Happy New Year!

Here are the first of the banjo diagrams. The banjo is ordinarily tuned to an open g chord (gDGBD).

This tuning makes the related modes of G major fall very naturally on the open strings, and the modes of D are also pretty easy, as are those of C major and F major. Depending on what tonality the song is in, the short 5th string can be tuned to anything that sounds good.

Tom Waits, Marc Ribot, and Danny Barnes

Well, it has been a while since I posted anything, so here's an update:

I've been playing gigs again on bass since last spring, playing country alternative folk rock or some such combination, some very different music from what I had always played( which was blues professionally, punk and acid rock on the side). All the music I had ever played: garage rock, blues, whatever; we always had a drummer. Lately all my gigs are coffee houses and small bars; duos, trios and quartets with no drummer, but with guitar, fiddle and/or mandolin.

Since last fall  I have been listening to a lot of Tom Waits music. A long time ago I had mistakenly dismissed him as some kind of novelty act, not realizing that he was a variety act. He plays a very broad selection of music, and I became interested in how he creates a musical environment where instruments such as banjo, accordion, or clarinet or really any instrument could find a place in the mix.

The Mothers could do that, and Captain Beefheart could as well; there is a great deal to be said for the dynamic control that makes it possible. It opens up a subtler range of expression.  Researching Tom Waits led me to discover a great guitarist, Marc Ribot. The first time I heard him with John Zorn, I thought that I hadn't heard anything that good since Zappa and Garcia. Since then I have heard more from him that confirms my initial impression, which is that he could be the best living guitar player (that I know of). His work with his own projects, Los Cubanos and Ceramic Dog have some of the most expressive guitar ever recorded, and his recent solo album, Silent Movies is some of the most beautiful classical sounding guitar I have ever heard.

There is a musical fearlessness in Tom Waits and Mark Ribot that goes beyond the ordinary conventions of  music. They show a spirit that in years past had been exemplified by Theolonius Monk, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.  They play like they have nothing to lose. At the same time they can play the sweetest most openly emotional kind of songs and keep them real.

Along with jazz, there is a lot of old time country in Tom Waits music, and in researching this, I found a lot of great old time country banjo players. Players like Ralph Stanley and Clarence Ashley often really didn't have anything to lose, even Earl Scruggs and many other successful players back then were sailing pretty close to the wind as it is accounted today; lesser known or unknown banjo players from that time were preserved only in field recordings on reel to reel tape (which can accessed at the Smithsonian website).

 The banjo has a great many virtues, and among them is that it can be played in a greatly diverse number of ways. I had imagined that I had a broad sort of general concept of what that might mean: you could conceivably play anything on banjo, jazz, rock, classical, funk. I had been playing banjo for a little over a year by this fall; in fact I hadn't played much guitar since I got the banjo up and running.   The old time sound  lent a mysterious air to the mix, a sound that suggested a lot of possibilities.

So while looking for more banjo music, I found out about Danny Barnes. This is a guy who ties a lot of the most diverse musical elements together with the banjo. He is able to not only bridge the gap between Zappa and Garcia (having a great measure of what I like in both their playing), but to take the fearless improvisation of the way out jazz, the freaks and the punks and tie it in with the deep traditional mountain music.

In addition to having incredible chops on the banjo, and being a terrific singer and songwriter ( I keep finding new recordings of his, each one better than the last; which has me thinking I don't yet know the half of it ), Danny Barnes has a very tasteful and new approach to recording and integrating the banjo with analog and digital processing which is at the same time old school and cutting edge. He has a great take on the use of the old technology like cassette tape and his writing on the subjects of recording and sound (and all the other stuff on his blog ), is really profound. You can hear the freshness of his ideas by getting a cassette from him. "Poison", the demo version of his recent release "Rocket" ("Angel" is the acoustic version), is fully loaded with sound, very impressive to anyone who hasn't thought much about cassettes lately. The bass is so dense, I thought I was going to wreck my speakers, made MP3 and WAV files sound anemic by comparison. Reminds me of the mix tapes my brother used to make me years ago.

So it is with this inspiration that I am going to go ahead and post up (over the winter) all my diagrams for banjo and some new ones I am going to make up for mandolin and fiddle. Stay tuned.