Day two of the 2010 Winter NAMM show was crazier than day one, and I know today (day 3) will be even crazier still. The crowds in some areas of the floor were simply impassable, due in large part to all the top players making appearances. Carlos Santana appeared at a couple of booths, and single- handedly brought all foot traffic in his vicinity to a standstill. One of the longest autograph lines I saw was for bassist Tal Wilkenfeld. Her work with Jeff Beck has really catapulted her notoriety, and rightly so. She's a super talented player.
One of the highlights of the day for me was seeing Johhny Hiland jamming with bassist Dave Larue at the Ernie Ball booth. Hiland is a monster country picker who just recently switched to Ernie Ball after being a long-time PRS guy. What a player. I got some decent footage of the jam, which I've embedded at the end of this post. I also saw Hiland playing at the ENGL booth while Steve Morse was signing autographs there. What a great player.
I also got to chat with Prashant Aswani. He has a new album on the way which sounds like it's going to be awesome. It looks like I'll be doing a new interview with Prashant after the
album is released (I previously interviewed Prashant in 2008). Later in the day, he created a gridlock-inducing crowd downstairs at the Spectraflex booth were he was demoing some of the new tunes.
Obviously gear is king at the NAMM show, and I checked out some great stuff, including the Moog guitar, some great Schecter models, and some beautiful Godin acoustics. Before heading out for the day, I caught some of bassist Jon Reshard's band playing outside, where I also met Guthrie Govan who was taking in the set. Very cool!
After NAMM, I heading up north to meet my old grade school buddy Josh (we hadn't seen each other in probably 25 years!) for dinner, and a trip to the Baked Potato to see Scott Henderson's trio. Unfortunately, our seats were kind of crappy (we were behind the mixer all the way to to the right), but that didn't stop us from enjoying Henderson's awesome, kinetically-charged set.
Gotta head out to take on day 3. Don't forget to check my Twitter feed for updates...
Johnny Hiland and Dave Larue jamming at Ernie Ball - NAMM 2010
Too cool for ska-ule! Dave, ya kill me.
Posted by: Rob Waxman | January 16, 2010 at 11:51 PM