Vintage

I was not aware of this before, but that incredible first song on Friday Night in San Francisco by Al di Meola and Paco de Lucia was edited after the concert.

Apparently, the track "Mediterranean Sundance" was spliced together from different performances. There is a video on YouTube that was taken of the original concert from which the recording was made.

Paco's solo is the same in the video as it is on the album up to the 5 minute mark. But the rest of the recording on the CD must come from some other night.

The other difference is that the video is a tiny bit slower (and a quarter-tone lower than the CD version). In other words, the CD is sped up a bit!

But of course, it is still incredibly fast! Watch Paco de Lucia's right hand play those incredibly fast lines -- Spanish style without a pick!

It's the great debate for guitar students around the globe.

If you are taking guitar lessons or if you play guitar but do not know how to read music, I'm sure you've thought about this before.

Guitar students often ask:

"Do I really need to learn how to read music? There are so many great guitarists who do not know how to read music, why should I?"

It's true there are many talented guitarists in the world who never learned to read music. But as great as they are, those guitar players will have suffered greater challenges in their development because they did not know how to read music.

It's Lester Young's birthday, and you know what that means? Starting today, August 27th and running continuously for 72 hours it's the annual WKCR Lester Young & Charlie Parker Birthday Broadcast. Three days of nonstop Bird and Pres!

WKCR is the radio station of Columbia University in NYC and it's streamed live over the internet You can listen to the stream through your favourite media player.

They'll be playing 3 days straight of Lester Young and Charlie Parker recordings. I'll be listening to as much of it as I can: at home and at work, but unfortunately not in the car because I can't get an internet connection there. But if I could, I would.