Guitar Moderne Festival XXVII

Guitar Moderne began as a place to curate videos of live performances by modern guitarists. During Covid, with touring shut down, I posted many imaginary festivals comprised of shows on You Tube. Festivals are back, though not until the spring, and some of us are still wary of crowded clubs, so here is another virtual festival featuring legend Eivind Aarset, as well as legends in the making Julien Desprez, Liberty Ellman, Susan Alcorn, Ava Mendoza, and Mike Baggetta.

Quatuor IXI, Jan Bang, Eivind Aarset, Michele Rabbia—live at Chamber Remix Cologne

Julien Desprez—at Angelica Festival Internazionale di Musica 2021

Vijay Iyer, Liberty Ellman, Reggie Workman, Tyshawn Sorey—The Stone, NYC – Jan 22 2015

Morphic Resonance 8 Livestream (the first 50 minutes is guitarist Nick Robinson.)

Susan Alcorn and Ava Mendoza at the Cunneen—Hackett Arts Center

Ava Mendoza and Mike Baggetta duo—at First Street Green

Share

Oz Noy Honors Monk

One commenter on this video laments Oz Noy’s use of effects for this tune as self-indulgent.  What they apparently fail to understand is that by pushing the sounds into the future, Oz is honoring another pioneer. Thelonious Monk was often misunderstood during his lifetime by people who wanted to keep hearing the basic swing of an Oscar Peterson or an Earl Hines. Many performers of Monk tunes over the years miss the spirit of his quirky style and merely play standard bebop and blues licks over the changes (Bill Frisell being a notable exception). Oz’s work here displays a mastery of modern effects, as well as blazing chops.

Share

Yaron Deutsch Performance

It has been fascinating to watch the expansion of electric guitar into the “classical” realm over the last 30 or 40 years. I have been privileged to have had interesting and enlightening discussions with two guitarist/composers working in this field: Tim Brady and James Moore. Israel has been exporting excellent guitarists for a while now: Gilad Hekselman, Oz Noy to name but two. Add to the list Yaron Deutsch. Working in the classical/new music realm he turns in an astonishing performance here, demonstrating a wealth of extended techniques, developed in the improvised music realm, which are showing up more and more in composed works.

Share

Full Stian Westerhus BBC Concert

Though this video has been continuously available in segments on YouTube for years. It is now possible to watch the whole thing continuously. Thanks to Neuguitars for the heads up. Between Covid and Westerhus’ focus on singing through electronics without guitar, there has been precious little new live video. As a bonus I include some of that here.

Continue reading

Share

Video Issue Solved…Maybe.

It seems that, prior to 2015, I was able to embed YouTube videos with http in the embed code. At some point since then YouTube and or Word Press decided that unless the code was https the videos would no longer appear. I assume this has something to do with security, so fine. I just had to go back and change all the http code to htttps, and now the videos are back again.

If you have visited any of those early posts and wondered where the videos were that is what happened. Feel free to revisit them and check out the videos. If you discover any missing videos post 2015, please let me know. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about the videos that say “No longer available.” Those have been taken down by YouTube, the artist or the manufacturer.

Share