I’ve mentioned Alvin Youngblood Hart on this blog before, but he definitely deserves another mention. Here’s a video clip of Alvin playing “Big Mama’s Door”. I love the groove of this song, and the trio format really works for Hart’s music.

Speaking of Cream’s Politician, here’s Cream bassist Jack Bruce playing the song with Rory Gallagher. Notice that at the beginning of the video, Bruce is singing the riff to Gallagher, so maybe Gallagher didn’t know the song. I think he did a pretty good job!

In 2007, Eric Johnson participated in a concert called Love-In: A Musical Celebration, which was a celebration of the music of the ’60s. In addition to Johnson, the concert featured Buddy Miles of Jimi Hendrix and Electric Flag fame, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Jesse Colin Young of the Youngbloods, Vince Martell of Vanilla Fudge, among others.

For his part of the show, Johnson played songs by Cream and Jimi Hendrix. The video below features Johnson playing Politician by Cream as well as Johnson discussing how he felt when hearing the music of the 60s:

Gov’t Mule recently performed their new song “Broke Down on the Brazos” for Sirius XM’s Jam On channel. This is one of my favorite tracks from their new album, and I like their live take on it as well. It’s also interesting to watch Warren Haynes switch between the neck and bridge pickups throughout the song. Here’s the video of the performance:

Tim Thompson is a local Nashville guitarist who won the 2008 Walnut Valley Festival International Guitar competition. He’s a phenomenal player, as the video below displays.

I had a chance to see Tim live earlier this year as part of a collection of awesome acoustic guitarists, and Tim was definitely one of the stand out performers from the night. (To give you an idea of the other musicians he played with, the show included acoustic guitar legends Stephen Bennett, John Knowles, and the incomparable Tommy Emmanuel.) Thompson puts on a lively and entertaining show, and I highly recommend checking him out if he comes to your area.

(Thanks to David for the video link.)

Guitar Edge magazine recently spoke with Joe Bonamassa backstage at one of his shows. During the discussion, Bonamassa plays a lick and then breaks it down. He also talks about a new guitar acquisition, a Gibson Firebird.

Robben Ford’s instructional DVD “The Art of Blues Rhythm” looks to be an excellent resource for learning how to play rhythm in a blues context. I haven’t seen the whole DVD yet, but the clips I’ve seen have all been interesting and informative. Here’s one clip I found on YouTube:

Below is a video of Carl Verheyen playing his song “Constant as the Wind” from his album Trading 8s during rehearsals for his recent tour. Check out that Strat in action!

Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam recently opened for Chickenfoot during their US tour. On the final show at the Gibson Amphitheatre, Knowles got to jam with Chickenfoot. It had to be a little intimidating to share the stage with Joe Satriani, but Knowles held his own.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you get a chance to catch Knowles and Back Door Slam, you should definitely do it. They put on a great show.

Here’s Davy jamming with Chickenfoot:

To kick off the release of his new album Battle Studies, John Mayer played a concert at the Beacon Theatre in NYC and the concert was broadcast by Fuse. Mayer played a number of guitars throughout the show, including of course a collection of Strats and his signature Martin acoustic. He also played a Telecaster, which isn’t too much of a surprise as he’d posted videos of himself playing a Telecaster during the recording of the album. However, what was surprising was him playing an SG at the end of the show on “Friends, Lovers, or Nothing”. He got a great tone out of it through his Two Rock amps.

Below is a video of Mayer playing the song with his SG: