The Wood Brothers - "When I Was Young" (Live at WFUV)

                              ABOUT HE WOOD BROTHERS

 Chris Wood had a scrap of a song — seemed like a chorus — scribbled in a notebook. He played it for his older brother, Oliver, who’d had a verse lying around he didn’t know what to do with. The two pieces, composed months apart, one in urban Atlanta and the other deep in the Catskills, dovetailed musically and lyrically: the verse about a man regretting chasing unattainable women, the high-lonesome, harmony-driven refrain of “When I die, I wanna be sent back to try, try again.” “Neon Tombstone” wasn’t the first song that Chris, a founding member of jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood, and Oliver, formerly Tinsley Ellis’s guitarist, had written — since 2006, they’d released three studio albums of Americana as The Wood Brothers. But it was the first one they’d written like this. “This is how a song is supposed to come together,” Oliver remembers thinking. “There was some chance, some randomness, to it.” The experience marked a deeper level of collaboration for The Wood Brothers, a newfound fraternal synchronicity that’s captured on their latest album, ‘The Muse.’ Within the first few bars of opener “Wastin’ My Mind,” which could pass for a lost cut from “The Last Waltz,” it’s clear the brothers are operating on a different plane than when we last heard them, on 2011’s ‘Smoke Ring Halo.’ The components are similar: the dialed-in vocal harmonies, Oliver’s gritty acoustic guitar, Chris’s virtuosic upright bass, the warrior poet lyrics. But here there’s a glue — a yellowy carpenter’s glue, one imagines — holding it all together. The cohesion comes from the brothers having spent the last two years on the road with new full-time member Jano Rix, a drummer and ace-in-the-hole multi-instrumentalist, whereas they relied on session musician-friends to fill out previous albums. Jano’s additional harmonies give credence to the old trope that while two family members often harmonize preternaturally, it takes a third, non-related singer for the sound to really shine. And then there’s Jano’s work on his literally patented percussion instrument, the “shuitar,” a shitty acoustic guitar rigged up with tuna cans and other noisemakers, which, in his hands, becomes a veritable drum kit. Starting with debut ‘Ways Not To Lose,’ which NPR described as a collection of “gracious little songs [that] sound like they were born on a front porch during a beautiful sunset,” The Wood Brothers have made albums like you’re not supposed to anymore — recording mostly live, warts and all. But on ‘The Muse,’ they double down on the production values of a purer time. Whereas ‘Smoke Ring Halo’ was tracked with the musicians playing in separate rooms, here Chris, Oliver and Jano often circled around a tree of microphones, a couple feet apart from one another, and simply played the songs, with even the lead vocals being recorded on the spot. The arrangement is a producer’s nightmare — the different sounds bleed into the various mics, limiting mixing options and ruling out the possibility of fixing mistakes — but the band had two willing accomplices: legendary country musician Buddy Miller, who produced the album, and Nashville studio vet Mike Poole, who engineered. “I just love how Mike and Buddy really embraced that idea,” Oliver says. Miller, an award-winning producer, guitarist and solo artist, has performed and recorded with icons such as Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Oliver continues, “I hear little things that are out of tune or imperfect, and I love it. That’s what I like about old recordings – they just did it, and that’s what happened.” From early in their childhood in Boulder, CO., Chris and Oliver were steeped in American roots music. Their father, a molecular biologist, would perform classic songs at campfires and family gatherings, while their mother, a poet, instilled a passion for storytelling and turn of phrase. The brothers bonded over bluesmen like Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins, but their paths, musical and otherwise, would diverge. Oliver moved to Atlanta, where he played guitar in cover bands before earning a spot in Tinsley Ellis’s touring act. At Ellis’s behest, Oliver began to sing and then founded King Johnson, a hard-touring group that would release six albums of blues-inflected R&B, funk and country over the next 12 years. Chris, meanwhile, studied jazz bass at the New England Conservatory of Music, moved to New York City and, in the early ‘90s, formed Medeski Martin & Wood, which over the next two decades would become a cornerstone of contemporary jazz and abstract music. After pursuing separate musical careers for some 15 years, the brothers performed together at a show in North Carolina: Oliver sat in with MM&W following King Johnson’s opening set. “I realized we should be playing music together,” Chris recalls. Soon after, the pair recorded a batch of Oliver’s songs, channeling the shared musical heroes of their youth while seizing on their own individual strengths — Oliver’s classic songwriting, Chris’s forward-thinking musicianship. A demo landed them a record deal with Blue Note, who released ‘Ways Not To Lose’ in 2006. Follow-up ‘Loaded’ came in 2008; after covers EP ‘Up Above My Head’ the next year, the band moved to Zac Brown’s Southern Ground Artists for ‘Smoke Ring Halo’ and then 2012’s ‘Live, Volume One: Sky High’ and ‘Live, Volume Two: Nail and Tooth.’ On ‘The Muse,’ following the opening one-two of “Wastin’ My Mind” and “Neon Tombstone,” the album shuffles between bluesy, classic country and swampy funk, mining the brothers’ timeless influences (Robert Johnson, Willie Nelson, Charles Mingus) while sounding fresh enough to win over fans of today’s mainstream roots-music acts (The Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons). The title track shows Oliver’s songwriting at its most tender and autobiographical to date, as he sings of his “finest work yet” — his newborn child — in his endearingly offbeat voice, which The New York Times calls “gripping.” Chris takes the vocal lead on “Sweet Maria” and “Losin’,” and capably so, while on his standup bass, he’s often playful, even rascally, imbuing the songs with humor with his warm, unpredictable notes. Jano, when not banging on his shuitar, adds refreshing flourishes of piano and melodica. ‘The Muse’ marks another milestone for The Wood Brothers: it’s the first full-length they’ve recorded at Southern Ground Studios in Nashville. In the way that Manhattan becomes its own character in an old Woody Allen movie, the live room at Southern Ground plays a key role on the album, making its warm presence felt throughout. (There’s even a little hiss from the analog tape machine.) The choice of location was practical, given Nashville’s rich history and network of musicians, but also symbolic: The Wood Brothers are now officially a Nashville-based band, with Oliver having relocated in 2012, and Chris recently following. It’s the first time the brothers have lived in the same city since they left their parents’ nest; both are eager, along with Nashville local Jano, to plumb the sense of collaboration they tapped into during the fateful “Neon Tombstone” writing session. As Oliver says of ‘The Muse,’ “This is the first record that really feels like a band record. It’s taken years for us to really feel like we can collaborate, and I think this is the pinnacle of it so far.”

D'Angelo - "Chicken Grease" Zürich

George Benson with Marcus Miller

jazz musician; guitarist; singer

Personal Information

Born March 22, 1943, in Pittsburgh, PA; wife's name Johnnie; seven children, three deceased.

Career

Guitarist, vocalist, and composer. Played electric guitar in quartet of jazz musician Jack McDuff, 1962-65; worked as sideman and led own quartets as guitarist and vocalist, 1965-; signed recording contract with Columbia label, 1965; worked with producer Creed Taylor, first at A&M Records, then at CTI, 1968-74; signed with Warner Brothers label, 1976; released Breezin', one of the top-selling jazz albums of all time, 1976; moved to GRP label, 1995; released Standing Together, 1998.

Life's Work

George Benson is one of the few musicians who has successfully crossed the divide between jazz and black popular music, neither ignoring the commercial possibilities in jazz nor abandoning his artistry when he achieved commercial success in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His hit recordings featured his light yet expressive singing voice, and to the general public he is known as well for his vocal work as for his guitar skills. But Benson came out of the jazz world, where he had a loyal cadre of fans, and returned to jazz when his connections with that world threatened to become stretched too thin. He is one of the figures most responsible for the presence of sophisticated jazz musicianship in the world of black popular music generally.

Born on March 22, 1943 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Benson showed prodigious talent from an early age, winning a singing contest when he was only four years old and enjoying a short career as a child radio performer under the name of "Little Georgie Benson." He started playing the guitar when he was eight, but it was as a vocalist that he spent much of his vast musical energy as a teenager, organizing and performing with a succession of rhythm-and-blues and rock bands around Pittsburgh. He made recordings for RCA Victor's X Records subsidiary in the middle 1950s. But Benson's stepfather encouraged his instrumental efforts by constructing a guitar for him, and in his late teens he began to concentrate exclusively on guitar. Seeking out the music of modern jazz's golden age, he became more and more interested in jazz, and was particularly inspired by recordings of saxophonist Charlie Parker and guitarists Charlie Christian and Grant Green.

Discovered by John Hammond

In 1961 Benson jumped to the national stage when he joined the group backing jazz organist Jack McDuff. He played and recorded with McDuff for four years. Then he struck out on his own: he moved to New York City, then the capital of the jazz universe, and formed his own band. There Benson made two acquaintances who proved crucial in setting him on the path to jazz stardom: guitarist Wes Montgomery, whose soft tone and graceful octave playing provided Benson with his most important stylistic inspiration, and Columbia Records producer and executive John Hammond, whose unerring eye for talent brought such seminal musicians as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to the label. Impressed by Benson's growing list of sideman credits, which included work with such luminaries as Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard and later Miles Davis, Hammond signed Benson to Columbia in 1965.

Benson's first two Columbia albums were It's Uptown and Benson Burner. His 1960s LPs, two of which were produced by Hammond himself, were in the main bop-influenced vein of the jazz of the time, and they garnered the guitarist, who was still in his early twenties, plenty of positive attention in the jazz community. Searching for wider public recognition, Benson switched labels several times, landing first with Verve (1967), and then with A&M (1968) and CTI (1970-71). He came under the influence of jazz producer Creed Taylor, who had also worked with Montgomery, and who encouraged Benson's natural versatility, backing him with various ensembles and cutting vocal tracks with him that reawakened Benson's interest in singing.

Success with Pop Vocal Track

It was another label move that paved the way for Benson's breakthrough to mass success. Signing with Warner Brothers in late 1975, he released the album Breezin'; the following year. While much of the album reprised the light guitar-and-strings sound that was common in Benson's CTI work, he took two great and accessible steps forward. First, Benson included on the album afrankly pop-oriented vocal, the Leon Russell composition "This Masquerade." The song reached the Number One position on jazz and R&B charts and drove the album to the same position on the pop charts. Benson's second innovation on Breezin'; was the introduction of what would become his trademark: scat singing along with his guitar, doubling it at the interval of an octave.

The combination was irresistible, and by some accounts Breezin', which won three Grammy awards, became the best selling jazz album of all time. Benson's pop vocals were self-assured and pleasant; he was in front of the curve which would lead to the highly successful, jazz-inflected "Quiet Storm" formats in black radio of the 1980s. The scat singing seemed to connote a satisfying kind of oneness between Benson and his guitar. "When I pick up the guitar, it's an extension of what I am," Benson told Guitar Player magazine. A series of commercially successful albums followed, most of which emphasized Benson's singing. All six of Benson's Warner Brothers albums of the late 1970s and early 1980s were certified gold (sales of 500,000 copies), and four of them went platinum (sales of 1,000,000 copies). Benson credited his success in part to his conversion to the faith of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Like other jazz players who have followed commercially oriented paths, Benson has taken criticism from jazz purists who felt that he had abandoned his early artistry. Writing about 1978's In Your Eyes, for example, Richard S. Ginell observed in the All-Music Guide to Jazz that "[f]or jazz fans, Benson's albums at this point become a search for buried treasure, for his guitar time is extremely limited." Benson apparently took the criticism to heart, for in 1989 he made a full-blast return to jazz, recording Tenderly, an album of standards, with the legendary jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, and touring with Tyner's trio that year. In 1990 he recorded the album Big Boss Band with Count Basie's orchestra.

Moved Between Jazz and Pop

The music he made when he returned to jazz showcased part of what was best about Benson's music: his versatility. He was equally at home with small ensembles, with a big band, with a string section, with hard bop, with Latin-inflected selections, with popular stylings. Through the 1990s Benson, his popularity assured, appeared in a wide variety of concert situations, and continued to manage well the balance he had achieved between the worlds of jazz and pop. He moved to the jazz-oriented GRP label in 1996, releasing the album That's Right, a quiet-storm-styled work, and following it up 1998's Standing Together in the same smooth-jazz vein.

For all his success, Benson's life has been shadowed by personal tragedy. He has lost three of his seven sons, one to kidney failure, one to crib death, and one to gunshot injuries stemming from a bar fight. His losses led to an unusual commission in 1998: he was asked by father Mohammed Al Fayed to write s song in commemoration of Dodi Al Fayed, who died along with his friend Princess Diana of England in a 1997 automobile crash in Paris. "During the writing, I asked my wife to come listen to what I had written," Benson was quoted as saying in Jet. "But when I got to certain parts, it became too difficult. My lips were trembling. I was thinking about my own losses and couldn't get past it. It stopped me cold."

Awards

Many Grammy awards, including Record of the Year 1977; Best Instrumental Performance, 1977; Best R&B Male Vocal Performance, 1980; Best Jazz Vocal Performance, 1980; and Best Pop Instrumental, 1983. Platinum and gold record certifications for numerous albums.

Works

Selected discography

• George Benson/Jack McDuff, Prestige, 1965.
• It's Uptown, Columbia, 1965.
• Benson Burner, Columbia, 1966.
• The George Benson Cookbook, Columbia, 1966.
• Giblet Gravy, Verve, 1967.
• The Shape of Things to Come, A&M, 1968.
• The Other Side of Abbey Road, A&M, 1969.
• Beyond the Blue Horizon, CTI, 1971.
• White Rabbit, CTI, 1972.
• Bad Benson, CTI, 1974.
• Breezin', Warner Bros., 1976.
• In Flight, Warner Bros., 1977.
• Weekend in L.A., Warner Bros., 1978.
• Livin' Inside Your Love, Warner Bros., 1979.
• Give Me the Night, Warner Bros., 1980.
• In Your Eyes, Warner Bros., 1983.
• 20-20, Warner Bros., 1984.
• Twice the Love, Warner Bros., 1988.
• Tenderly, Warner Bros., 1989.
• Big Boss Band (with the Count Basie Orchestra), Warner Bros., 1990.
• Love Remembers, Warner Bros., 1993.
• That's Right, GRP, 1996.
• Standing Together, GRP, 1998.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Musicians, volume 9, Gale, 1993.
• Erlewine, Michael, et. al, The All Music Guide to Jazz, Miller Freeman, 1998.
• Kernfeld, Barry, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, St. Martin's, 1995.
• Romanowski, Patricia, and Holly George-Warren, The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, Fireside, 1995.

Periodicals

• Down Beat, October 1991.
• Guitar Player, June 1999, p. 135.
• Jet, September 7, 1998, p. 55.

— James M. Manheim

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/george-benson#ixzz2cLHXmtnp

Richard Bona live part 4 - Dina Lam

Victor Wooten Super Solo

Carol Kaye on Choosing the Bass

Carol Kaye was born in Everett, Washington to musician parents, Clyde and Dot Smith, both professionals. She has played and taught guitar professionally since 1949, played bebop jazz guitar in dozens of nightclubs around Los Angeles with top groups (also in Bob Neal's jazz group with Jack Sheldon backing Lenny Bruce, with Teddy Edwards, Billy Higgins etc.), accidentally got into studio work late 1957 with the Sam Cooke recordings and other big recordings on guitar for the 1st 5 years of studio work in Hollywood.

In 1963 when a Fender bassist didn't show up for a record date at Capitol Records, she picked up the Fender bass (as it was called then) and augmented her busy schedule playing bass and grew quickly to be the no. 1 call with record companies, movie & TV film people, commericals (ads), and industrial films. She enjoyed working under the direction of Michel LeGrand, Quincy Jones, Elmer Bernstein, Lalo Schifrin, David Rose, David Grusin, Ernie Freeman, Hugo Montenegro, Leonard Rosenman, John Williams, Alfred & Lionel Newman, etc. as well as the numerous hits she recorded for hundreds of recording artists.

Beginning in 1969, she wrote her first of many bass tutoring books, "How To Play The Electric Bass" effectively changing the name of Fender Bass to Electric Bass and began teaching 100s of Electric Bass students, many of them now famous themselves.

Her tutors are endorsed by such notables as Professor Joel Leach, 10-year winner of the Pacific Jazz Festival Awards with his famous Cal-State Northridge Jazz Bands, and Plas Johnson, jazz/blues studio sax legend ("Pink Panther"). She stepped out to perform live with the Hampton Hawes Jazz Trio in the mid 70s, has given many seminars all over the USA, and is a leader in Electric Bass education.