Category: youtube recommends

YouTube Recommends: The Ultimate 80s Medley

No shame, YouTube knows me well (maybe that’s a little scary).

Martin Miller is a German guitar player, teacher, producer, composer and, oh yeah, vocalist. He’s well-known for teaching people how to play guitar and his YouTube channel is filled with dozens of instructional videos as well as cover jams where he’s joined by guests like Paul Gilbert and Andy Timmons.

I’m not familiar with Martin so when this popped up, I thought maybe it was a couple of friends who have a bar band that decided to show off what they do but, within seconds, it’s easy to see these guys are really, really good seasoned pros and they run through full versions of some 80s classics like “Eye of the Tiger”, “Sledgehammer”, “The Final Countdown” and more.



YouTube Recommends: John Wright Trio – South Side Soul

Though I can’t speak eloquently about jazz, I do love listening to it. Nobody in my immediate world is a jazz fan so I spend a lot of time just searching “jazz” on YouTube and Spotify. The easiest way to describe my sweet spot is that I like piano jazz that you’d hear at a country club or a dark, basement-level bar in a major city.

John Wright is not a familiar name to me, nor have I ever heard any of his music. I’ve learned that Soul Side Soul was the John Wright Trio’s debut album and was released on the Prestige label in 1960. Whenever I hear something like this, I contemplate cashing in my existing vinyl collection which consists mainly of rock albums, and starting a jazz collection. But, when searching for South Side Soul on Amazon, Discogs and eBay, I found that it goes for about $150 so streaming on YouTube will have to do.

Here is a fantastic feature on John Wright that appeared in the Chicago Reader in 2014. Three years later, John Wright would pass away at the age of 83.