The Steel Guitar Forum

Hi, folks. Jim Stalhut sent me videos of the set we played together at the '07 convention in the jazz room and I posted them on youtube deleting the heads of the cover tunes in order to comply with the rules of youtube.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZRRy7jMJbTI My Shining Hour

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7LQo0FVLWt8 Giant Steps

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tlQ2XMA4aTY Black Orpheus

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e-lTvjngFhg Beatrice

http://youtube.com/watch?v=H35QpuAfIFw Eight Miles High

I couldn't attend St Louis this year, thanks for posting your vids.
gary

I watched "My Shining Hour" and that's great stuff...

I'm definitely going back to watch them all when I get the chance.

Oh man...can't wait to get home to check these out. Thanks so much for posting them Dave!

Best,
LarryW

Thanks for posting Dave! You make it look so easy. It's great to hear such a new style of playing!

awesome stuff dave. great playing from everyone.
i really enjoyed Giant Steps and Black Orpheus...

do you give lessons???

I mean no disrespect with the following statement:

My brain must be wired up wrong, because, although I'm impressed with the virtuosity of the playing, I find it absolutely impossible to listen to that style of playing for more than a few seconds before I can stand it no longer, and reach for the off button.

Am I a pedal steel philistine ?

Wow Dave! How do I put it, I'm looking for just the right way to say this...ah, yes now I've got it:

I quit!



Previously, I had only heard the Brian Blade stuff, and thought you were from outer space. Now, I now you're from a whole different galaxy!

Richard, maybe it's just that you don't like jazz. ...not that there's anything wrong with that!

richard burton wrote:I mean no disrespect with the following statement:

My brain must be wired up wrong, because, although I'm impressed with the virtuosity of the playing, I find it absolutely impossible to listen to that style of playing for more than a few seconds before I can stand it no longer, and reach for the off button.

Am I a pedal steel philistine ?

Not really. You own and play a pedal steel. The philistines were always refered to as enemies. How can you be an enemy of what you play. Your more of a typical pedal steel traditionalist.

If you were flipping through the TV channels and you came across a talk show where the language was Finninsh and you did not speak it, how long would you watch it??? How about Greek or Russian or any other language you did not know.....same way with music. If you had played those jazz standards a billion times like most jazzers then you would have known the language they were playing in and you could make a better judgement on what was being spoken on the bandstand and it might have been more interesting to you.

The improv that is used in jazz has no boundries. I is an expression of the player at that moment.

glitch

and another, sorry.

No offence taken, Richard Burton. I was rooting for you in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" My hat's off to anyone who can go the 15 rounds in "Virginia Wolf" plus two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor.

Anyway, thanks for those few seconds of listening! You're, of course, under no obligation to continue. I'm the only one who HAS to listen to myself play. For everyone else it's completely optional. I guess I've gotten used to myself after all these years so I sound perfectly normal to me. (Oh, except when I play this 12 tone piece that my friend wrote based on the Shonberg Matrix. That took me some getting used to but now I look forward to it.)

I did have a nice ballad picked out for that set at the convention but I guess I jammed too long on the other songs so I didn't get to play "Chelsea Bridge" I wonder if you would have liked that one any better.

Happy '08, everybody!

Fantastic playing . I am a relative newcomer to pedal steel but i am just beginning to be able to palm and pick block fairly succesfully. but it seems in giant steps that the right hand is not moving at all in the video.Does one not need to block every note when playing fast or what? I know that you are not to move your right hand too far off the strings to block but most good players that i see , i can not see them block with the right hand. thanks, gene

Bill Hatcher wrote:If you were flipping through the TV channels and you came across a talk show where the language was Finninsh and you did not speak it, how long would you watch it??? How about Greek or Russian or any other language you did not know.....same way with music. If you had played those jazz standards a billion times like most jazzers then you would have known the language they were playing in and you could make a better judgement on what was being spoken on the bandstand and it might have been more interesting to you.

Bill, I think that's a wonderful analogy. I like to take it a step further when talking about learning to play jazz. It is much like learning a language in that there are 2 general ways to go: if you're born into it, you learn it by immersion and gradually absorb the rules without actually having to study them formally. If you are learning it as a second language, as in school, then you don't have the benefit of immersion and you need to study the rules. You learn the letters, then develop a vocabulary of words, then learn to use them together into meaningful phrases, then full sentences, paragraphs, etc., until you're using the language to communicate your own thoughts and ideas. Someone who hasn't learned the language just thinks your talking babble.

With jazz (or, indeed, with other musical genres too), if you've immersed yourself in it enough, you absorb all this over time. Most of us do a combination of absorption and learning rules.

I speak finnish and understand finnish, which is why I won`t watch a finnish talk show for more than 15 seconds.
Dave , thanks for posting the videos, have good 2008 !
Olli

Ha, Ha, Ha. That's a good one, Olli! That's why I don't watch American talk shows, because I speak and understand English.

Gene Jones, I actually had to go and watch that song again and roll back over several spots and then go to my steel and play those licks in order to answer this but I'd say that it's mostly finger blocking with a little bit of left hand blocking. I've heard it called penciling before but don't expect to see the bar go up at the same angle that you hold a pencil at when you're writing. It comes back to the economy of motion thing. You can tilt the bar up at just enough of an angle so that only the bullet nose is touching the strings and you can't really see that on camera. In the same way you're absolutely right that palm blocking is not necesarily that visible. If your palm is very close to the strings when you go to block then it's that much easier. For some reason I used to always anchor my right pinkie on the neck when I did palm blocking but somehow I think I managed to break that habit so now it's a little easier to go back and forth.

I think everybody is different but I tend to use finger blocking more in jazz which tends to be more legato. A couple of examples where I'd use palm blocking would be like if I was covering a Buck Owens tune like that good old song about making a dollar at the saw mill or this Coco Robicheaux song, "Street Connection" where I turn off the echo and put on the wah wah and play very stacatto rhythm parts.

It's cool that you're mixing them up right from the start. At my late age I'm only now mixing two fretted guitar techniques: strict down and up flat picking, and the technique where you sometimes continue in the same picking direction when going from one string to the next. It's taking some getting used to for sure.

Most of my friends agree on one point: the less thinking on stage the better. That's why I kind of suck as a teacher. There's one thing though that's come to my attention over the years: I always exhale when playing a phrase and then inhale in the spaces between phrases.

I really like it and I love listening to Jazz. I don't play it, would love to but I don't have the time. I should have started with the study earlier.

When I put on a Mike Stern CD in the car my wife just rolls her eyes. I guess you like it or you don't. Again Dave - I like it!

Russ

Cool! very cool. Nice work Dave, and congratulations for cutting a new path. I admire originality. It's in short supply in the music world today.

Holy crap Dave!Can I say holy crap?No?OK.Spiritually enlightened fecal matter Dave!!!Thanks from the bottom of my upper stuctures for posting those,My Shining Hour is a fave tune,ever since 'Trane's version on Coltrane Jazz,despight the misleading title(even your rendition clocks in at considerably less than an hour, though it shines brightly).Nice pack 'o' seat too,great for card games and B.B.Q's also.Cheers and happy new year.Shane.

Ok, David is certainly too much of a class act to plug his own CDs...since I'm in no danger of that, I'll toss a note in here about them.

http://pedalsteelmusic.com/music/daveeasley.html#c-008

These remain in very heavy rotation at our house. Incredibly inspiring stuff. Anyone interested in Jazz and PSG needs these.

David, I was turned onto these not too long ago by a guitar player named Mark Guest who moved up here after Katrina. He has miles of great things to say about playing with you.

Thanks again for posting the vids!

best,
LarryW

wow. "Off Minor" on pedal steel? I gotta hear that.

Susan Alcorn does a great Monk medley that includes "Crepuscule with Nellie" and "Pannonica".

I recently worked up "Monk's Mood" and "Ruby My Dear"... the slower the better!

I had a lot of fun playing with Mark Guest a couple of years ago in South Carolina. What a nice guy! I hope he's doing well.

Scott, that's really cool that you're so into the Monk tunes. He has so many beautiful ballads. I love that song "Ruby My Dear". I'd love to hear you play it. I was just messing around with that one actually. We've covered a handful of his songs over the years. My favorite was "Coming on the Hudson" but I like "Off Minor" too. I wonder if you might also like this tune I wrote called, "Naufragio" off of Book of Spells. I'm sorry I never sent that one into Bobby Lee's store. I think it's only at louisianamusicfactory.com but they let you hear the first minute of that song. (Sorry for the plug folks)

Dave E.

This, along with Don Helms' unaccompanied performance of "Cold Cold Heart", was the hands-down highlight of the conference for me.

Glad to hear there's video. Looking forward to watching it later.

Hi David! -M.S.

yeah David... "Ruby" lays out real well on the C6... lots of 6th chords!

any chance of you posting "Off Minor" on your myspace page???

Monk is probably my favorite composer of all time. His stuff is so odd and modern but so steeped in tradition. And it just sounds like the streets and sidewalks of New York City to me. I love it.

I play "Off Minor" on standard guitar, among others.

I was sitting on the front row at this show, and I could have listened to this stuff all day. I'm not a fan of Country music, and I can't listen to country shuffles more than a few minutes. This is really breaking new ground for the pedal steel, and I hope we see David at lots more steel shows.

And I'll say thanks again to Jim Stalhut for having the idea and the drive to put the Jazz Room together at ISGC. There was a nice crowd at this show, and I can foresee it growing every year. Keep up the good work, Jim.