Okee-Dokee, I am officially freaking out. This dag-nabbed internet.... I just, like LAST NIGHT, discovered my THIRD stupendous, mind-blowingly amazing musician for the year 2014. Who I never even heard of till now! The first was astonishing Canadian slide guitarist Kevin Breit. He's been playing in the same band, on the same weeknight, in the same little bar in Toronto, every week, for FOURTEEN years. And they kick ass, and Breit immediately leapfrogged a bunch of blues retreads and rocketed right up to claim a throne next to Derek Trucks and Sonny Landreth, and just like those two - he sounds exactly and entirely like HIMSELF, and himself only.
And the next was Swedish... fusion? guitarist Einvind Aarset. After the first world-wrecking blowup of "In a Silent Way", "Bitches Brew", and the first iterations of Mahavishnu, Return to Forever and Weather Report, "fusion" music got attacked by the corporations and subverted by human imperfections and ruined faster than could be believed possible. It really WAS too good to be true, there were like, four great years - 1969 -> 1973 -> Kaput. But these sneaky foreigners were listening, and hiding in the north woods, and now all of a sudden it's like:
Vikings: the Sequel!
Just, guitars instead of swords.
And now, LAST NIGHT, I stumble over this Naseer Shamma dude. He's an Iraqi, from Iraq (a lot of them are), which may partly explain why HE'S been hiding, for sure. He plays an oud, which is sort of like the bastard offspring of a sarod and a nylon string guitar, except it sort-of predated or was concurrent with them... and he plays like he's been smoking the ashes of Paco DeLucia, that same level of power and fearlessness, dragon biscuits for breakfast & farting gods for lunch, absolutely hair-raising. I guess everybody but me knows about him - as long as you read Arabic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x15cC8NnjgU
Wowee.
