The TCBB Goes Unplugged (At Our Maiden Gig)

That's right. The Terence Chong Blues Band (TCBB) played at Daikanyama Restaurant & Sake Bar in Changkat Bukit Bintang last Wednesday by privileged invitation. The theme of the performance was RAW Acoustic Sing Along No.2.

As Paul McCartney once said. "Well, this is Unplugged, where everyone removes their plugs and go crazy..." Ha ha, but truly I reckon only a seasoned musician like Paul would dare say that :-D... we sure had a lot of fun on this one tonight.

Nice atmosphere at this fancy fusion Japanese restaurant. The lower floor houses the diner and the bar while the upper floor was where most of the action took presence. The bar and couches there felt really comfy and perfect for acoustic sets. The TCBB started off the 1st set at 9pm with blues standards, paying homage to Howlin Wolf, Robert Johnson, and Eric Clapton. While I must personally admit that this genre may be quite primitive to some of our audience that night, nevertheless, we managed to add touches of foot-tapping and percussions (courtesy of Salahuddin) to contemporarise the music further. We were pleasantly greeted with shouts and claps from the supportive audience which paved way for us to play even more spiritedly in the next 2 sets till the stroke of midnight.

Both Imran and Ivan were in super form that night, and played one of their best performance together in the band. Occasionally Imran would awe the audience with his tasty and bendy blues licks while stunning them with his cool Chris Cornell-like vocals, such as on 'Something' & 'Bell Bottom Blues'. Those SM57s surely made the acoustic guitars sound larger than life in the performance hall. He also belted out a spontaneous rendition of Soundgarden's 'Black Hole Sun' at the end of the 3rd set which I thought was splendid. Great job!

Between breaks, our trump card Ivan would both nonchalantly and wantonly tease the crowd with either exquisite snippets from Richard Clayderman's piano catalog or with some extremely complicated finger pinched harmonics which one imagined only Eric Johnson could do. All this was accomplished via his Godin nylon stringed semi-acoustic electric guitar thru a MIDI controller capable of any sound one could imagine, except the acoustic guitar :-p Ivan, IMHO stole the show for the evening with his fine cheeky touches :-)

Salahx our passionate blues based drummer made his presence felt with a djembe (a conga-like instrument), a cylindrical shaker, bottleneck slide guitar, and his new found talent: the kazoo. The crowd went bonkers in the middle of the 2nd set when Salahx gave them a taster of this wind instrument to the tune of Jesse Fuller's composition of 'San Francisco Bay Blues'. Definitely the crowd pleaser :-D

While the 2nd set concentrated on assorted love songs, the 3rd set was completely an opposite. From Muddy Water's 'Hoochie Coochie Man' to Big Bill Broonzy's 'Hey Hey' to Robert Johnson's 'Crossroads Blues', it was definitely rockin' (even by my bluesy standards). Most of the songs here we normally do electrically, so you could imagine how the acoustic guitars had sounded.. :-) Rizal Ross sportingly sang Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower' and the Cream classic 'Sunshine Of Your Love' to add mojo to the night.

Our other blues brother Ali also took the stage with his anthems: 'Wonderful Tonight' and Freddie King's 'Have You Ever Loved A Woman'. Powerful and beautiful solo on the Godin mate!

Just before we concluded, Prema Yin (a friend of Bari, the manager of Daikanyama) graciously stunned the audience once again with her Memphis R&B vocals on Etta James' 'At Last', CCR's 'Proud Mary', and Whitney Houston's 'Greatest Love of All'. A lovely and potential knockout in the local scene, for sure! What a diva!

We're definitely yearning for another gig pretty soon. Stay tuned bros and siss!

Thanks Bari! :-)

My Acoustics

Here's the long due writeup on my acoustic guitars. I have in the first installment the Martin 000-28EC model. The specs. are pretty straightforward; being a Martin style 28 model, it has the spruce top with rosewood back and sides, primarilly. As Brazillian rosewood had been embargoed since the late sixties, most modern Martin acoustic guitars with rosewood models today are made from the Indian or Madagascar origin. This particular EC model is of Indian rosewood. I am aware that some limited edition EC models were even made with rare Brazillian leftovers and priced very 'richly'...

Let's see.... Sitka Spruce top; scalloped 5/16" bracing; Ivoroid binding on the body; herringbone top purfling; 1-3/4" nut width; 24.9" scale; modified V-shaped neck; 28-style rosette; Ebony fretboard with diamonds & squares inlay and Eric Clapton's signature at the 19th fret; Rosewood peghead overlay; nickel butter bean style tuning machines; Ebony belly bridge with bone drop-in saddle; 2-1/4" string spacing; tortoise color beveled.

The first impression I got from this beautifully made acoustic flattop is how balanced the tone is. From the 1st to the 6th string, every single one rings uniformly and with precision. For fingerstyle, notes are both dynamic and bold. For strumming, all tones envelop into a beautiful harmonic 'togetherness' (think orchestra). The strength of this guitar is essentially suited for the blues or folk music either by fingerpicking or flatpicked. For advocates of volume, one should look towards the D models which have a bigger slope and bout size.

The scalloped braces of this 000-28EC model makes it different in tone with a regular Martin 000-28 model. This is suppose to elevate the EC model closer to pre-war Martins when this manufacturing technique was first widely used (30s?) and greatly appreciated by most acoustic guitar players. Furthermore, this signature Martin is supposed to replicate what EC played some years back before he auctioned off his entire vintage Martin collection for his Crossroads Foundation. Well what the luthier does is he shaves off the edges of the braces under the guitar's top and shapes them like a suspension bridge. This make the braces lighter and vibrate freer thus 'turbo-charging' the tone and dynamics as well.

There's no pickup installed for this guitar. I may do so in the future but as is, I'm overly satisfied with what Martin made in conjunction with EC's taste. Great sounding and playing.... Try one and you'll agree too.