A couple of years before the pandemic, I obtained the EHX Syn-9 pedal which turns your guitar signal into synthesiser sounds. It's a cool pedal because it allows you to play synth runs as a guitar player, and suddenly your palette sounds like a mid to late 80s pop rock outfit. I've played with it live and people are taken aback when you dial it in and suddenly there's a fat Prophet IV sound coming out of the guitar amp.
During work on Cosmic Orphans, I decided I would use the Syn-9 pedal as the backbone sound. I would use it to play all the sections that I would normally assign to keyboard or rhythm guitar during the basic outline of the tracks. Then, just before the pandemic hit, I managed to get hold of the Boss SY-300 pedal, and that fit right into the sound of Cosmic Orphans too.
When I played early demos of those tracks to some people, I got the response "but why would you want to turn your guitar into a synth?" It struck me as odd that people would want to ask that. The same people are okay with the guitar signal going through overdrives, distortions, modulations, and so on. Somehow they drew the line at guitar synths. Why wouldn't you expand the palette of guitar sounds to include synths? It was weird.
Some things are just too awful to let pass. That's how I feel about the mega-fires that visited our land in the summer of 2019-2020. Combined with the unpreparedness, the wilful ignorance of the Federal Government, runaway heatwaves, under-investment in infrastructure for dealing with mega-fires, and you had a catastrophic failure of leadership that manifested as a total, unmitigated disaster.
And it's one thing if idiot Queenslanders voted for Clive Palmer's mob as a 'hedge' and found themselves with this terrifyingly incompetent government were the ones getting burned out of their houses. Instead it was innocent wildlife was getting hurt and killed in these fires. You can blame the idiot humans who voted for the idiot government, but the wildlife is blame-free - and yet they bore the burnt of the consequence.
I'm not some Animal Liberationist nut job - but even I can see how disproportionately the piling up of bad decisions and their horrible consequences are falling upon those without the power to withstand it, or change it, move away from it, or voice their concerns.
When you see footage of people rescuing wildlife amid the chaos and turmoil of the fires, you have to ask yourself, how exactly did we get to this point? When will the comeuppance visit themselves upon those who are ostensibly responsible for this land, the idiot politicians? Why do the animals have to lose their dwellings for the idiot politicians' bad decisions? Why can't the idiot politicians lose their houses and family and habitat?
There's really no justice on that account. There ought to be. I'll leave it at that.
Suffice to say the accounts of what happened last summer in Australia were harrowing as they were bewildering. Harrowing because so many lives were lost, not just humans but much wildlife as well. Some put th e figures at 1 billion. It might have been conservative. It was also bewildering because the Australian government's preparation and response to the Firesign general were all too slow, inadequate and mostly laughable if the tragedy unfolding weren't so dire.
People spent the night in the waters off the pier, up to their necks in the waves as they watched the sky glow red and black embers fell and they could hear screams of burning koalas from the burning tree tops. It's not way to bring in the new year. People talk about how bad 2020 was in relation to the COVID-19 but make no mistake, from Day 1, it was a crap year.
So yeah, I guess I had to write a song about that. One year on, I'm still livid at the Global Warming Denialism of this Federal Government. I mean yes if we changed out of fossil fuels, it would be a hit the GDP and the wallet of people like Gina and Twiggy Forrest. But honestly, they can wear that pay cut - and they won't exactly starve or lose their houses. Seriously, what price our planet?
Our Premier, the Hon. Premier Gladys Berejiklian is an odd duck, even in the ranks of female politicians who toil in the ranks of conservatives. She must be good at whatever it is politicians do to get ahead of the pack because let's face it, she's got the weird woggy surname, and a visage that is most unlike that of say a TV breakfast host intros country. She seems to be nice on some level, compassionate, even. You wouldn't want to be the guy wagging a finger at her telling her her policies stink, lest people think you're the bully.
Thus it seemed appropriate to at least discuss this by writing a song about her being Gladys, the Koala Killer, destroyer of trees, water tables, and the pristine environment of our bushland, amongst other horrible deeds.
I don't want to badmouth my own country but a year on from the massive bushfires, there are days where you just draw a deep sigh.
When one reflects on everything that happened in Australian politics in the last decade, you're left with a profound sense of lost time. It's all time that could have been spent on doing things better - certainly better than the internecine party-politic-infighting that was a feature of the decade. If the ALP burnt itself out on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd imbroglio, the Liberal Party regaled with no less than a Turnbull-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison turn of leadership spills. 6 Prime Minsters in the decade shows the country was in political strife, most over the issue of Climate Change.
Needless to say the decade was punctuated by an exclamation mark in the massive bushfires last summer and still there is no indication the culture wars over Global Warming has come to an end. There were many villains in the story, but if there was one traitor to this country that deserves special mention, it must be Andrew Robb who sold out this country from his position in government and now receives a fat salary from our burgeoning enemy China.
All that said, our country lurches on without a policy or apology. just bumbling around trying to find a fig leaf to put over the glaringly obvious absence of a credible climate policy. Again, I won't go into the idiocy of the situation we find ourselves, but it has to beside that making the future precarious through the misapplication of partisan politics is the height of stupidity. As such, it is inescapable to understand that the government we have is a execrable mess.
So, what exactly is this luckiness we credit ourselves when we must live with such stupidity that undercuts that luck?
It's weird that this comes out the week after the US elections but, it wasn't planned that way. It's a happy coincidence - and honestly, I'm okay with Biden winning. If anything the shit referred to in the song is more in line with the 4 year misrule of the Trump Administration which ignored all the warnings about Climate Change. Indeed, I'm really talking about the 2019 Australian election where the Morrison Government was returned, only to promptly ignore expert warnings about the drought and the catastrophic summer weather that led to the massive fires up and down the east coast.
I mean, what were people thinking really? In the olden days I would've come on tooth's blog and vented but of course nobody is persuaded by some blog telling them they are fuckheads for voting in a conservative government that doesn't believe in Global Warming. Instead, they pretty much need to lose their farms and houses to 40m tall walls of fire roaming the landscape, burning everything to the ground.
As such the only thing left for me is to write a song about it and stick it out there, commemorating the abject stupidity of the electorate that opted to return this miserable, intellectually stunted, execrable government to office. For indeed they are shit and this is what they voted for. It's a sobering feeling every election to find that at least 48% of your fellow countrymen are willing to burn the planet to make a buck and think that is the most important thing, followed by cutting deficits (or some other piece of economic nonsense). It's amazing how they win more often than not and give us the shit we need not ought to have had.
The planet's headed deeper into climate crisis and there's the Adani mine going ahead in Queensland. They're doing all kinds of shady things and they will stoop to anything to silence those who are opposed to this catastrophic mine going ahead.
Honestly, there's really no symptom of the evil of crony capitalism in this world than the people who make excuses for this mine to go ahead. It makes no economic sense, the company gets subsidies it doesn't deserve and there's no discernible good in digging up more coal to be burnt. The best form of carbon sequestration is not to dig up the stuff to be burnt at all.
Hence the need for this song. Seriously, fuck these people.
I've been trying to write something about Eddie for some days as you know.
I wish it were as simple assuming up career highlights and noting his impact on the playing of rock guitar and then emote some grief. It would be like that if his life and times and career were like any other musician, but that's not quite true. And even with the dimension fo grief, I find it hard to express what exactly that we can articulate about a man who was fighting a losing battle against throat cancer while continuing to smoke. It's hard.
Yet I'd like to start there. When famous people die and their careers are done, you can look upon their works and measure up their careers. With Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, you know they were mid-flight when the folly of overdosing removed them service, so to speak. You can't quite say the same thing about Eddie Van Halen. It's been apparent since the double live album of 2015 that there might not be any more new albums coming from the band. 2012's 'A Different Kind of Truth' was in effect the final statement from a career that spanned 12 studio albums and 2 double live discs. His entire oeuvre was in the rear mirror as he lay dying. And even though 65 is much too young, it is hard to imagine there was going to be anything he would do to revolutionise guitar playing once more.
Perhaps the coming years we will get releases from the vault of materials he was recording in disown private comforts at his own studio. For now, we are left with the 12 studio albums and 2 live albums. There is an almost symmetry in that the 12 albums can be split into 6 with David Lee Roth and 5 with Sammy Hagar, with the lone album with Gary Cherone. There is a live album each with Hagar and Roth respectively, and if their Sydney concert was anything to go by, there would be in the vaults somewhere a concert video with Cherone.
The point is, he wasn't exactly felled, mid-career like the 27 club - and we are much better off for it. It was a full and vibrant career made up mostly of high points and a few dud songs. If you were a kid in the 'burbs wishing upon a career as a rock star, you couldn't draw it up much better. If you add in his impact on the playing style, which is still reverberating through the guitar playing community, and his place in the history of rock guitar, it was a splendid career. And we are grateful he came along.
So Vale, to the King of Rock Guitar.
That Moment We First Heard Eruption
Being in Australia, my first encounter was rather late. Back in early 1982, for us, Heavy Metal was still a peculiar sub-sub-genre of Hard Rock which was a sub-genre of Rock which had finally broken through to the mainstream with the advent FM Radio in Australia. The guy who introduced me to Van Halen was this guy who would later be known as 'Sandy' Vahadani in this band. At the time I was getting a lot of input in the schoolyard from various friends wanting me to listen to this that and the other thing - of course that's kind of how I got into most of the bands I still love and cherish.
Sandy was always armed with Heavy Metal magazines of artists giving interviews in their spandex pants, posing and preening like wankers-from-outer-space. Sandy wanted to be one but he didn't exactly look the part. He flung me a cassette of Van Halen 1. He prodded the cover notes written in his loopy-jagged cursive with his hairy muscular index finger and said "make sure you listen to this, man". Dutifully, I took the thing home and listened that evening and it promptly blew my mind.
I had had experiences with records blowing my mind, but nothing sounded quite like Van Halen. You could hear the boundaries of rock guitar being redefined. If the goal posts were moving by feet with every great rock album, the goal posts had suddenly moved to the horizon with the advent of Van Halen.
This was, to borrow a phrase from Ted Templeman who produced their early albums, a generational talent. To this day I can say with 100% confidence nothing has shattered and re-defined the boundaries of music quite like 'Van Halen I' with 'Eruption' as its piece de resistance. I've heard impressive, amazing, jaw-dropping players since but none of them have mapped an entire continent of playing like Eddie Van Halen did.
Tapping As A Way of Life
There are many great guitar players - but there really is only one player who defined the guitar sound for a generation. The cultural power of Eddie transcended rock. It permeated the whole attitude of what it meant to be a guitar player. His playing demonstrated that everything matters. Technique matters; Intent matters; feel for the material matters; your understanding of the music you are playing matters; your equipment matters; the very coils of wire in your pickups around what kind of magnets matters; the voltage going into your tube amplifier matters. And when you summed up the total of all the things that mattered, guitar playing mattered, like never before.
When I was working my summer job at Dickson's Music in Chatswood around 1984-1985, every kid coming in to check out guitars was attempting to emulate Van Halen's two-handed tapping technique. There has been much spilled ink about the origins of the technique and whether Eddie Van Halen really did 'invent' it, but needless to say he was the man who made it part of the vernacular of guitar playing in the 1980s onwards, and it cannot be understated.
In 1985, the fictional Marty McFly was tapping on his electric guitar in 'Back to the Future' and even tortures his father with a cassette recording labelled 'Edward Van Halen'. The sequels of overtones and howls of feedback melding into a cacophony of true 1980s Guitar-isme. And at that point the whole Van Halen thing was coopted into a schtick. It marks a denouement in the moment of all rock music where Hollywood abducted the power and turned it into a culture nicknack. All the same, in one of the best movies of all time, there is a deeply embedded imprint of Eddie Van Halen - the moment we can understand the cultural significance of that playing style.
RIP Eddie Van Halen - you will always be an inspiration to every kid who picks up an electric guitar.
I feel I ought to write something briefly about the passing of Eddie Van Halen. The outpouring of grief is palpable around the world. Unlikely people have come forward to offer up their condolences - like the Cabinet Secretary of the Government of Japan who says he is the same age as Eddie and feels the loss deeply. We're all devastated by the loss, but I've felt for a long while now that this day would come, sooner or later.
Maybe it was the photo he shared from his treatment in Switzerland where he looked like a shrivelled gnome. It was sad and a horrible indicator that he was losing that battle. After all, who goes to expensive specialists in Switzerland except those in desperate straits or the incurably crazy?
As such I find myself feeling a weird blank sorrow more than a mordant grief or gargantuan attack of sadness. He wasn't well for a long while now - we should have known it was bad.
May he rest in peace.
I'll try and post something a bit more detailed later in the week.
Bad Decisions Writ Large
This is a song about the stupid decision to proceed with the Adani Mine. In times like this where forests around the world are going up in flames, it seems cavalier-stupid to want to continue digging up ever more fossil fuels to satisfy an imaginary need that won't be of use even in 5years' time.
When I was a kid I asked my economist father if they put all the money in the world in one place and divided it up with everybody on the planet (I must have been a nascent communist), whether would all be reasonably well off or not. My father replied there wasn't such wealth in the world to make everybody well off, let alone wealthy. We would all get about a month's pay and then the money would be spent.
Of course, that's a long time ago and since then we've learned through such things as the Panama Papers that global wealth locked up and hidden away from the prying eyes of tax offices of various governments is such that it would make us all rather well off, if not wealthy, if redistributed globally. Thomas Piketty's big book essentially underlined how this terrible state came to be.
The drain of wealth out of nations via Tax Haven has got to be one of the worst injustices going around. The fact that that capital largely does not work - i.e. put to good use in building factories and towards production and instead sits around on government bonds and debt structures around the world exacerbates the various injustices threefold: once for the tax not paid, once for the misapplication of capital, and once again for the lack of debt forgiveness that condemns the third world to its third world existence. You know, those world vision starving kids and all that, is a side effect of this money sitting on all those bonds. You gotta laugh when the charities come knocking on your door, that they expect piling up your $5 will somehow counteract the mountain of bonds.
While I don't believe in a radical redistribution wealth like I did when I was 5, I do sort of think the least the billionaire classes can do is pay their fucking fair share of taxes.
The updated interface fro Blogger has proven to be a deterrent. It's actually quite annoying endless user-friendly than the old one. I'll try and get on top of it and come back more often but ... you know how things can get. Your out of time to do things.
I've got this new song out. You should check it out.
n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.
The moon, is barren. Its emotions austere. It is not surprising it has the desire to care less about things. It may even be that it has already reached the absolute zero of caring as it orbits this planet.
Our consciousness is not that different to that of animals. We think our ability to articulate words and therefore convey meaning makes us so different from animals but this is a misconception of what our conscious mind consists. The 'I' we place as the 0 - 0 coordinate is a construct that enables to decide on fairly simple things like what one might want to eat or when one might want to go to the toilet. Most offer biological functions come through this filter and manifest themselves in our minds. And to that extent we are no different to the cat that miaows demanding to be let out of the house or the dog that barks at passing cars in annoyance and boredom.
With that said, it's wort considering this word today:
n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.
We need to drill down deeper into what we think we are and where we think we exist. The space time we perceive is a lot more motile and defiant towards any meaning we place on it. You may be better off to strip away the abstractions and feel your way into the wind like wolves.
The totality of your life is impossible to communicate. I always laugh when I watch some TV show or movie where the conflict revolves around a character withholding information about themselves. The other party berates the character as being dishonest, and make the charge that such dishonesty leads to communication breakdown or worse still, a termination of trust.
What never seems to be discussed in such instances is the impossibility of conveying one's entire truth in pith dialogue that even a middle-American yokel can understand with bite-size chunks of wisdom sprinkled in. So for that purpose we have to explore this word here:
n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
That's some problematic stuff right there for any character on screen that has to convey their way-out-there truth. Like "I'm Batman", or "I love you" or "I eat snails for breakfast".
Sometimes, you just ca't put it into words. That's just the truth of the matter.
n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.
Clive James who knew he was dying of cancer let out his own ellipsis around the time of the end of season 2 of 'Game of Thrones'. His lament was that he would not live to see how it would all end on that TV series. He expressed some embarrassment that man of his age would be so caught up in the kind fiction that had dragons in it, but he needn't have worried - it's not as if his own poetry was terribly profound or deeply meaningful. Lucky for him, he outlasted the last season and saw it all end. I don't know what he thought of the end, whether he was with all the people that complained about it, to whether maybe he was exhausted by the narrative, he accepted for what it was.
When Francis Fukuyama wrote the book 'The End of History', it seemed eminently premature to declare not just because I was still young but because there were clearly lots of people still about from whence history would be made. The end of history necessarily comes when there is a last man standing, watching the devastated horror of the extinction of all living things, with nobody to read how it all happened.
Yet if the likes of Tacitus or Suetonius or Thucydides felt ellipsism it is not surprising nor is it something to be pitied. Have great empathy for their ellipsism. There is a desire to see out how things turn out. It is what keeps us tuned in and turned on to all the events that unfold around us. Perhaps it i the first human condition that takes place when one balances one's own mortality with the absolute of time.
It's hard to get things right the first time. If you sit down to do a recording, Take 1 is never right. Take 2 sometimes is just right, but Take 1 being the golden Take is very rare. And so in conversations, where there are no opportunities to perfect the discourse, you don't quite get things out the way you want to, and this leads to this weird process of dissecting one's own thoughts in endless internal dialogue afterwards.
n. a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.
Which all makes it sound rather jolly. Life also has a way of eluding the jolly.
Imagine a life. A person gets out at the beginning and gets run over by a freak bus. They leave the front door one morning, and this random crazy bus rides up on to the sidewalk and takes them out.
He survives, but he is messed up - he will never be who he was going to be for the rest of his life.
Then he eventually gets up form his hospital bed and wonders what the hell is going on and what the hell just happened - but there is no answer. So they are doomed to question what the hell happened to them as they left the door to their house. Was that the wrong decision? Yet everybody else leaves home at the start of the day. Was it that the wasn't looking carefully enough? Perhaps he reacted too slowly and the bus ran him over. Or perhaps it was the driver's fault and not his own, but he feels like he needs to shoulder some of the responsibility.
And so he talks to himself endlessly, in a sad bid to unravel the mystery of how his life was altered irrevocably. That, is his jouska.
This COVID-19 pandemic situation has nudged me back towards reading books. So it seems appropriate that the word we're hijacking for song titles is vellichor.
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.
The most recent book I read is about the many diasporas of humanity out of Africa. It seems long ago - probably about 60,000 years ago that we left Africa as Homo Sapiens. Judging by how lacking in wisdom humanity is, clearly that time has not gone towards accumulating a whole wisdom.
I realise as I write this entry that my habit of reading books gave way to a habit of producing music.It is ironic somewhat that one goes from a phase of life where there is nothing one can do to produce what they want to produce and so one must spend time devouring texts to enrich one's mind; and then to a phase of life where one has the means of production so it is incumbent upon one to keep producing as much as one can using all the available time at hand.
All the same I would like to go back to reading in equal measure. It's not that I have stopped liking the producing part, it is just that I do miss spending time with books. Reading is great - even the reading of somewhat-crappy-books.
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
I am guessing that, with all this social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, "other people" is starting to seem like an abstract idea. It's kind of getting that way with me. My friends are becoming voices down a phone line or messages on social media. It's a little daunting to think I won't be grabbing a bite to eat with my old buddies at our favourite haunts for at last 6 months, and god only knows if our favourite haunts would even be in business 6 months down the track.
The wider picture of course is that our ancestors survives the bubonic plague and other epidemics and pandemics. Even our grandparents and great grandparents survived the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919; although in writing that, it seems important that it did go on longer than a year with that particular pandemic. You take a moment to contemplate those lives and their losses, and their suffering and well, that's even more cause for sonder.
When I as working on this one, it didn't really occur to method I would be putting it out during a global pandemic. That is the nature of time. You only get to live the history that comes to you.
We were warned about a pandemic. We just didn't seem to factor it into our thinking, even with all the fiction that warned us of what it might be like in the 21st Century. This is not quite Bocaccio's Decameron or Albert Camus' plague, or even Love in the time of Cholera. It's more a prosaic confrontation with ethereality that toilet paper is valued more highly than most other things in the supermarket when it comes to our consumerist society.
I've got an album of instrumentals coming out. It's more stuff in the vein of 'Neurotronic' where I let the synths and modulators go spastic and then figured out how to play guitars and bass and drums against it. It's not like there is any high falutin' concept beyond trying to make the seemingly atonal fold back into something that resembles guitar rock.
'Nodus Tollens' is the name the album. The term Nodus Tollens apparently means "the realisation that the plot of your life doesn't make any sense to you any more." I figure a lot of things could be said about such a statement. Maybe I'll wait until I get into it track by track once the damn thing gets its release.
Yes. When is it coming it out anyway?
This album was supposed to come out on the 29th March 2020 but there was a mix up with the Distributor and so here we are in limbo. It might take a week for it to getup.With the COVID-19 situation going, it might take even longer but you wonder how hard it could be to mount a digital release. It's not like I'm pressing these albums.
After 2 years of doing these digital releases, something wonderful happened. Somebody actually downloaded one of my tracks paying real money for it - all US$0.99 of it. Hey I'd like to encourage that here so whoever it was, kudos to you! Everybody should learn from this person's good behaviour. If you're reading this blog, come on, you know you like this stuff well enough.
Goodness this is hard to write, especially since it's a matter of weeks since Alphonse Mouzon passed away in late 2016. It feels like a kick to the guts, every bit as David Bowie and Carrie Fisher.
Back in the day when I was young, dumb and still buying 'Guitar Player' in magazine form, I'd come across a lot of guitar players whom I had no way of learning about if I simply went hunting up records at record stores. Larry Coryell was an interviewee that grabbed my attention - I can't even remember why - but likely because he was very open about discussing his technique and at that point in my development, what he had to say was exactly what I needed to read.
I know the big name in fusion guitar is John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola and Jeff Beck, but when I cast my mind to who's playing sits in my wheelhouse, it has to be Larry Coryell. His body of work was always intelligent, daring, as well as sounding so natural. You never get bored of his playing.
Fusion gets a bad rap. Compared to the amount of ink spilled for say, heavy metal virtuosos or the endless line of punk/grunge/emo players who don't want to talk about technique in a constructive way (they like to talk about it in deconstructive ways, shall we say) fusion players offer glimpse into the outer possibilities of electric guitar. And so Larry Coryell to me, for a very long time was an inspiration, a guitar player who led the way towards interesting ideas. Through the 1990s, I was able to acquire some of the seminal albums he worked on, and found a player who had been to places I wanted to go.
As you can see he had a fluid technique and a deep commitment to riffing chromatically with a cosmic phased tone. It's otherworldly and unique. He had a technique that was deeply human and infused with his touch. He was easy on the ear, and yet had a beautiful sense of melody that you couldn't help but be drawn to.
Here he is with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia:
You don't get invited to play with those guys unless your chops are astronomically prodigious.
As fusion stylists go, Coryell had a varied palette of tones and techniques, and had a wonderful way of slipping from one mode to another seamlessly. He also had a breezy freedom to his playing that allowed him to make tremendous leaps in style as well as tone.
It wasn't just his electric guitar stylings. He was also just as adept on steel string as well.
One dreams of playing like this, with so much expansiveness:
