Steel Guitar Jazz

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Steel Guitar Jazz
Steel Guitar Jazz - album cover.jpg
Studio album by Buddy Emmons
Released September 1963
Recorded July 22, 1963
Genre Jazz
Length36:20
Label Mercury
Producer Hal Mooney
Buddy Emmons chronology
Steel Guitar Jazz
(1963)
The Steel Guitar and Dobro Sounds of Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons
(1965)The Steel Guitar and Dobro Sounds of Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons1965

Steel Guitar Jazz is a 1963 studio album by steel guitarist Buddy Emmons. It was reissued in 2003 by Verve Records. [1]

Buddy Emmons American guitarist

Buddy Gene Emmons was an American musician who is widely regarded as the world's foremost pedal steel guitarist of his day. He was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1981. Affectionately known by the nickname "Big E", Emmons' primary genre was American country music, but he also performed jazz and Western swing. He recorded with Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, The Everly Brothers, The Carpenters, Roger Miller, Ernest Tubb, John Hartford, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ray Price, Judy Collins, George Strait, John Sebastian, and Ray Charles and was a widely sought session musician in Nashville and Los Angeles.

Verve Records American record label

Verve Records, also known as The Verve Music Group, founded in 1956 by Norman Granz, is home to the world's largest jazz catalogue and includes recordings by artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Stan Getz and Billie Holiday, among others. It absorbed the catalogues of Granz's earlier labels, Clef Records, founded in 1946, Norgran Records, founded in 1953, and material previously licensed to Mercury Records.

Contents

Reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic Star full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar full.svgStar half.svg [1]

Ken Dryden reviewed the album for Allmusic and wrote that "Buddy Emmons wasn't the first musician to be featured playing a pedal steel guitar in a jazz setting, but it is unlikely that anyone else recorded an entire date playing one prior to this 1963 session. He's surrounded by some top players...he also interacts with the band rather than overdoing the special effects available to him, especially the horn-like sounds obtained from his use of the slide. Emmons also chose an intriguing mix of material...This was pretty much a one-time affair for Emmons, who returned to country music, though he did record some additional jazz with guitarist Lenny Breau during the 1970s". [1]

Kevin Whitehead reviewed the album in 2003 for National Public Radio's Fresh Air. [2]

Track listing

  1. "Bluemmons" (Buddy Emmons) – 2:59
  2. "Anytime" (Herbert "Happy" Lawson) – 2:47
  3. "Where or When" (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers) – 3:15
  4. "(Back Home Again in) Indiana" (James F. Hanley, Ballard MacDonald) – 3:13
  5. "Gravy Waltz" (Steve Allen, Ray Brown) – 3:58
  6. "Oleo" (Sonny Rollins) – 3:11
  7. "The Preacher" (Horace Silver) – 3:04
  8. "Cherokee" (Ray Noble) – 3:56
  9. "Witchcraft" (Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh) – 3:33
  10. "Gonna Build a Mountain" (Leslie Bricusse, Anthony Newley) – 3:16
  11. "There Will Never Be Another You" (Irving Gordon, Harry Warren) – 3:43

Personnel

Steel guitar type of guitar or the method of playing the instrument

Steel guitar is a type of guitar or the method of playing the instrument. Developed in Hawaii by Joseph Kekuku in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a steel guitar is usually positioned horizontally; strings are plucked with one hand, while the other hand changes the pitch of one or more strings with the use of a bar or slide called a steel. The earliest use of an electrified steel guitar was first made in the early 1930s by Bob Dunn of Milton Brown and His Brownies, a western swing band from Fort Worth, Texas; the instrument was perfected in the mid to late 1930s by Fort Worth's Leon McAluff, who played for western swing band Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Nashville later picked up the use of the steel guitar in the early days of the late 1940s and early 1950s "Honky Tonk" country & western music with a number of fine steel guitarists backing names like Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce. The term steel guitar is often mistakenly used to describe any metal body resophonic guitar.

Robert William Scott was an American musician, record producer, and songwriter.

Piano musical instrument

The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700, in which the strings are struck by hammers. It is played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings.

Production

Hal Mooney, born Harold Mooney, was an American composer and arranger.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Steel Guitar Jazz at AllMusic
  2. Kevin Whitehead (9 June 2003). "Music Review: 'Steel Guitar Jazz' from Buddy Emmons". NPR. Retrieved 13 April 2016.