I wanted to give a short write-up on my 1964 Gibson 175.

As some of you know, I've had close to 12 175s as well as a couple 165s.

I'd had them from almost every era, 1964, 1968, 1971, 1974, 1989(4), 2005, 2012

As time went on, gibson made the build heavier and heavier in an attempt to save money on warranty repairs. They also briefly flirted with 3pc mahogany and 3pc maple necks to avoid warpage. Tops also got thicker and glues were changed. Originally hide and then PVA. I have heard that the modern 175s used epoxy for the plates but I'm not sure.

In 2012, gibson was "caught" using laminated fingerboards so it's possible the 175 from that era also fell victim.

I haven't played a real '57 and only briefly played a '57 reissue so I can't tell you much about them.

This '64 is remarkable in that there is almost no top sinkage. By contrast, when you get up to the '80s 175s, they almost all have significant top sinkage. One of the first things I do when I look at a 175 is look at how many threads are visible above the base. On the late '80s models, you often see 1/4" to 3/8" of threads visible. On my 64, there is less than 1/8. Of course this can vary based on the hight of the base/bridge itself. I'm talking the standard base and bridge, including tuneamatic.

IMO, the '88/'89 guitars were the last era that had a light enough build that you actually got some acoustic resonance when you played electrically. Sadly, the 88/89 guitars also suffer from extreme top sinkage. I've heard that Gibson flirted with kerfed bracing but I cannot confirm which eras had this.

My 64 has a couple screw holes in the top which apparently were from a bigsby. It also has replaced pickups (patent # pickups). Tuners, tailpiece are also replaced. It weighs slightly more than 6lb compared to the 7.5lb of the 2012 I recently sold.

Earlier ones have a much more resonant vibe to them than the modern ones. Each decade generally brought heavier builds and had different characteristics, progressively worse build quality/younger woods and subsceptibility to top sinkage, warping, etc.

Will write more later and accompany with a sound demo.

Preface, I have taught jazz theory, improvisation and jazz guitar at the university level. I'm the author of the Sheets of Sound for Guitar series books. I'm well versed in traditional and jazz theory.
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Do you realize that theory, in particular -- western theory, is an after-the-fact analysis of composed music? We tend to think of theory as rules and formulas when it's simply a common language used to describe what someone else has done.

The common western theory taught in universities is based on the Baroque period of music (1600–1750).

And then, when jazz came along, we tried to analyze it in terms of Baroque rules and principles. Along came Bird, Trane, Herbie, Chick and up and up.

AND WE ARE STILL USING BAROQUE terminology to describe jazz. Of course, Barris Harris, Hal Galper, Dave Liebman updated these principles and helped usher in a period of what we now refer to as "Jazz Theory".

Of course, we are still taking after-the-fact analysis and attempting to generate rules and regulations about what is valid based on looking at things backwards.

Reality check -- You don't play by the rules. YOU MAKE THE RUlES. The rules will bend to follow what you played. If it sounds good, it *IS* good.

With all that being said, can you play a b9 against a Maj7 chord? Answer, YES OF COURSE YOU CAN. Try taking a tune like "You stepped out of a dream" and for ever tonic, Try using an altered dominant tonality. Does it work? Yes, does it fit the rule books? Who cares!!!

Let's stop trying to use western theory (baroque or otherwise) to govern what we can or cannot do in jazz.

Rules are like labels, jazz is not Mayonnaise.

I'll post some more articles like this in the future, perhaps taking these concepts forther.

For years I wanted to put out an album but with such fabulous guitarists out there such as Dan Wilson, Cecil Alexander, Mike Moreno, Jonathan Kreisberg, Adam Rogers, etc., I would often ask myself what the point was. I didn't want to be one of those guys who printed 200 cds and put 275 in the attic after giving them to friends and relatives.

And my career has slowed down and I'm not gigging like I used to so i doubted I'd be successful setting up a merch table at the few gigs I do these days.

However, I had done a steady gig for 8 months playing a lot of my original songs and I thought it would be a shame if -- after I'm gone -- my songs were relegated to a book on someone's shelf that would get tossed out during a move.

And I wanted to dedicate an album to my muse -- my wife -- Sandra Lester. So I decided to write lyrics expressing my love for her and to try to get a band together to try to record my music. My tunes are very difficult and I had a difficult time finding a singer who could sing my melodies and then I happened to hear this singer from Armenia -- Srbuhi Hovhannisyan -- who had incredible range, musicianship and the voice of an angel. I approached her and asked her if she'd be interested in remotely collaborating on music. I didn't have any lyrics at the time and she offered to help. However, I've written love poetry to Sandra for years and I felt like I could take my words and transform them into lyrics.

EXTREMELY NAIVE!

It was a lot harder than that I thought it would be. But one tune at a time, I wrote lyrics, recorded a rough draft of the song using Reaper, with guitar melody, rhythm, ez drummer and myself playing bass.

I would then send her the recording along with sheet music and she'd record the melody and send it back as a .wav file which I'd incorporate into my project, eventually adding real drums and bass. Inspired by Roy Hargrove's Moment to Moment (roy hargrove with strings), i decided to write some string arrangements for the first couple of tunes. I tried several times to hire a real string arranger but found that many didn't have the harmonic knowledge to navigate the chord changes of my music, so I learned on the job. I got better as the project progressed. At one point, I spent a couple hundred dollars (down payment) on a string arrangement for one of my ballads and it was a diaster because the arranger didn't understand slash chords and advanced harmony. So I ended up using my own arrangement.

I bought a bunch of plugins from orchestral tools and spitfire and used those for the strings. That turned out to be its own black hole because the spitfire strings had a HUGE lag time, sometimes as much as 250ms and they were inconsistent, i.e. I couldn't just apply single negative offset to the track. They were off by varying amounts depending on the register of the instrument. So I mostly used orchestral tools strings, some of their soul choral voices and a little bit of garritan strings.

We did not record this live in a studio. It was a challenge to get a live feel to it and so when we would track the bass parts, the bassist would react to my solo as if we were playing in the room. I would then send the tracks to the drummer and he'd do the same thing. Sometimes, the drums would track before the bassist.

I realize that this is not the correct way to record a jazz album but I wasn't trying to record a hard-core jazz album as i mentioned earlier. I consider this kind of a pop album coming from a jazz musician's perspective. I wanted to record my originals and highlight the song-writing, arranging and make something that was listenable to more than just a hardcore jazz audience while -- at the same time -- reflecting the love and respect for jazz that I have put some much of time time and life into over the past 50+ years as a jazz guitarist.

It's also been a bit of a learning experience having the songs mixed because the produce has a different vision of vocal sound and guitar sound than I do and we've gone round and round about this. Sadly, my knowledge and experience mixing drums is very limited, otherwise I'd have done the whole mix myself.

[UPDATE] Producer is out! 

https://jackzucker.com/blogs/thoughts-of-the-day-1-22-2024/posts/7578703/album-update-producer-quit-in-the-middle-of-mixing

I used 4 guitars on the project. A Holst Jim Hall guitar for most of the tracks, a Gibson 175 for a couple tracks, Ibanez PM120 for one solo and a Heritage eagle for some fills. All the guitars and bass parts were recorded with a Fractal FM3.

Managing the process has been an incredible trip. I've probably spent 8+ hours a day for 3 months working on this. Additionally, coming up with a design for the album cover has been challenging. I'm a photographer and consider myself pretty good at design but I've rarely done anything like making a cover and I'm so close to the project that it has been difficult. I hired a couple people to do cover designs but hated them. It seems that most people doing covers only know how to do modern, rock and hiphop type covers and nothing seemed appropriate for my audience. I struggled with whether to put myself on the cover because, well -- who wants to see an old guy on the cover of an album -- but, at the same time, I thought I should leverage the 15,000 followers I have on my youtube channel. I finally have a design that I like on the album. I'm going to use a painting that Jeff Matz did of me.

I'm finally done with the recording and engineering side and just dealing with getting everything mixed and uploaded to Distrokid. When the album's finished, I'll put it up on bandcamp.

There's a discussion on one of the jazz guitar forums using E natural on an Fm7 chord in cantalope island.

I had posted this clip.

At the beginning of my solo I play C F G Ab G E and sustain the E natural.

A guitarist on this forum posted that the E natural was a sour note.

I posted that it we considered melodic minor to be a sour note we'd have to go all the way back to 1933 harmony.

He replied, "Straight minor or m6 is one thing; that's an Fm7 in Cantaloupe."...

I replied that martino and pass and others have been using this sound over min7 chords for over 80 years. But it points out one of the shortcomings of online forums. Somewhere along the line, this guitarist was told that you can only play over the exact chord in the rhythm section and that anything else is wrong. 

And he's not the only jazz forum member who posts things like that. I've heard from dozens of folks in the last couple months saying you can't superimpose chords that aren't being played by the rhythm section.

And one poster said on the same forum, (talking about my clip) 

“If he leaned on the maj. 7th over an m7 chord for a few beats as he did over the vamp, don't think many would say it worked.”

Just curious who's teaching these methodologies?

And why do people who are student level players have such strong opinions that they feel the need to pontificate about what is right or wrong about someone's solo?

And why do people feel like it's ok to make negative comments about someone else's playing in a public forum?

This is one reason that I do not allow criticism or negative comments in my forum, https://www.facebook.com/groups/modernjazzguitar .

Too many times, i've seen student level players put down others - when it's actually the student who needs to do more work…

I wanted to write a little bit about mental health issues among artists/musicians. As someone who's been honest and up front about my own mental health issues, I just wanted to get some things off my chest and start a dialog.

During a recent struggle with mental health and just prior to my spinal surgery in May 2023, I was prescribed a number of anti-depressants and sadly, most had really bad side effects - not the least of which was extreme insomnia. So I eventually ditched them because I wanted to go into the surgery - well rested. 

People often say that artists and musicians need to have thick skin. I'm sorry but WHAT??? Artists are, “who they are”, because of their sensitivities, their heart, their expression. So we're supposed to just turn that off autoMAGICALLY when someone says horrible things about our art, our playing, our personal life?

Once, on a well known guitar forum, someone started a hate-thread about me. People jumped in to add fuel to the fire saying stuff like,

• he thinks he's so great
• you can tell he's an @sshole by the look on his face in his videos
• he's not really a jazz player
• he just plays fusion, not jazz
• he just plays a lot of notes
• people who compliment him are just being nice
• he's an {insert derogatory comment}
• he's ruining his kid's career by posting videos of his guitar playing

Amazingly, this went on for a week and it was 10+ pages long. There were some folks who jumped in and defended me… But many friends and supporters stayed silent. A funny part of internet bullying is that people are hesitant to jump into the fray because they don't want to be attacked. 

Eventually, enough people wrote in to the moderator - that he deleted the thread. But this went on for 7 days straight and even though I tried not to look, I periodically checked to see if anyone was coming to my defense.

I probably slept about 2 hours a night during this period and of course, my mental health was horrible during this time. 

And I wish this were the only case. I've been doxxed, had calls with death threats, had stalkers sending derogatory emails from throwaway accounts, been subject to deep fakes of my face on porn and other bullying - some too horrifying to publicly post about.

So when people advise artists to just “get a thicker skin”, i push back. Instead of getting a thicker skin, I want bullying to be out in the open and called out for what it is.

Because the truth is, people with mental health issues have taken their own lives when confronted with internet bullying. 

Why then would an artist be expected to shrug it off and develop thick skin???

Weird day today. Earlier in the day,  i found out that one of my buddies from the Army Band - John Desalme, passed away over the weekend. Very sad and distraught about that. He was a breath of fresh air about life, love and music. A fierce jazz player and great friend. John is the 2nd from the right in this photo on tenor saxophone.

Late this morning, I got a follow request from one of my heros - Dweezil Zappa.