Sun Dappled

Sun Dappled

In the pattern of most of my videos, I have combined esoteric guitar music with little films of cats and dogs doing nothing. This is the world we live in.

Miss Kitka perches in her favorite sunbeam in the south window of the house whenever our otherwise dreary Michigan February weather chooses to make its face shine upon the waters so to speak.

Miss Kitka – Sunbeam Sunday

Sun Dappled was retrieved from my archive, I believe this was recorded maybe in 1985 or so.

This is one of my earlier original pieces, it is in what would nominally be the same open G tuning I believe that Leo Kottke used on songs like Owls and The Brain of the Purple Mountain, if I actually tuned to a concert G pitch. Apologies to those with perfect pitch.

I spent a couple years back in my early 20s working out much of Kottke’s music found on first first 1/2 dozen or so albums. I made recordings of my attempts to grind through his songs, and upon cursory review, came to jarring determination that I butchered his style with force, glee and alacrity. Primarily, my thumb is not wired to play with his precise and percussive articulation and his music doesn’t benefit from Fritz Kreisler style portamento.

So I tried to write my own things on theory that I would be best Chris Justice style guitarist ever, or at least I would just be doing interpretive violence to my own music and not the cream of others’ crops. Musically this song, is about 1/2 way between a Kottke tune and what I believe is my own idiosyncratic approach to solo guitar composition that eventually dribbled out when I was working on Ph D in math at SUNY at Buffalo.