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Joscho on Rick Beato
billyshakes
NoVA✭✭✭ Park Avance - Dupont Nomade - Dupont DM-50E
Joscho and Sven played in Atlanta a few weeks ago. I guess he stopped by Rick Beato's studio and did an interview. The full video isn't posted yet but this Short showed up recently.
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By the way, when my brother sent me the short this morning, I typed "joscho stephan beato" in my google search bar to see if the video would come up. The AI summary said words to the effect of "Joscho Stephan Beato is the birth name of Rick Beato, a music theory educator and musician...." 🤣
I should have taken a screen capture then, but I was doing other things. I tried it again now and it didn't repeat, so a missed opportunity. But I have found that these AI overviews are ~50-60% accurate depending on subject matter.
Joscho is not my favorite player to listen to, but I really appreciate his chops and absolute precision and control of the instrument.
I wish people who know better were more specific about Django's hand, it's limitations and his ingenuity to put his injured fingers and thumb to use. When you say "he played with two fingers" then people who don't know better think he literally never used any fingers other than index and middle fingers. Which is not accurate. He had use of all of his fingers, only he did superhuman job working around his limitations. And in a way it does a disservice to Django saying he played with two fingers. Because, as mind blowing as it is to me to think about his solo lines played with two fingers, it's even more so when you try to wrap your head around him playing his solo guitar pieces. I learned and did a decent job playing I'll See You...solo with two fingers. Many others have done more and better. But when I learned the intro guitar to J'attendrai, I had a hard time picturing what kind of acrobatics he needed to do in order to play that. There are some regular bar chords and chords that don't favor 6/9 shape which we commonly attribute to his workaround because of the injury. We all know about guitar players who covered his solos with two fingers. Some rhythm accompaniment too. I don't know of anyone who extensively covered his solo guitar pieces with Django's left hand limitations in mind. Even his intro for Time On My Hands that I learned recently, it's a real head scratcher when you start thinking about how he could've done it. The only way I see it is a lot of double stops using his good fingers but even then it's like "how in the world...???"
How in the world indeed.
How the heck do play this with "two fingers"?
There was an article in Guitarist magazine a couple of years ago which had a whole feature on how Django's two-finger technique led to him inventing shell voicings (making the usual mistake of confusing Django with Freddie Green ...) - even though the picture of Django that accompanied the article showed him clearly playing a six string chord using all four fingers!
The best clue to his approach to the solo pieces is his rubato play on J'Attendrai in the Le Jazz Hot video, where he clearly alternates between two-finger runs and chords with all four fingers.
@lucky on one of the uploads of the J'attendrai film on YT there was a lively discussion over the comment along the lines how he played all that using only two fingers. I commented to say something like "you all just saw this film where you can clearly see that he could use his injured fingers including wrapping his thumb and you're still discussing that he played with only two fingers, that's kinda ironic". Nobody paid any attention to it and they all happily continued their discussion.
Yes it's frustrating, people see what they want to see I guess. Yeah, Django used his thumb as well so that's five fingers - and he could use his thumb on the fifth string too. As a rhythm player, he was much more versatile than most guitarists I know.
Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story!
Joscho Stephan is the best guitar player in the world hands down