Years back some folks bought a no-name guitar from Elderly Instruments for $100. It was a shit guitar. Fucking horrid by sight. But it was passed around. Nels Cline played it. Alex Skolnick played it. Matt Wilson, a jazz drummer, played it. All manner of folks who were open to it, had their run with the thing and recorded a song with the guitar. It resulted in the $100 Guitar Project: a collection of 51 songs at this point, all from a janky abomination.

The six-stringed atrocity travelled over 30,000 miles according to this NPR piece, and I’m working through the list of folks who contributed, looking for bodies of work I can identify with because openness to that sort of project seems like as great a gate-keeping device as I can imagine for identifying folks who produce a particular type of music I’m interested in.

Which is half of how I stumbled onto:

Ava Mendoza is my favorite artist I’ve discovered this week. (my GOD ! who makes an entire song out of artificial harmonics?!?) I guess she used to be from here (Bay Area) but is in Brooklyn now working with an outfit she is calling Unnatural Ways. Much of my week has inovled checking them out. Their bass player, Tim Dahl, is incredibly interesting as well, but I haven’t pulled that sweater string just yet.

This was beautiful. It was apparently filmed in temperatures below 20’F (and as the footage shows, there was a bit of a gale) but I’m glad they did it.

A guitarist I’ve seen a couple of times, and am always interested in, was apparently reunited with a guitar he cut his teeth on as an early musician, after pawning it 37 years earlier. A really charming story is unravelled in this video interview with Bill Frisell. One of the really great aspects of the story is how just the act of sharing seemingly trivial information with one’s friends and aquaintances can end up producing such amazing outcomes.

finally:

“If people saw this, they would stay home.” What the war against the coronavirus looks like inside two Bronx hospitals. Opinion by Nick Kristoff, Video by Alexander Stockton, Zach Goldbaum and Michael Kirby Smith.