Here's a new track made by Swedish musician Björn Nyberg, featuring a small (but clearly critical) guitar-playing contribution from me.
Full credits:
Music: Björn Nyberg
Guitars: Chris Bestwick
Sax: Emma Magdalena Svensson
I'm very happy to be playing on Björn's tunes, and I'm always up for collaboration (except with enemy troops in occupied territories, obviously).
As a jazz guitarist, no longer short in the tooth, I've tried many different ways of practising. (I just googled "jazz guitar practise tips" and there are more than three million results, which feels about right.)
I think a good way of practising improvising is to record yourself doing it. It's not simply that this allows you to hear what you really sound like, it's more that the act of recording turns your practise into a performance.
Quite recently I read Julian Barnes' book "Nothing To Be Frightened Of". A meditation on death and dying, it's very good, but perhaps not to be read actually, you know, in the hospital.
In it he writes about the idea that, not only will we die as individuals, but everything we create will at some point be experienced for the last time. Every book will have a final reader. Every song, too, will have a final listener.
Now some songs roll on through the culture, like giant blocks of stone pushed by multitudes. Others, though, get left behind. (Some of these songs undoubtedly deserve this neglect, but for others, it's a shame.) I realised that there's one song I play, just to myself and at least once every couple of weeks, that I've been playing my whole adult life, and realised too that I might be one of a very few people in the world who know and play this song.
If you subscribe to my blog via RSS, I'm sorry for swamping you with duplicate content over the past couple of days!
It seems to be an issue about how feedburner is determining the uniqueness of the articles. I think/hope I've fixed it now, and I'll keep an eye on it, but if it keeps happening please let me know.
(At least you'll now be getting duplicate apologies too :)
Chris
My days haven't been entirely filled with php and yii recently (see previous post). I also managed to get a bit of playing done too.
(This is how it feels when I play the guitar. Exactly like this.)
Björn Nyberg is someone I know from myspace days. I've always liked his tunes and he recently asked me to play some Ernest Ranglin-style solo guitar on this:
Funeral procession by bkgnyberg
The full credits are:
Produced by: Björn Nyberg
Music: Björn Nyberg
Guitar: Chris Bestwick
Vocals/Lyrics: Nyinomugisha
Flute: Simon Jensen
Congas: Lars Rosengren
It's a pleasure to be collaborating with such talented people. I'm always flattered to be asked to play on things, so please get in touch if you'd like some guitar on your tracks.*
Chris
* As long as they're not godawful :)
