Jason Mraz Youtube – Acoustic Guitar in Commercial Music
In the 1980′s there was an incredible drought of male acoustic guitar players in commercial music. Fortunately the releasing of music by Eric Clapton and a number of others reopened the doorway for a lot of other acoustic guitar players ‘to unplug and do what they had probably been doing all along. Players such as Ben Harper, Ash Grunwald, John Butler have filled the Blues Roots gap.
Last night I went to a party which had a PA set up, and I realized how dated the commercial music was that people were jamming on, so came I home thinking about learning a dozen or so commercial tunes to play and I put on a few albums by Jose Gonzalez ( the Swedish guy, not the classical player), John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz and a few others.
It’s important to add new material all the time. Not everyone wants to hear your virtuoso arrangements of 17th Century music, and playing jazz standards with multiple chord inversions and substitutions with any jazz vocalist (regardless how good) usually has a limit of about three tunes at a party.
So I thought I’d add a few blog posts and include some of the newer players in commercial pop who own and play an Acoustic Guitar in a public place. When I listened to the Jason Mraz album- Waiting for My Rocket to Come, I found myself sitting there and working out some of his tunes, they’re reasonably simple and would be quite easy to rearrange into solo singable tunes. He does a lot of Major Sevenths and is rather melodic in his approach, and the phrasing of his melodies is very interesting, this skill sets him apart from a lot of the other material which fills the music charts with product instead of music.
So here’s Jason doing the Remedy
Here’s John Mayer Acoustic Guitar Youtube
I’m impressed because from this video you can see that Jason Mraz actually puts alot of emotion into his playing as well as singing. Usually I’m not a fan of this stuff but this fella ain’t bad at all
Glad I ran across this. Never heard of Jason before but I definetly like his style. Will be looking for more.