Jared Bentley has been writing some terrific new original songs lately and together with Slow Motion Trio and the talented Jeremiah Nave with East Coast Mobile Recording, we’ve just completed ten new songs.

The new music is in addition to the five songs we recorded back in the winter and represent the new sound and textures that we’re molding with the band. Ranging from reggae to soul, rock to country, the music is very different from the original mix.

Over the past several months, we’ve been culturing these songs at several performances and it’s been fun listening to them evolve. It’s also satisfying to have them recorded and part of a complete package. The best part is that we can now pass them along to our friends.

It was great fun to record these tracks at Lance Williams business in the hills of Hampton. They were recorded Tuesday, July 21 – Thursday, July 23rd.

The sessions were unique and didn’t require a lot of effort thanks to the magic and expertise of Jeremiah Nave. He’s an incredibly talented engineer and real pleasure to work.

His recording studio is in the back of a large panel van that he uses to record live concerts all over the Southeast. He’s been at some of the best festivals on the East Coast and comes to the console with an excellent ear for music as he multi-talented on several instruments. More importantly, he’s a wiz behind the knobs and completely patient with the performers at all times.

These recordings are still in their rough mixes and we hope to do a final mix-down and mastering here in the next few weeks. Until then, we offer these up to our friends and hope you enjoy them.

Below are links to the five new songs. Click to download them in their Mp3 formats.

Heaven - a new song Jared wrote for his daughter
WindChill - a song written about studies of the Civil War
All His Might - nice reggae toe-tapper and hip swagger
Wash- love this country outlaw flavor…we like to call this one “worsh”
Lucky One – a favorite among several of our closet friends

HD Net is one of my favorite television channels now that I’m living the high-def lifestyle. Their coolest programming centers around a healthy collection of concert performances that air on the channel. Recently, Herbie Hancock was featured and he was talking about his latest recording, “Possibilities” and it’s been one of my favorite new projects I’ve listened to in quite some time.

Hancock is a living legend and multiple Grammy award winner and the 67 year-old artist shows no signs of slowing down. He catapulted his career when he began performing with the Miles Davis quintet in the sixties at the age of 21. He was one of the architects of the jazz-fusion movement in the seventies blending jazz and synthesizers. And GenX may remember his vanguard video and hip-hop anthem “Rock-It” and for baby-boomers – he produced most of the soundtrack for Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert cartoons.

Always the innovator – I’ve seen Hancock perform live three times now – twice in Knoxville with The HeadHunters (his jazz fusion group) and Wayne Shorter (whom he heralds as his most influential instrumentalist). I was front stage in Asheville a few years ago at Thomas Wolfe and consider it surreal everytime I get the chance catch him live.

“Possibilities” is a dream recording for Hancock as he’s cooked up a dream roster. Must be nice to play gigs with anyone you please and he had no problem attracting some of the most distinctive artists of the modern era.

Last week, we lost another great rock and roll voice from the seventies as Brad Delp, lead singer for the band Boston passed away at 55.

Brad passed away at his home in Southern New Hampshire and will long be remembered in this rock and roll band out of Boston. Together with Tom Sholtz, they formed “Boston” one of the most enduring and distinctive rock sounds to come out during the “disco-seventies” and for a decade, no band would have such a distinctive sound.

Delp’s voice was often in the stratosphere for most male vocalists of the time and together with the rich harmonies this band was noted for their recording production techniques and most notably the voice was one-of-a-kind.

A few years ago my brother and his family gave me a gift of music for Christmas. They knew I was a jazz fan and must have asked a store clerk about a recommendation when they decided on the box set – “Miles Davis in person Friday and Saturday Nights at The Blackhawk.” It’s a complete 4-CD set of Miles performances on the weekends of April 21-22, 1961 and for the past few weeks, I’ve been unable able to take the “Saturday night” disc out of my player.

Listening to a great jazz CD is easy for me to listen to over and over again and you may think this as exaggerating, but disc three of this 4 Box set has been in my music player for close to four weeks and it surely has played more than 100 times. For some reason, CD’s like this intrigue me and it’ seems void of monotonous rrepetition that bores me from popular CDs. I’m not sure why it took so long to take the wrapping off this present either, but it’s quickly become one of my favorites – taking it’s position next to ‘Kind of Blue,’ ‘Monk’s Mood’ and ‘Love Supreme’ by Coltrane.

What follows is a collection of recordings from the CLEAR project that began in the summer of 2006. Jared Bentley, Lance McCloud, Willie Simpson and Greg Smith invited me to be a part of their band as the regrouped after 10 years.

We began rehearsals in downtown Elizabethton, resurrecting several original songs recorded by the original band, Jared’s prior band Yukon and several experimental covers. After a handful of nights, we played our first show near July 4th in a field somewhere near Bristol, VA and have been working the band at several favorite venues in the region.

Below is a discography of this band featuring live recordings from our performances. These samples are recorded directly from the mixing console on to small digital recorders and immediately processed into Mp3s and available to download and will play on most any digital player.

It took me a couple of weeks, but I finally went through the recordings of the Allandale Dinner with The Dead performance at the end of October and have them uploaded to the server for anyone to listen to. My schedule’s been kind of busy this past week with lots of needs from my clients and several other personal adventures in music. I always like to think I can get to these sooner, but processing all of this digital data is time-consuming.

This year, I decided to take my Archos Mp3 Recorder with me to Allandale along with a small mixing board, a mike on a short stand on the floor and a mike attached to a boom stand arched over the strings with an open lid. You can hear the crowd in the background and unfortunately, Saturday’s mike may have been too close to my foot which you can hearing taping out the tunes.

Nevertheless, here is the work, warts and all. There’s a mild hiss that gets kind of annoying to the recording perectionist in me, but I’m glad I captured these songs because they are some of my favorites and I continue to work with the improvisations around the songs in my solo gigs. Listening I can always find room for improvement and some uncomfortable habits, but what’s down is in the past. Enjoy!

Click more to download Mp3s

One of my favorite local recordings right now is ‘Big Truck’ by The Crawford Brothers.

If you heard it on my Mp3 player, you might be surprised I was listening to Bluegrass and if my teenage rock and roll soul saw this, it would turn in shame, but over the years, I’ve discovered something rarely beautiful about this special music we call ‘Bluegrass.’

Here in East Tennessee, the heart of Bluegrass is a sense of family and this is what makes the music so enduring and one of the main reasons it’s opened my mind.

I began playing music in a small living room at my ‘Papaw’ Frank’s house. My dad married Frank’s daughter and some of our most special family moments were spent in what we called ’sessions.’ My father and Frank played guitar on those days and I tried to hang on to a big acoustic and the whole family would sing.

Click here to listen to the Crawford Brother’s song “Big Truck”

Got an email from Josh Green today. He’s one of Kingsport’s new generation of pop/rock musicians from Sullivan South and I worked with him several weeks ago at Keith Smith’s new Greenwood Studios. He’s got a new song for me to listen to, but I was impressed to see his new website up at Indie911.com. I was completely surprised to hear the song as soon as the window opened and it’s nice to see him moving up with his package.

Click here to see what Josh is up to and listen to his new music. I’m looking forward to another episode in the milk barn too.

Josh has a style that interests me because of the spacious way his songs are constructed. There are some hesitant moments in some of the instruments, but the soundscapes are big productions and it reminds me of a lot of great pop songs from the past.

One of the coolest new jazz groups that has crossed my desktop in years is the trio of players from Minneapolis called, “The Bad Plus.”

Their music is a convergence of improvisational jazz, abstract rock, pop and metal compositions and a dose of classicial exertion by pianist Ethan Iverson.

This music is an epic arrival on the jazz scene and they have received numerous accolades from the press as they deconstruct everything from Nirvana to Black Sabbath and Deborah Harry. Not since Medeski Martin and Wood have I enjoyed listening to new music as much and the trio has never sounded finer.

It’s my hope to have a front row seat some day to see these guys perform.

Here’s a link to their weblog. I’m envious of their performance schedule…a heavy dose of European stages…..