Check out this very cool iOS app. Highly intuitive and fun.
Another one of the true greats has left us. His playing was highly innovative and soulful, making seemingly incompatible genres work perfectly together. He made rock and roll keyboard playing so much richer, and made a lasting mark on at least three instruments: The Vox Continental, the Rhodes Bass and the Fender Rhodes. By the way, the interview above is from a fantastic documentary about the Fender Rhodes, Down The Rhodes, featuring a very impressive line-up of keyboard giants, whose recordings, like Manzarek’s with the Doors, made the Rhodes the legendary instrument it is today.
Relistened to this track today, it’s from her very nice album “101″, that I’m proud to have worked on.
Did you ever wonder what the keyboard on the Beatles track “Because” looks like? I certainly did. It is such a particular sound, so haunting, that the song needed nothing more than this keyboard part and the not-that-bad vocal trio of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison. The extraordinary music instrument shop Antiquity Music in Los Angeles recently did this video about the instrument that George Martin played on the song, the rare and unusual Baldwin Solid Body Harpsichord.
My old friend Pat West, an extraordinary guitar player from London, recently put together a great team of English musicians to make an old school blues record. I think they all did a great job. The album is on iTunes here and on SoundCloud here. The Twitter account is here.
Here’s “Rockin’ Daddy” featuring Jon Allen on vocals, and some cool organ playing from Mike Gorman:
I got to play piano on one of the tracks, a cover of Albert King’s “Ain’t Nothin’ You Can Do”, featuring my old partner in crime Bruce “Mississippi” Johnson:
As a part of Daft Punk very well-crafted communication campaign for their upcoming album, here’s a short interview with one of the all time greats of Electronic Music. Time will show whether the new Daft Punk album can live up to the expectations and the hype, but in any case it’s always interesting to hear what old legends like Moroder have to say.
In case you want to go a little deeper, here’s a recent 40 minute interview as well:
Three weeks into the tour with Damien Saez. We had some really good shows already, the crowds have been very generous, and we’re starting to find a good blend of songs and a good order. In the end, the show is closer to classic Saez than originally intended, with more acoustic and more rock songs, and less of the groove based material of his latest album, “Miami”. It’s cool to try out new directions, but it’s important to respect the core of what Damien’s work is about. So in a show where I initially thought I’d be playing a lot of synths, I’ve ended up playing accordion half of the time. It’s a long tradition in the family, though, my grandmother plays accordion, so I am enjoying it. Tonight we play the old slaughterhouse of Lyon, La Halle Tony Garnier.
