Les Paul Design

This Final Performance Tribute all began on Les Paul's 90th birthday when luminaries from the musical world gathered to celebrate at New York's historic Iridium Jazz Club. Les and friends 'jammed' every Monday for the next four years until the legend left us. Great moments from many of those cool sessions are presented in this tribute to the man who created a sonic boom with the solid-body electric guitar. It's all here…

Les Paul had such a staggeringly huge influence over the way American popular music sounds today that many tend to overlook his significant impact upon the jazz world. Before his attention was diverted toward recording multi-layered hits for the pop market, he made his name as a brilliant jazz guitarist whose exposure on coast-to-coast radio programs guaranteed a wide audience of susceptible young musicians.

Something of a companion piece to the 2005 Les Paul & Friends album American Made World Played, A Tribute to a Legend again finds contemporary rock musicians playing on tracks that, in most cases, also feature Paul himself. The guitarist was 93-years-old on the day the album was released, and it isn't clear how much he participated on the seven out of ten tracks on which he is credited. The term "tribute" does not suggest what the naïve potential consumer might suppose. As Slash (whose contribution, "Vocalese," does not feature Paul) puts it in his liner notes, "This is a record where instead of playing Les Paul's music & trying to imitate his inimitable style, it is a showcase of guitar players doing their own thing, but in tribute to his influence on our musicianship, techniques & use of effects."

2007 four CD Proper box featuring 108 tracks recorded by the famed duo. Les Paul pioneered electric guitar design and multi-track recording and along the way invented the synthesizer. He was also a very fine guitarist himself and with vocalist Mary Ford had considerable chart success with songs of varying styles, all included here. Les Paul's influence as a guitarist is acknowledged by musicians ranging from B.B. King, Jerry Garcia and Eric Clapton to James Burton, Frank Zappa, Keith Richards and Jeff Beck.

For musicians of today, Rameau is often associated with the study of music theory.а His Traitщ de l'harmonie (1722) was incredibly influential Ч and controversial Ч in its new conception of the triad as an invertible entity.а While his critics often cited his theoretical background as making him unfit for composition, his considerable success as a composer of keyboard music and, later, opera called this accusation into question.
Jonathan Rohr