Guitar virtuoso and teacher Wayne Krantz and his trio are coming to the Miraverse February 15, 2015, and we are so excited! I first learned about Wayne from the AbstractLogix catalog. My love of the music created by John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Herring, and others of that sort predicted I would like Wayne’s music. Not because he imitates them–he most certainly doesn’t! But because he is as boldly original as they are, bringing together an exciting mix of classic and alien, funky and beautiful, harmonic and angular. I bought the self-titled album Krantz Carlock Lefebvre and it spent weeks in the player as I listened to it over and over and over again.
When Wayne released a book (An Improviser’s OS), I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of nearly infinite complexity. And infinitely beautiful. And that’s how I learned that in addition to being a creative composer and master player, he is also a teacher.
So it is fitting, then, for him to come to the Miraverse both to play, and to teach…and you can attend his lessons and/or performances by clicking here.
Still reading? Then here’s some more motivation to come…
As Wayne explains in some of his instructional videos, he honors the conventions of rock and pop music, structuring his songs with verse, chorus, bridge, etc. But then he shreds everything else: melodies, harmonies, chords, progressions, rhythm, etc. Its like he’s got all these elements running around in the music like 5 year olds playing some combination of hide-and-go-seek, tag, and freeze tag. A great example of this is his pop song “It’s no fun not to like pop,” which uses the pop form to destroy pop clichés (the video part of the music video starts about 24 seconds in):
In doing some research for this blog posting, I found these two lessons (with videos) Wayne made for Guitar World. The first concerns “Expanding on Chord Shapes Within the Context of Funk Guitar” and it talks about how, as a rhythm guitar player, he had to find a way out of the box of playing the same funk guitar groove for 20 minutes straight. The second is a two-parter, examining how he put together the song War Torn Johnny, both as a song and as a combination of things he liked. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2. While each of these three lessons are huge in a stand-alone kind of way, the truths that are revealed in relationship to one another really show the depth of Wayne’s knowledge and his incredible skill as a teacher.
And if you are wondering what he does when playing with his trio, check this out:
That’s WHY!
So, if you want to experience Wayne as a teacher or as a performer, in one of the most beautiful and acoustically ideal environments anywhere in the world, make your reservations now! I can’t think of a better way to spend the day after Valentine’s Day!
Manifold Recording / The Miraverse 