Music

I've been browsing YouTube for interesting music today and posted a mini history of the guitar below...

The Moors brought a fretless, stringed instrument called the Oud to Spain when they invaded Europe. Al Oud means "the wood" in Arabic. The word oud became "lute" in English, and the European instrument had frets.

Here is a video of Farid Al Atrache playing an oud:

I've been listing to a lot of Baroque music lately. I was looking for a CD of good harpsicord music and after a few days of searching at the library I came across a great recording of Wanda Landowska playing Bach's Goldberg Variations. I highly recommend it.

Niño Ricardo is one of my favorite guitarists. I didn't even think to try to find him on YouTube until tonight while waiting for a script to run... This is a great video.

I was browsing through some YouTube videos this afternoon and came across some clips of Tomatito playing flamenco guitar. Check it out:

This morning I took a break from regular tech-related surfing to look up some music. I came across JazzMando.com and found several interesting choro clips on YouTube today (posted by ovidiov). I also ordered a guitar CD by Rafael Rabello.

Check it out:

I stumbled across a blog about choro music that had a nice YouTube video of the Brazilian guitarist Fábio Zanon playing a Scarlatti sonata.

I also found a "tribute to Dino 7 Cordas" on YouTube. It's a style of Brazilian music called choro.

I'm a guitarist who got into computers by accident. My main guitar interests are Brazilian guitar, classical, jazz, and traditional flamenco.

It was interesting to find a Web application framework called Django, that was named after the guitarist. Although I don't play steel-stringed guitar and don't use a pick, I really like "Gypsy jazz" and would like to learn this style of guitar playing. Below are some video clips of the master himself, Django Reinhardt, playing guitar.

Why is Django considered such a good guitar player?

First, note that his left hand only has two working fingers. His hand was severely damaged in a fire when he was younger, and it is baffling how he managed to play like he did.

Listen to his phrasing, and complete mastery of improvization across chord changes. He created an entire genre of guitar playing.

I got stuck watching Google and YouTube videos this evening. I often find myself searching for new Rimsky Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee guitar videos.

This is some extremely fast guitar playing:

Here's another one with a heavy metal background: