a parallel future for the electric guitar

It was only a matter of time before what came to be known as electronic music captured the mainstream imagination, and I appreciated how the resultant rave scene was bringing concert goers together like never before.

In 2000, inspired by the demo cassettes from a prodigious teenager named Chad Carrier, I began to sketch out xy techno theatre, a portable extravaganza that combined Chad's production concepts, an interactive audience virtual environment, and live theater courtesy of my brother, Ian, and his wife, Andi.

xy techno theatre

Not only was all this techno multimedia a good excuse to experiment with crazed guitar processing, but there were times when I attempted a similarly multi-dimensional guitar technique that had just been taken to a stratospheric level of development by a one-time New York street musician by the name of Stanley Jordan.  

Like Van Halen, his childhood background as a piano student led him down the path of a two-handed string tapping approach, but his net effect was even more unbelievable: it's like each of his hands has its own independent brain, the sound of two guitarists playing at once.  After he exploded out of the blue and unannounced at the 1984 Kool Jazz Festival, some of the most successful players in the business wondered whether from then on, it would be impossible for any guitarist to ignore the new universe of possibilities he'd exposed; that an unforeseen, parallel future for the electric guitar was laid out before us all.  After a few years, though, it became clear that virtually nobody was going to retool their whole way of thinking about the instrument and follow in his footsteps, after all.  Now Jordan's delicate, spidery solos do not automatically endear him to head-bangers, but in this rendition of the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, he proves that when tap comes to slap, he can still light 'em up:

Stanley Jordan - Eleanor Rigby