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Here's one for the ages: Mark O'Connor, Tony Rice, Bela Fleck - "Freeborn Man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVl1ibykWZU
'nuff said...
Scot, thanks for the recommendation. I had heard of Tony Rice, but had not listened to his music. I'm really enjoying "River Suite for Two Guitars", superb playing on an interesting variety of tunes. Do you happen to know which channel, left or right, Tony's guitar is coming through? Cheers Phil
According to John Carlini's website, it's Tony Rice on the left and John Carlini on the right.
As for the Selmer, find me a really great guitarist who doesn't sound pretty much the same no matter the guitar. I actually played the Selmer used on "Tone Poems" a couple of days after it arrived in the USA and before it was sold to David Grisman. I was a total beginner at GJ (it was 1993) and so I can't really say what it sounded like. It was one of the guitars with a rosewood neck and was very heavy to the left, the neck always wanted to droop. But it was still an unforgettable moment...
TonyRees, thanks for the video. That’s a bunch of master musicians. Jerry Douglas has no peer on dobro. If you want to see something fun, check out Jerry and Tommy Emmanuel playing Purple Haze on YT. (I don’t know how to post a vid from YT). This thread might make bluegrassers out of a lot of GJ players 😄. I’m sure there’s some bit of cross-pollenation there already
I always felt there's a lot of crossover between Gypsy jazz and bluegrass. At least from the bluegrass side. A lot of those guys are Django fans and play tunes from Django repertoire.
I've always liked "Come Back To Old Santa Fe" on YouTube with Peter Rowan and Tony Rice and bass and mandolin with harmony. Not complex, just beautifully presented! This video especially.
Peter Rowan - Tony Rice - Old Santa Fe 4:22
I'm a bluegrasser who dabbles in Gypsy jazz, and I think that's common. I had been listening to Django for years before I started playing bluegrass, but it was in bluegrass when I first started attempting some of these tunes. Things like Lady Be Good and Sweet Georgia Brown are standards at bluegrass jams and particularly on flatpicked acoustic guitar. By the way, Tony was "the man" and my biggest guitar hero. I'm actually a little surprised he wasn't more into Django. He really listened to the masters of other instruments and in other musical styles, such as Jascha Heifetz or Coltrane. He was touring with Stephane Grappelli and David Grisman when I think there was a disagreement over the direction of the band - Tony wanted to continue pursuing original music and Grisman wanted to just support Grappelli and play standards. I wonder if that soured Tony on Gypsy jazz?
I think Tony was wise not to get involved with the Grappelli tour.
He wasn’t really a jazz guy by background, and he would certainly have taken a lot of criticism for just daring to sit in the Django chair...
...where’s the upside to that?
Edgar Degas: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.... To draw, you must close your eyes and sing."
Georges Braque: "In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that can’t be explained."
This track is Tony and Stephane. It's really good, but different than Django. Note that this is different than the version of Minor Swing on the first album, which featured Darol Anger on fiddle.
David Grisman - Minor Swing - YouTube
The Grisman/Grapelly tour was 40 years ago, and the music world was a much different place in those days. No one would have criticized Tony Rice for taking "Django's Chair" - hardly anyone knew anything about Django in 1980. Mark O'Connor took over the guitar duties on that tour and he received zero criticism. I saw that band at the Coconut Grove Arts festival in '79 or '80 and they really were great. My friends and I were expecting Tony Rice but we were all knocked out by Mark O'Connor who was just amazing and so young - I didn't know that he even played the guitar. It just seemed impossible that he could play so well. That whole band was something to hear, the kind of technical skill those guys had was something you didn't hear every day back then. Not everyone liked it but they could play.
The whole concept of mixing jazz with bluegrass wasn't seen all that favorably by a lot of people in the bluegrass world back then (maybe today too, IDK), though I remember hearing SGB and Limehouse Blues at festivals in the late 70s - Limehouse Blues was a popular banjo contest piece. I was camped next to a bluegrass banjo player at Galax around 1980 and remember trying to figure out the chords to Limehouse Blues while he played it and just giving it up. I couldn't do it.
Tony Rice was really kind of a country guy and everyone just assumed that he wasn't all that comfortable around Grapelly. He could play jazz because people wanted him to, but I think he always remained a real bluegrasser at heart.