Question for the Jazz lovers. Is Al DiMeola considered a jazz guitarist? I am a big fan of Al along with Django Reinhardt.
Let me add these contemporary artists off the top of my head... Brand X Brian Bromberg Chick Corea Fattburger Incognito Jean Luc Ponty Karizma - David Garfield Ottmar Liebert Yellowjackets
Except you have to be careful what you pick -- YK has a huge range of styles, from video game music to jpop (Escaflowne) to balladic (Wolf's Rain) to Techno (Stand Alone Complex). (Although "Inner Universe" mixes techno with Siberian with latin choral -- a mix that shouldn't work, but does.) See http://www.jameswong.com/ykproject/disc/music.php for a sampling of her various works. For "Cowboy Bebop" she set out to reproduce the Bop style -- successfully. The Bebop OSTs are pretty much all of that style. "Tank!" translates well to stand alone music, but the "long" versions of both "Real Folk Blues" and "Ask DNA" seem to end with a metaphoric groping for the exit. (Somebody show her a Beatles Album to prove that "real" music doesn't have to be six minutes long -- even if it means more victory laps than race.) Computer WAV editors can be useful here. In other modern jazz, look for albums by "FourPlay": Bob James, Lee Ritenour, Harvey Mason, and Nathan East. But you'd be surprised where you can rip the occasional good track -- Whitney Houston's "I'm Knockin'" stands up as decent jazz. (I've got a huge collection of CD's that I only got one or two tracks off of. Sigh.)
