Guitar Player August 2024

While most of the discussions of Frank Zappa have to do with his satirical and off-color lyrics, the fact remains that he was one of the finest and most underappreciated guitarists around. This collection places the spotlight squarely on Zappa's mastery of the guitar. Recorded for the most part in 1979 and 1980 (with a few tracks dating as far back as 1977), Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar is simply a collection of guitar solos. Even though most of the tracks were just edited out of their original song context, they fare well as stand-alone pieces, as Zappa was an ever-inventive player. Take, for example, the three versions of "Shut Up." These tracks were simply the guitar solos from "Inca Roads," but thanks to Zappa's ability for "instant composition," each version has its own complete story to tell, without ever being redundant…

Silhouette describes itself as Melodic/Symphonic Rock. All songs are composed by the band-members themselves who are influenced by bands as Genesis, Marillion, Pink Floyd and IQ among others.
The genesis of the band was Jos Uffing responding to an ad from Brian de Graeve in 2001. Brian was looking for a drummer & singer for his band. By the time Jos called though, the band had already broken up. But during the phone call, they found that they had a shared taste related to music. So they kept in touch , working on their own songs & sharing them with each other from time to time. By 2004, they came to a point where they felt they were ready to get a band going to complete their songs…

Snowball was founded by four of the most distinguished European musicians. Drummer Curt Cress shortly before left Doldinger's Passport. Together with Dave King (bass, keyboards, Ex-Embryo), who amongst others played with Volker Kriegel, Donna Summer and Wolfgang Dauner he built the core of this new supergroup. Keyboarder Kristian Schultze, also from Passport, joined them. The quartet was complete with Roye Albrighton, guitar-player and singer for long years of the band Nektar.
The band played a funk oriented progressive jazz-rock similar to Passport, with a rockier edge. The first record Defroster was released in 1978…

Hard core ZZ Top and Texas Blues fans know who Rocky Hill is. Very few others do, however, and that's a shame.
Rocky Hill was the brother of ZZ Top bass player and vocalist Dusty Hill, and in fact played in a psychedelic Blues band with Dusty in the late 60's. That band, a trio called American Blues, also included a certain drummer by the name of Frank Beard. Right there you had two-thirds of the future ZZ Top ready to go.
After the band broke up (with three albums to their credit) Beard joined a band being put together by a guitar player/singer named Billy Gibbons. When their bass player left Beard suggested his American Blues bandmate Dusty Hill, and the rest is history…

Listen to the very first cut on Freefall and you'll understand the basic problem with the Alvin Lee Band: the track is a nice piece of mid-tempo rock, rather catchy, but is Alvin Lee in there anywhere? Repeated listenings reveal that he might be singing background vocals, and that guitar lead sounds like a slick studio player who listened to a few Ten Years After records one afternoon. From the sound of the whole track, the rest of the band had been listening to Foreigner. Not everything on this album is as anonymous as the first track, and some of it sounds pretty good. This band probably should have been called the Lee/Gould band, as former Rare Bird vocalist Steve Gould has at least as much to do with the sound of the band on those first few tracks.

Almost 50 years have passed since Flasket Brinner’s (The Flesh is Burning) double album "Flasket” (The Flesh) was released. It was their second and last album, but they existed as a live band for almost another ten years. During their existence they changed group members several times, but the front figure was always guitar player Bengt Dahlén.
On this album we find different musicians playing on several tracks. Some of the tracks even feature famous Swedish jazz musicians, such as Gunnar Bergsten and Bobo Stensson, whose contribution creates a unique blend of jazz and rock; Bo Hansson, already invited to participate at their debut album…

Quite possibly the best album to feature the talents of Chico Hamilton and Eric Dolphy - a set recorded at a time when Dolphy was an up-and-coming player on the west coast scene! Although Chico Hamilton had recorded with unusual reed players before, Dolphy brings a depth of soul and spirit to this album that's missing from a lot of Chico's earlier work at the time - a style that still holds onto some of the measured qualities of the Pacific Jazz work by the Hamilton group, yet which also opens up into some of the darker corners that Dolphy would explore more on his own recordings of the 60s. The group also features some great guitar by Dennis Budimir and cello by Nathan Gershman - but the real standout aspects of the set come from Dolphy's work on flute, alto, and bass clarinet.

Gary Burton hits a sweet electric funky sound here - a great groove that really makes the album stand out from most of his other work! The support Burton gets is a big reason for the greatness of the date - as he's working in a group that includes Eric Gale on guitar, Richard Tee on piano and organ, Chuck Rainey on bass, and Bernard Purdie on drums. The album's got a bit of trippiness to it - kind of in the style of some of Herbie Mann's funky production work for the Vortex label - and a few cuts have producer Joel Dorn working with Arif Mardin on the cuts, giving them a more expansive sound that pushes Burton's playing nicely. The vibes have a dark chromatic quality to them that sounds great next to the sweeter playing of the funky player - and the record's filled with nice numbers

Michael Schenker and Phil Mogg really started to find their groove as a songwriting team with their second album together (and fourth UFO release overall), Force It. In fact, the last remaining folk and space rock tendencies that had stolen much of Phenomenon's thunder are summarily abandoned here, as the group launches itself wholeheartedly toward the hard rock direction that would make them stars. The first step is taken by Schenker, of course, who confidently establishes the aggressive, biting guitar tone that would define all the releases of the band's glory years. "Let It Roll" and "Shoot Shoot" kick off the album in rousing fashion, and while holding them under a microscope might reveal them as rather disposable slabs of hard rock, they would remain concert favorites for the band nonetheless…