Harvey “the Snake” Mandel is a guitarist’s guitarist. Born in Detroit in 1945 and raised in Morton Grove, he moved to the west coast in his early 20s to launch his career. He never became a household name like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Eric Crapton, but beginning with his debut LP, 1968’s funky fuzz classic […]
Tag: Guitarist
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Marisa Anderson’s solo guitar provides solace and forges community
Guitarist Marisa Anderson, based in Portland, Oregon, is a veteran solo performer, but solitude isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when she plays. In concert and on a string of solo albums, her reverberant, gritty instrumentals tap into the capacity of blues, gospel, and folk music to bring people together. Anderson’s recent […]
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Drummer Susie Ibarra and guitarist Tashi Dorji subdivide sound and silence on Master of Time
In 2019, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College presented The Second Buddha: Master of Time, an exhibition concerning Padmasambhava, the guru credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet during the eighth century. Along with lectures and exhibits both visual and virtual, the museum commissioned a concert—conceived as a “musical bardo exploration”—by Susie Ibarra, a Philippine American […]
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Sir Richard Bishop continues to chart his own guitar language in the studio and onstage
Sir Richard Bishop has spent about as much time recording under his own name as he did with the Sun City Girls, a deftly bohemian, genre-bending avant-rock act that dissolved after the 2007 cancer death of founding drummer Charlie Gocher. For almost 30 years, the band (which also included Bishop’s brother Alan) teased at the […]
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Dynamic guitarist Nita Strauss will shred your face off
Los Angeles-based guitarist Nita Strauss has made her name as a session player and composer of music for video games and indie film. She’s also been Alice Cooper’s guitarist since 2014, and as she fought her way up through the competitive world of studio musicians and hired guns, she became the first woman to have […]
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Guitarist Jeff Parker contains multitudes on Forfolks
With credits as diverse as Chicago postrock collective Tortoise and free-jazz band Ernest Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble, guitarist and composer Jeff Parker owns a unique vocabulary. He’s been able to muster expressions of self within groups and as a bandleader across 30 years of work, and now he offers a new solo dispatch, Forfolks. “Suffolk” […]
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ACID MOTHERS GURU GURU
Contemporary psychedelia often raises the question, hasn’t inner space been explored enough already? Well, yes and no. The psychedelic experience, like the religious one, is unique to the individual–while there’s no denying the commonalities, everyone interprets it his own way. Japanese guitarist Kawabata Makoto takes cues from past masters in pursuing his own voyages and […]
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A Cushicle
Bands with regular engagements are easy to take for granted–until I saw A Cushicle again last month, I’d been telling myself “I’ll just catch them next week” for more than a year. But such engagements are perfect for jazz: the musicians get the time and space to develop a deep rapport. This trio of guitarist […]
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90 Day Men, Cocorosie
No unicorns, but the cover art for the 90 Day Men’s new Panda Park (Southern) does feature rainbows, magic mushrooms, and rows of wildflowers, and the ornate music within certainly lives up to the prog-rock imagery. This would have been hard to imagine early in the band’s career–they started out in the mid-90s as dealers […]