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Reviews
Review of "Guitar Mediations Of A Setting Sun"
By: Gerry Fialka
Veteran music journeyman Edward LaGrossa creates an all-encompassing sound with just his voice and guitar. He is truly the people's guitarist upholding his three "T" percept: Technique, Theory and Taste. LaGrossa cements the fact that these requirements for inspired and inspiring music are accomplished completely by his own Tremendous Truthful Talent. He gushes originality while tapping a fountain of authentic Rock'n'Roll fluid from Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix.
This solo acoustic trip starts with an instrumental entitled SURRENDER. The fullness of just one man's guitar evokes the three elements that Chinese painters employ: eye, heart and hand. In this case, we see the eye turning into the ear. The canvas is filled with questions for the thinking listener: Should music resolve? Should time signatures change? What is fate? Sometimes leaving us in the void, McLuhan's aphorism "the gap is where the action is" came to mind. The harmonics that end this masterpiece opener remind me of Steve Howe reincarnating Peter Green's OH WELL.
Edward, who is often heard playing on the Venice Boardwalk, continues to live in the present with END OF 444. His vocal stylization proclaims, "where her and I can be alone" on COME & TAKE ME with sizzling light and heat. LaGrossa really knows and practices daily that the shared experience is where it's at. That is home.
Striking his strings with percussive dexterity, it's ON MY WAY TO GLORY. His awareness of volume dynamics and silence comes through on IN THE FLOW. This piece is so sensitive to not over-playing, it literally breathes deep. THE AWAKENING resonants the chewy caramel center, or so-called "nutmeat." Frank Zappa called it "the crux of the biscuit." LaGrossa croons consciousness with lines like "we are of one divine mind" and "we can share" amidst this celestial air molecule sculpture.
TRANCE DANCE cavorts bold ambition into a supersonic out-of-body experience. THE TRUE YOU recalls Walter Paters' axiom "All art aspires to the condition of music." What is the condition of music? Why does being in love come so dang close to the trance of honest music? WALK ON THE BEACH shuffles perfectly into ONE GOD, invoking the bumper sticker, "My God loves your God." The passion of mindfulness in creating this entire cd on his 50th birthday reaffirms openness and LaGrossa's be-here-nowness.
NO SUCH THING AS TIME spirals upward in that cumulative and cyclical cone of human moral progress. One hears the exhale as the guitar ring slowly fades. The last track, DAY TURNS TO NIGHT...AGAIN, is Edward's verbal celebration of the ending, yet knowing that rebirth (Dali called it "phoenixology") is the resolve. Humans always rise and fall, fall and rise. James Joyce utilized Vico's cycle and sang "Finnegan's Wake!" Finns awake! Wake again and again, music lovers. If the listener starts this cd exactly 53 minutes before the sunset, they can stroll the magic hour in golden song.
Edward LaGrossa's new cd hoicks up the sweet yin-yangification of life's contradictions and lovingly cries out in musical laughtears. Manifest the future. Get it and live.
Gerry Fialka
7 Dudley Film and Music
pfsuzy@aol.com
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