and the subterranean side by side – the differences between the opposing poles, as in Brennan’s work, at times nearly indistinguishable.

The second LP from guitarist Che Chen and percussionist Rick Brown is an absolute stunner; incorporating influences ranging from Arabic and Indian music to Mississippi blues, the sound is forcefully hypnotic as saxophones, trumpet, bass, and viola augment the core. Featuring a short piece, one of medium length and two longer numbers, the grooves are psych-inclined but never meandering. Fans of desert blues, Sun City Girls, Endless Boogie, and RL Burnside take note.

Create fingerstyle blues instrumentals, from Delta swamp to Piedmont bounce, and transform your guitar arrangements with new ideas and thrilling sounds! Al Petteway, one of our most musically inventive guitarists, teaches you six original tunes, each highlighting a different rhythmic and melodic feel and utilizing the unique qualities that DADGAD tuning offers. It's Only the Blues employs a steady dead thumb bass with lots of slinky licks - a very swampy sound based on a Hendrix idea.

The cello was a beneficiary of the remarkable flowering of high culture sponsored by both ecclesiastical and aristocratic patrons in early 18th-century Naples. In 1717, Rocco Greco (1650-1718) became the last appointed player of the viola da gamba in the Royal Chapel dedicated to the treasure of St Januarius, the patron saint of Naples. Both Greco and his colleague Gaetano Francone (c.1650-1717) produced new music for the cello which was suitable for performance within the liturgy of the chapel.

Alfred Schnittke's Second Concerto Grosso is a different creature than his First. While the 1977 Concerto Grosso No. 1 for 2 Violins, Strings and Keyboards is a lithe, vicious, often comical work, the Second, finished five years later, is a weightier affair. The soloists are now violin and cello; the Baroque band is now a full orchestra with electric guitar, drum kit, and brake drum; there are four large movements rather than six smaller ones; the entire work is imbued with an air of sincere tragedy, albeit with mud on its shoes. Schnittke dedicated the work to its premiere soloists, husband-and-wife duo Oleg Kagan (violin) and Natalia Gutman (cello); famed for their flawless ensemble, the couple inspired in Schnittke a musical air of companionship – a single soul in two instruments.