Mark Whitfield

[JETman]

Do you ever think you'll move to Florida Jetman,

Sheesh....I'd hate to play a round of golf with you and Lou Donaldson.

Yeah, where you be at? We could all eat a sammich together. Just to make it interesting, we could invite that other sterling example of fine Floridian behavior on the bored.

[king ubu]

Do you ever think you'll move to Florida Jetman,

Sheesh....I'd hate to play a round of golf with you and Lou Donaldson.

[JETman]

Do you ever think you'll move to Florida Jetman,

Sheesh....I'd hate to play a round of golf with you and Lou Donaldson.

Try not to get yerself too worked up, junior!

[Peter Friedman]

Whitfield and Malone seem like the best of the retro guitarists, very much emulating Wes, Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, etc. I don't find them wholly slavish, but they go solidly in that direction, rather than in the more modern and creative directions of Metheny, Frisell, Scofield, Stern, etc.

AREN'T WE AFTER MORE CREATIVE AND LESS RETRO DIRECTIONS?

Try guys like Samo Salamon, Julian Lage, etc.

All I have to say is OY.

FWIW, Eubanks' latest is excellent, and if you want to hear some creative guitar playing from years past from him, just pick up any of the ones where he appears with Dave Holland. "Extensions" comes immediately to mind.

>

I have all of Whitfield's Warner and Verve CDs and really like his playing. I have the impressions that the attempt to do parallel work in a mainstream jazz style in the Marsalis wake and fusion didn't work particularly well in his case. There isn't so much room for so many jazz guitarists at the top, but Malone etc. made it.

I have a VHS video with that smooth jazz stuff - bland indeed!

Now what is Whitfield doing right now?

Whether Malone is "at the top" depends wholly on your definition of that phrase. There are several guitarists out there who are at the top of their games, for instance. I don't know.........someone named "Metheny" comes to mind! Guys like Eubanks and Juris smoke both of these guys IMHO of course.

Juris has a lovely soft approach to some very advanced Post-Coltrane modalism for sure (a bit like the Liebman school of Saxophanists), but he's hardly what I'd call a commanding player. Now Malone on the other hand, doesn't really suffer from that problem

Eubanks I haven't heard in years though.

Please take this within the spirit with which it's intended: you are out of your mind!

Not sure who "we" are in the above comment about being "after more creative ... directions". But it sure does not include everyone here in the way you mean it. None of the guitar players you refer to

in a positive way appeal to me.

[Sundog]

A contemporary guitarist well worth checking out.

http://havardstubo.com/

[JETman]

Whitfield and Malone seem like the best of the retro guitarists, very much emulating Wes, Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, etc. I don't find them wholly slavish, but they go solidly in that direction, rather than in the more modern and creative directions of Metheny, Frisell, Scofield, Stern, etc.

AREN'T WE AFTER MORE CREATIVE AND LESS RETRO DIRECTIONS?

Try guys like Samo Salamon, Julian Lage, etc.

All I have to say is OY.

FWIW, Eubanks' latest is excellent, and if you want to hear some creative guitar playing from years past from him, just pick up any of the ones where he appears with Dave Holland. "Extensions" comes immediately to mind.

>>

I have all of Whitfield's Warner and Verve CDs and really like his playing. I have the impressions that the attempt to do parallel work in a mainstream jazz style in the Marsalis wake and fusion didn't work particularly well in his case. There isn't so much room for so many jazz guitarists at the top, but Malone etc. made it.

I have a VHS video with that smooth jazz stuff - bland indeed!

Now what is Whitfield doing right now?

Whether Malone is "at the top" depends wholly on your definition of that phrase. There are several guitarists out there who are at the top of their games, for instance. I don't know.........someone named "Metheny" comes to mind! Guys like Eubanks and Juris smoke both of these guys IMHO of course.

Juris has a lovely soft approach to some very advanced Post-Coltrane modalism for sure (a bit like the Liebman school of Saxophanists), but he's hardly what I'd call a commanding player. Now Malone on the other hand, doesn't really suffer from that problem

Eubanks I haven't heard in years though.

Please take this within the spirit with which it's intended: you are out of your mind!

Not sure who "we" are in the above comment about being "after more creative ... directions". But it sure does not include everyone here in the way you mean it. None of the guitar players you refer to

in a positive way appeal to me.

If retro is your thing, more power to you. There are too many guitarists out there cut from that cloth. While talented, Whitfield and Malone do not stand out among those.

[Milestones]

Frisell's music "is wide-open, and it incorporates everything in a single gesture, from the sweetest nostalgia to the harshest dissonance, from desert twang to urban squawk, from fairground Americana to speed-metal, from the Beach Boys to Burt Bacharach to Neil Young to Sonny Rollins to Charles Ives to Henry Mancini to Aretha Franklin to Skeeter Davis to...well, like I said, everything and everybody. His music, at its best, is not about Bill Frisell taking guitar solos. He's not a wanker, and he doesn't have the usual axman's ego. Hell, it's hardly even guitar music at all, except insofar as Bill Frisell is inventing a new use for the guitar, not as a rhythm instrument or as a solo instrument but as the universal solvent of all American music - as a home for every sound he's ever heard."

I don't know where I pulled the quotation (it is a professional), but it describes his work better than I ever could, and it indicates why I find him creative and even innovative.