A Musical Interlude

Why Is It Mining, Always Bloody Mining?

I know. I hear you. I’ve been so preoccupied dredging up old mining stories from the caved-in stopes of my aging brain, I’d clean forgotten that I used to post musical curios on the urbancrows blog. So, as a brief diversion from earth moving, I want to highlight a new guitar discovery for me. Not strictly classical this time around -it’s more contemporary guitar, but with a huge dash of Latin flavour.

For some obscure algorithmic reason, Australian musicians have muscled their way to the top of my youtube page recently. The Ozzie genius, Tommy Emmanuel, stands out as perhaps the best of the lot; a self taught master of finger style guitar. I had tickets to see him at the end of April at Vancouver’s QE Theatre but- guess what?- the gig was cancelled. Funny that. I live in hope that it’ll be back on next year.

Emmanuel’s total technical mastery of the steel string is on display as he turns House of the Rising Sun into a walking blues. And here he is in a fun recording of an old Django Reinhardt gipsy jazz tune with the great German jazz guitarist, Joscho Stephan.

My deep dives into the youtube guitar archives have led me to a ton of hidden gems, not least of which is Christie Lenee (definitely NOT an Ozzie), winner of the 2017 International Fingerstyle Guitar Champion competition. Here she plays a gorgeous self-penned tune, Song For Michael Pukac.

I highly recommend a few hours spent going through both of their archived videos.

The Main Event: Stephanie Jones

But that’s not today’s main event. Today, I’d like to bend your ears to the music of Stephanie Jones. Like Emmanuel she’s Australian, but as far as I know the only one of the 4 players in this posting who’s classically trained. Still in her 20s, she’s an absurdly talented, award-winning musician who plays the piano, violin, viola, saxophone, and flute AND in her spare time, presumably, has truly mastered the classical guitar. This is a piece she posted the other day – not Latin despite the title of this blog piece- and very short: her take on Sound of Silence.

Ho hum. Jealous moi? Makes my camp fire singalong efforts sound rather like stoneage-bang-2-sticks-and-a-rock-together kinda stuff.

Get To The Latin Stuff…

What first drew me in to her music was a recent focus on contemporary Latin composers; she’s currently selling a compilation album called Open Sky, via her website, which is well worth a listen.

It features modern Latin classical and jazz pieces with some really stand out tracks, such as “Cielo Abierto” by the Brazilian composer Quique Sinesi, a dazzling piece which crops up on youtube as a video titled “Latin Fingerstyle on A Classical Guitar”. Another treat for the ears is Otoño Porteño by the composer Astor Piazzolla.

Tucked away on the album is another new favourite of mine, a song called “Jongo” written by Paulo Bellatini, but Jones hasn’t filmed a performance of this yet. I actually e-mailed her to ask if she was going to publish it on youtube and she kindly answered, letting me know she plans to record it as soon as COVID conditions allow. In the meantime, while we’re waiting for her version, here’s the piece played by the Cato Guitar guitar duo.

Enjoy. Ok, musical interlude over. Back to mining. Next up: the different flavours of news release. Watch this space.

Don’t Forget

If you liked my musical selections, you can subscribe to urbancrows.com by entering your email address in the atonal subscription box that I placed at the top of the page above the highest stave. I’ll be sure to email you more musical stuff mined from youtube in the future.

Remember, there’s no place in civil society for racism -casual or institutional- and we all need to stand up to it when we come across it. The biggest lesson of my career- the privilege of travelling the world to bang rocks- is that when you scratch below the surface, we’re all the same person. Enjoy and embrace the diversity.