Artist
My latest act Dre Daniels will be releasing a new single called “You Done Done Me Wrong” on April 6th with an accompanying video. I’m organizing a few events to celebrate, including an acoustic set with guests at The Red Bike in the Nations, Nashville on Thursday April 6th and a live set with a band on Thursday April 12th at 9pm the Springwater Supper club. If you’re in town then you should definitely check them out!
The electronic music project I commandeer, The Resident Alien, has released its first single in 5 years entitled “I Am The Virus.” It’s a reflection of the times and for a limited time you can download it free from The Resident Alien website when you sign up for the mailing list.
In another first, the song is also available as an NFT! So if you want to part with some Ether and be the claimant of this block on the chain, all you need to do is follow this link and make an offer.
It’s time for another instalment from the Cubist sessions. I’m a huge fan of Bossa Nova. To me it’s some of the greatest music this world has produced as it contains so many special elements: complex harmonic structures borrowed from jazz and classical music, intricate rhythms from Latin and African music and great melodic songwriting. Plus everything sounds good in Portuguese.
According to an Argentinian guitar player I know – Bossa is the brain child of the musical intelligentsia in Brazil who were listening to the jazz greats from America like Ellington and Basie and constructing a whole new style of playing in the dark, smoke filled cafes of Rio de Janeiro. It all sounds very romantic to me.
The fourth song in this series of videos is a short tribute to Bossa and in particular one of it’s greatest composers Antonio Carlos Jobim. I first heard this song, Samba do Aviao, on a Baden Powell record that I found randomly when I was around 14 and it blew me away – the composition and the playing.
When I finally got down to learning it I gained even more respect for the difficulty involved in playing these complex rhythmic patterns with their sliding melodies over constantly changing harmonic progressions. It was a difficult song to learn but well worth the effort. It’s a real pleasure to play.