MEGADETH Performs In Indonesia; Review, Oct. 27, 2007

Rebecca Burchell of TheJakartaPost.com reviewed MEGADETH's October 25, 2007 concert in Jakarta, Indonesia. An excerpt follows:

"There was a large police contingency scattered among the crowd, complete with bamboo canes and riot gear. While 'metal heads' around the world continue to be feared, members of Jakarta's metal community were sipping on bottled tea and water. A lone seller trying to pedal warm cans of beer to the crowd certainly wasn't making a killing.

"This was the night so many Jakartans had been waiting for. MEGADETH were to play in Indonesia once again, and this time they had selected Jakarta over Medan. Since the early 1990s after a much-publicized riot at a METALICA concert, there had been an unofficial ban on international 'hard core' bands touring in Indonesia. When their Medan show went off without incident a few years ago, MEGADETH paved the way for the reemergence of international metal bands in the country.

"MEGADETH were fashionably late on stage. There was a genuine vibe of anticipation in the air, with even crew members receiving a rousing reception when they walked on stage for last-minute sound checks. Finally, after almost half and hour of false alarms, a lone figure strolled onto the darkened stage. His trademark long, blonde locks gave him away. It was lead singer Dave Mustaine, and before he had a chance to as much as strum his first note, the crowd had gone wild."

Bon Jovi rocks Newark in arena's opening concert

Bon Jovi on 'Today' Richie Sambora, left, and Jon Bon Jovi perform with their group, Bon Jovi, on NBC's "Today" show in New York. (AP/Richard Drew)

NEWARK, N.J. - Singing the title song from their latest album, "Lost Highway," Bon Jovi christened a glistening $380 million arena pegged as a hope to help revitalize the struggling city of Newark.

"I'm a Jersey Devil and this is my new house," the band's frontman, Jon Bon Jovi, said Thursday night. "It looks good with all you people in it. Welcome to `The Rock' here in Newark, N.J."

Just hours earlier, workers had put the final touches on the new Prudential Center, as they dumped dirt into planters and vacuumed a red carpet. Police patrolled the streets nearby on horseback and on foot.

Some concertgoers arrived hours before Bon Jovi took the stage for the opening-night performance, the first of 10 shows.

The downtown arena opened amid hopes that crowds attending concerts and sporting events would help revive a city whose image has been tarnished by violent crime, poverty and high unemployment.

"It's our first time in Newark," said Michelle Payne, 41, who drove nearly two hours from South Jersey with her 16-year-old daughter, Ashley. "So far so good."

As concert time neared, Mayor Cory A. Booker walked the red carpet with Chanda Gibson, his date for the evening.

Several New Jersey celebrities soon followed, including former New York Giant Tiki Barber and several stars of HBO's "The Sopranos," including Aida Turturro and Robert Iler.

"I am a huge Jon Bon Jovi fan," Barber said. "He's a big Giants fan."

Gov. Jon S. Corzine said Newark's renewal will be built by momentum and credibility.

"Not only will we get to hear Jon Bon Jovi tonight, which is always a thrill," he said, "but this is a milestone."

___

Associated Press Writer David Porter in Newark contributed to this story.

Too Good to be UNKNOWN by the World

Dewa Budjana

Like many other guitarists in the world, I Dewa Gede Budjana (B. 30 Aug. 1963) did not really have a formal education in music, except for a few years of classical guitar course when he was in high school. The Balinese native was not born in a family of professional musicians, either, as father was a prosecutor. His grandparents, however, played traditional gamelan music in their spare times.

Dewa Budjana’s first teacher was a construction worker lived nearby his house in Klungkung regency, Bali. The passion grew stronger, and was nurtured when the boy moved to big city of Surabaya, where he took a classical music course, performed with a band, and indulged in dozens of music performances.

Initially into pop and rock, Budjana’ s style veered heavily into jazz as he got to know the likes of John Mc Laughlin, Pat Metheny, Jeff Beck, John Abercrombie , Chick Corea , Weather Report , He also established a jazz band called Squirrel, which was pretty popular in the local scene. Budjana’s song Nusa Damai (Peaceful Island) earned the band an award at the prestigious Light Music Contest in 1984.

After graduation, off he went to Jakarta to pursue a career as professional musician. He came across jazz maestro, the late Jack Lesmana -- father of former jazz whiz kid Indra Lesmana, who taught Budjana the philosophy of jazz.

After a period of club performances, Bud Jana’s skill later attracted many artists to collaborate with. He joined several bands, including Spirit and Java Jazz, as well as working for noted musicians like Erwin Gutawa, Elfa Secioria and Addie MS, making him quite a household name.

Despite growing reputation as a top-notch guitarist, Budjana’s personal taste is actually pretty eclectic, which brought him to establish pop group GIGI in 1994, along with guitarist Baron Arafat, bassist Thomas Ramdhan, drummer Ronald and singer Armand Maulana. The group survives until now, still hailed as one of the biggest pop bands in the country.

Budjana’s current influences from pianists Keith Jarret, Alex de Grassi and Bill Evans, Bill Frissell as well as those from saxophonists Jan Garbarek, are also reflected in the latest album.

He also manages to release four solo albums whose music is an amalgamation of jazz, pop and traditional music. His debut in 1997, Nusa Damai, was a collection of compositions he wrote ever since he knew how to play the instrument. With the title taken from the book by Balinese noted author Ktut Tantri Revolt in Paradise, there was a song called Ruang Dialisis (Dialisis Room), which contained Budjana’s grandmother’s singing.

The sophomore effort Gitarku (My Guitar) was released 2000, a purely instrumental album with therapeutic and meditative sound. Samsara followed three years later, an album highlighted with traditional Kalimantan flute and Japanese Shamisen, for instance. The album was a reflection of his journey and experience of working with international musicians, such

as Peter Erskine from legendary jazz-fusion group Weather Report, and bassist Dave Carpenter.

It was Erskine again who urged Budjana to release another album when they crossed their path again in the early 2005. The result was Home, a tribute album Budjana dedicates for the victims of tsunami disaster, which scheduled to release on December 2005.

Radiohead Announce World Tour

Radiohead will tour the world next summer, their management have announced.

The band, after giving away new album “In Rainbows” for free, are in talks about a series of “larger-scale” gigs.

The news was revealed in a new interview with Bryce Edge, of Courtyard Management, who represent Thom Yorke and co.

“We plan to tour next year, starting in May through to probably the end of the year. With lots of holidays in that period”, explained Edge.

“At the moment we are talking with our agents in North America and for the rest of the world, trying to get a schedule which works for the band and works financially.”

In the interview with Billboard, Edge said the group planned to play bigger venues than those visited last year, when tracks from “In Rainbows” were previewed.

“They toured last summer almost for creative reasons, definitely not for financial reasons. And I think they quite enjoyed it. The next set of touring will be slightly larger-scale venues”, he said.

Van Halen Live at Allstate Arena

Van Halen at Allstate Arena, Chicago - October 16, 2007

One of the more admirable qualities about that lip-smacking would-be gigolo in leather bell-bottoms, David Lee Roth, is that he could always laugh at himself.

And Roth did a lot of laughing Tuesday at the sold-out Allstate Arena, where the partially reunited Van Halen rocked songs that date back to the eight-track cassette era: an atomic cover of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” “And the Cradle Will Rock,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” “Jump.”

Van Halen doesn’t have this reunion thing down to a science yet: They ousted founding bassist Michael Anthony and replaced him with guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s 16-year-old son, Wolfgang. The kid did just fine, but his presence on this tour is emblematic of the ego wars that derailed the band in the last decade. During these wayward years, Van Halen briefly reconciled with its second most-famous lead singer, Sammy Hagar, for a $54 million tour.

This time the band ignored the nine top-40 hits it scored with Hagar in 1985-96, and focused on a different kind of nostalgia: the six albums it recorded with Roth, from 1978 to 1984. Though not a singer or musician on par with Hagar, Roth is a more entertaining front man, and the personality associated with the band’s most durable songs. It was a much leaner show than the ’04 Hagar tour, 25 songs packed into two hours with a minimum of pyrotechnics and only one drum solo (the band plays a second Chicago show Thursday at the United Center).

Roth didn’t sing, exactly, but he did bark, yelp, and smile a lot. He was on his best behavior, focusing on the songs and deferring to the Van Halen family members. He even hugged Eddie Van Halen a few times; the least he could do for walking back into a job that pays the band about $1.5 million a night.

For the fans, it was the tour they’d been anticipating since they were sporting mullets. With the notable exception of Anthony, it was an adequate reincarnation of the band in its leering, pop-metal glory. The boys may be in their 50s now, but they still screamed about hot girls, hot teachers and runnin’ with the devil like hormone-addled teenagers.

Roth’s boys-will-be-boys shenanigans were balanced by the still awe-inspiring virtuosity of Eddie Van Halen. While the rhythm section clubbed away, the guitarist turned six strings into a mini-orchestra. The night’s finest entertainment was on the big screen behind the stage, which showed close-ups of Van Halen’s hands at work. In “Jamie’s Cryin’,” he alternated raffish commentary with a lost-in-space solo.

After recovering from cancer, hip surgery and alcoholism, the still-lean guitarist made sure that Roth wasn’t the only one having a laugh on stage.

Purchase Van Halen Tickets to Upcoming Concerts

10/18/2007 United Center
10/20/2007 Joe Louis Arena
10/22/2007 Palace of Auburn Hills
10/24/2007 Target Center
10/26/2007 Sprint Center
10/28/2007 Scottrade Center
10/30/2007 TD Banknorth Garden
11/1/2007 Verizon Center
11/3/2007 Continental Airlines Arena
11/8/2007 Nassau Coliseum
11/10/2007 Bell Centre
11/13/2007 Madison Square Garden
11/20/2007 STAPLES Center
11/23/2007 Jobing.com Arena
11/25/2007 Cox Arena
11/27/2007 Arco Arena
12/1/2007 Rose Garden
12/3/2007 Key Arena
12/5/2007 General Motors Place
12/7/2007 Pengrowth Saddledome
12/9/2007 Rexall Place
12/16/2007 HP Pavilion

Too Good to be UNKNOWN by the World

Balawan

Balawan is the one and only guitarist in Indonesia who plays double neck guitars with two independent style hands. This technique is very different with two handed tapping (tapping) which introduced by Eddie Van Halen in 1978.

I Wayan Balawan was born in Bali - Indonesia September 1973, He Grew up amongst Balinese gamelan music. At age of 8 he began to play guitar and start his first band in the age of 14. He can plays rock guitar virtuoso style like Yngwie Malmsteen since he was 10 years old.

In 1993 he went to Sydney and got a scholarship to study jazz at the Australian Institute Of Music for two years. He went back to Bali in 1997 and form Batuan Ethnic Fusion (A mix of Balinese Gamelan and Jazz) and released one album in 1999.

He is versatile guitarist that play many styles of music, and a great solo performer. He has developed the ability to play a special and difficult form of tapping which involves chord and bass work with the left hand and tapped melody with the right hand, which resembles piano playing.

Balawan is now considered as one of famous favourite jazz guitarist in Indonesia.

About Balawan

Name : I Wayan Balawan
Place of Birth: Gianyar, Bali
Date of Birth: September, 9, 1973
Location : Bali, Indonesia

Van Halen Reunion Nothing Special

The whether and when of a Van Halen reunion with original lead singer David Lee Roth have been subjects of frequent speculation ever since Roth quit the enterprise in April 1985, a rabbit that would not come out of its hat until at last the band kicked off its current tour last month.

The famously combustible band brought its signature brand of boisterous, hard-charging rock to the Mohegan Sun Arena on Friday for a show that had some impressive moments but was generally more serviceable than special.

Although the signature presences of Roth and guitarist Eddie Van Halen were sufficient to satisfy most nostalgia, the band's lineup was not quite its original, as bass player Michael Anthony has been replaced by Van Halen's 16-year-old son, Wolfgang. That role has never been the band's lynchpin and remained secondary as drummer Alex Van Halen hammered out a backbeat for the rowdy opener "You Really Got Me" while his brother Eddie tore into the melody with sharp-edged electric licks.

Roth's role requires little more than an ability to bark festively in a manner sufficiently assertive to match up with full bore rock anthems, and despite having accrued some additional rasp on his voice's high end over the years, he remained game enough to handle the chore as he yelped "I'm the One" and pushed along the chunky "Runnin' With the Devil." Short-haired relative to the flowing locks of his glory years, the 53-year-old Roth was more tentative and less kinetic than the memories he was trying to evoke, almost asking for the crowd's approval where once he would have commanded it as he battered the lyric of "Somebody Get me a Doctor." He looked fit and frequently punctuated his performances with spinning high kicks, twirled microphone stands and other colorful touches that were the closest things to spectacle in a generally straightforward show.

The storied antagonism between Roth and the Van Halen brothers was nowhere to be seen as the singer went out of his way to vamp Eddie's still-incendiary playing as it formed the centerpiece of the roaring "Everybody Wants Some." The tour is most assuredly a marriage of convenience for two factions that desired the buzz - and payday - their reunion would bring, but the band members seemed almost surprisingly cordial in ways that went beyond the couple of hugs the always-grinning Roth and Eddie Van Halen managed during the show.

With the exception of a snippet of "316" during Eddie Van Halen's lengthy guitar solo near its end, the entire set was built from tunes from the Roth era, which meant everything was at least 23 years old. Much of it remained a dynamic mix of hard rock and pop, from the springy "Unchained" to the rugged throb of "And the Cradle Will Rock." Roth opened "Ice Cream Man" by reminiscing his way through a solo acoustic guitar bit (in fact, Wolfgang Van Halen was the lone member of the quartet who didn't take a solo turn), and his voice was a touch creaky during a blowout trip through "Panama."

The set ran to two hours by the time it closed with a pulsating rendition of "Ain't Talkin' `Bout Love," and then extended with a brief encore of the band's lone chart-topping single, "Jump." The tune closed with Roth riding a big inflatable microphone across the stage, but the prerecorded keyboard line was more in line with how adornments fit into the program, a light touch in a show that tied up more efforts in raw energy than gimmicky flair.

Source: courant.com

Yuri Landman Builds Incredible Guitars for Noisy Bands

Sonic Youth fan turned guitar maker, who builds multi-stringed, multi-bridged instruments for Lee Renaldo and a bunch of other bands I've never heard of.
"It's basically a two-string guitar with a built-in thumb piano. The strings of the guitar can be bent by a brake cable from a moped, which is connected to a foot pedal. When amplified, the thumb piano, which is mounted to the guitar body, has a very low and impressive sound, almost like a vibraphone.".

Do You know?

Continuum

The Continuum is a music performance controller developed by Lippold Haken and sold by Haken Audio, located in Champaign, Illinois.

Technically a MIDI controller, the Continuum features a touch-sensitive neoprene playing surface measuring approximately 19 cm high by either 137 cm long (full-size instrument) or 72 cm long (half-size instrument). Sensors under the playing surface respond to finger position and pressure in three dimensions and provide pitch resolution of one cent (one one-hundredth of a semitone) along the length of the scale (the X dimension), allowing essentially continuous pitch control for portamento effects and notes that aren't on the chromatic scale, apply vibratos or pitch bends to a note. While pitch bend and vibrato are standard features on most MIDI keyboards, sliding between half steps, as permitted by the Continuum, is not. A software "rounding" feature enables pitch to be quantized to the notes of a traditional equal-tempered scale, just scale or other scale to facilitate in-tune performance, with the amount and duration of the "rounding" controllable in real time.

The Continuum also provides two additional parameters for the sound: It is also able to transmit the finger pressure on the board as a MIDI value, as well as the finger's vertical position on the key. These parameters can be used to enrich the sound even more, for example to modulate between two sound banks. The Continuum is capable of polyphonic performance, with up to 16 simultaneous voices.

The Continuum does not itself generate sounds. Rather, it must be connected to a sound-producing source that will receive MIDI input, such as a synthesizer module.

Perhaps the most famous player of the Continuum in contemporary music is Dream Theater's keyboardist Jordan Rudess. It can be heard in the songs "Octavarium" from the album with the same name, and in the end of the song "The Dark Eternal Night" from 2007's Systematic Chaos. He is also seen playing the Continuum on Dream Theater's 2006 live DVD Score.

The continuum is also played by Jordan Rudess on John-Luke Addison's Multiple Valences album in the song "Unimaginable Charimatics".

'Stadium' is Mostly Filler

The Peppers' career has survived three stages, mostly defined by who's playing guitar and how bad that guitarist's junk habit is.

There's the "punk funk" years, when they were the druggy, thuggy doofs from L.A. who loved the Germs and George Clinton in equal measure. Guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a heroin overdose in 1988.

Then there were the alt-rock years with guitarist John Frusciante, during which they became one of the world's biggest bands. Then Frusciante quit to pursue his own junk habit in '92. Not a good look.

Since 1999's weirdly compelling "Californication," with a cleaned-up Frusciante back in the band, the Peppers are now alt-rock's elder statesmen, penning endless variations — thematic and musical — on "Under the Bridge." Some are moving (the songs "Californication," "Scar Tissue"), some are just retreads (pretty much everything else).

But that's no excuse for a two-hour, 28-song double CD; there's never any excuse for a double CD. Produced by musical-enabler-to-the-stars Rick Rubin, "Stadium Arcadium" is an exhausting slog through the Peppers' late-era skill set — funk, ballads, the sort of whanging guitar doodles that Fruciante should keep to solo albums, bassist Flea's always-deft low end, rock-solid drumming from Chad Smith and Anthony Kiedis' shirtless croon. There are high points — "Dani California," the mildly trippy title track, the furious "Torture Me," even the acoustic "If" ain't bad — but finding them is exhausting.

Police Guitarist Says New Album Possible

Andy Summers, from left, Sting and Stewart Copeland of The Police. (AP/Michel Eulerl)

DUBLIN, Ireland - Will the curtain close again on The Police when their reunion tour ends? Andy Summers says the fractious trio could have a new album in
them.

"It's sort of like living with the elephant in the room. I would see it as a challenge, to make an absolutely brilliant pop album at this stage of our career, and that would be something quite remarkable," Summers, 64, said.

The Police broke up in 1984 following five albums and a relationship-wrecking world tour. Their hits include "Roxanne" and "Every Breath You Take."

Since then, frontman Sting, 56, has sustained solo stardom. Guitarist Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland, 55, have pursued their own, much more low-key recording projects.

They reunited for a 30th-anniversary world tour that began in May and is scheduled to run into next year.

Summers said the trio has yet to discuss in any detail the prospect of recording a new album together. But he said the tour had sharpened their group skills --and, four months into the reunion, creating something new together would make sense.

The Police performed a sold-out concert Saturday in Dublin's 82,000-seat Croke Park that received praise from critics and the largely 30-something crowd alike.

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