Janet D'Addario, a prodigious creative and philanthropic force throughout the world, and wife of D'Addario Chairman, Jim D'Addario, died on June 14th in her home, surrounded by her entire family.
The cause was complications from gall bladder cancer, said her husband, Jim D'Addario.
Janet Marie D'Addario was born on December 10th, 1948 in Nassau County. Her education circumnavigated Long Island: St. Brigid in Westbury; St. Dominic's High School in Oyster Bay, and Nassau Community College in Garden City.
In 1966, the course of her life would forever change when the 18-year-old lead singer of a folk group met another young, budding musician who was instantly smitten by her tender voice and magnetic personality. Jim and Janet D'Addario would go on to marry, sing and perform on stage together, and start an extraordinary 50-year partnership that produced a family, a philanthropic legacy, and the most prestigious music accessories business in the world.
When D'Addario & Co. was first founded in 1973, Janet used her creative talents to design the company's advertising as well as the packaging design for all of their products. As a fledgling organization, Janet's vision and compassion had a tremendous influence on the development of the culture that guides the organization today.
She would go on to wear many hats, including head of Artist Relations and co-founder of the D'Addario Foundation, which continues to provide music education to young children in underserved communities. Janet served as the Managing Director of the Foundation for 20 years—helping to raise awareness for the cause by producing classical music concerts in cities around the world.
Ms. D'Addario was known by family and friends for her peerless compassion and generosity—fervently believing that actions mean far more than just words. She would go on to serve 11 years on the Board of Long Island Cares, the charity created by Harry Chapin to eradicate hunger on Long island. As a devout Catholic, she supported numerous Catholic charities across the globe, the Long Island Catholic Hospital system as well as her own, personal parish, St. Brigid.
The one charity that held a particularly special place in her heart was Providence House, a New York institution that provides transitional housing for homeless women and children.
"Providence House is, in so many ways, the very embodiment of my wife...when she saw pain, she wanted to ease it. When she saw hunger, she brought food. When she saw homelessness, she provided shelter. But most importantly when Janet saw someone with no hope, she worked hard to provide them with the tools to restore their will to overcome the challenges they were facing.," said Jim D'Addario.
Ms. D'Addario served as a Board Member of Providence House for 21 years and as its President from 2004-2019. Over those years, she helped raise millions of dollars to ensure thousands of women and children would have a pathway to a brighter future. Her invaluable work led to Janet and Jim being named the first People of Hope in 2002 and the construction of the 43-unit D'Addario Residence in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
In addition to her philanthropic work, Janet was an avid foodie and prolific painter. Not surprisingly, her greatest joy was bringing friends and family together for a homemade meal and the occasional musical performance by she and Jim, as well as their many musical friends.
Janet D'Addario was the daughter of Robert James Carbone and Annabelle (Eannaccone) Carbone of Westbury, New York. She is survived by her loving husband of over 50 years, Jim D'Addario, and their three children: Julie (Pat); Amy (Marcus) and Robert (Gina). She is also survived by eight grandchildren, and her beloved dogs, Dave and Blue.
In lieu of any gifts or flowers, the family is asking anyone wishing to pay their respects to consider a modest donation to Providence House (https://www.providencehouse.org/support-our-work).
Keep the giveaways rolling! Enter Stompboxtober Day 22 for your chance to win a pedal from Walrus Audio!
Walrus Audio Lore Reverse Soundscape Generator
Create the soundtrack to your storybook adventure with the Lore Reverse Soundscape Generator. Made up of five different programs, the Lore is an ambient creation machine built around reverse delay and reverbs. Featuring two DSP chips running in series, each with their own analog feedback path, the Lore takes you on an adventurous journey rich with themes of reversing, time-stretching, pitch-shifting, and vast ambiance.
Joe Satriani’s G3 returns with Reunion Live, an album that sets out to capture the energy and essence of their sold-out 2024 US tour.
This reunion features guitar icons Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Steve Vai—who first joined forces in 1996. The live album showcases the boundary-pushing performances that define G3. Fans will enjoy full sets from each guitarist, including hits like Satriani’s “Sahara,” Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover,” and Vai’s “For the Love of God,” along with a thrilling encore jam of Hendrix and Clapton covers.
In addition to the live experience, Reunion Live offers new live albums from each artist, plus a collaborative supergroup LP. Available in multiple formats, the deluxe edition features a different colored vinyl for each artist, a special splatter LP for the jam sessions, and a 64-page photo book, divided into separate artists and jam chapters, documenting this monumental event. It is also available in a 2CD set with a 16-page photo booklet. The album perfectly mirrors the live tour format, with individual sets followed by an epic jam session featuring all three guitarists.
Pre-order here.
Satriani says, “This live album recorded at The Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles captures all the energy of the live performances while shining a spotlight on the ever-evolving art of playing the electric guitar.”
Tracklisting (all formats):
- Gravitas (Vai)
- Avalancha (Vai)
- Little Pretty Intro (Vai)
- Little Pretty (Vai)
- Tender Surrender (Vai)
- Zeus in Chains (Vai)
- Teeth of the Hydra (Vai)
- For the Love of God (Vai)
- Land of 1000 Dances (Johnson)
- Righteous (Johnson)
- Trail of Tears (Johnson)
- On-Ramp Improv (Johnson)
- Freeway Jam (Johnson)
- Desert Rose (Johnson)
- Venus Reprise (Johnson)
- Raspberry Jam Delta-V (Satriani)
- Surfing with the Alien (Satriani)
- Satch Boogie (Satriani)
- Sahara (Satriani)
- Nineteen Eighty (Satriani)
- Big Bad Moon (Satriani)
- Always with Me, Always with You (Satriani)
- Sumer Song (Satriani)
- Introductions
- Crossroads (Encore Jam)
- Spanish Castle Magic (Encore Jam)
- Born to Be Wild (Encore Jam)
Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney, and Emmett Kelly formed a casual supergroup around their shared love of beat-up, lo-fi guitar sounds. They tell us how the band and their debut self-titled record came together in a dying Brooklyn studio.
Stephen Malkmus and Matt Sweeney go way back.
The two musicians and songwriters have been part of the same cohort since Malkmus’ band Pavement took off in the early 1990s. Pavement went the way of indie-rock royalty, defining an entire new generation of slightly left-of-center guitar music. Sweeney slugged it out for years inbands like Chavez and Zwan, that never reached those levels of influence. Still, he was an indispensable sideman and in-demand collaborator. But it wasn’t until just before the pandemic that the two friends recorded together, on Malkmus’ solo acoustic record, Traditional Techniques. It went well—really well.
So when Sweeney suggested they get together again, Malkmus was game. But this time, Sweeney invited some friends. He knew the guitarist Emmett Kelly from their time playing with Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and the two developed a bond over a mutual aesthetic sensibility on the guitar. And Kelly played in a duo called the Double with drummer Jim White, another serial collaborator best known for his instrumental Australian group Dirty Three. So, White and Kelly got invites. (It turned out that Malkmus was a fan of Kelly’s lo-fi weirdo-folk project Cairo Gang.)
The Hard Quartet - "Earth Hater" Official Music Video
They all met up at Strange Weather, a Brooklyn studio where Sweeney was working. The studio was on its deathbed: The buildings on either side of it had been demolished, and it was slated for the same fate to prep the way for a new condo build. The owner and house engineer, Daniel Schlett, was depressed. Sweeney figured some fun, no-stakes sessions—committed to the studio’s original vision of total artistic freakness—were called for. “The idea was like, ‘Let’s go and try recording, everybody bring songs and we’ll see what happens, and if it sucks, we don’t care because it’ll just be a nice thing to do in this beautiful studio that’s going away,’” he explains.
When the foursome initially met at Strange Weather in early summer 2023, there were no plans and no expectations. Over a year later, we have the Hard Quartet and their self-titled debut record, an epic, 15-song double LP that captures the spirit of adventure, imagination, and unedited, base instinct that unites the four musicians. When time came to pick a name for the project, Malkmus suggested they use the word “band” or “quartet.” “Matt was just immediately like, ‘Hard Quartet, because we’re hard as fuck,’” laughs Kelly.
“Finding phrases that make it sound not boring is the basic idea: simple things with twists.” —Stephen Malkmus
Sweeney’s boldness, in both the band name and in pulling all the players together, is perhaps the key to all of this. “Matt’s always confident, or at least he likes to pretend he is, in a good way,” says Malkmus. “He knows that’s how music should be sometimes. Most people that make music actually are confident or they wouldn’t do it. They like their own music and they’re confident it’s good, and then they have to kind of act. They’re also needful and worried that people won’t like it, and want people to like it but also think that it’s good.”
The Hard Quartet is heavily indebted to ’90s indie and alternative rock, but the 15-track double LP dips into Americana, country, and weirder territories, too.
Maybe Sweeney was being tongue-in-cheek, but more likely, it’s just the honesty of a group of musicians who can’t be bothered to affect an air of deep reasoning or artsy symbolism. Though, Hard Quartet isn’t terribly hard music. It moseys through different guitar-based genres, most of it fairly lo-fi and garage-ish. There’s plenty of Pavement-leaning indie-rock, charged with clever wordplay, edge-of-breakup chording, and general slacker charisma. There’s a certain Guided by Voices sensibility to it all, too; the feeling that guitar rock doesn’t need to be perfect or cohesive or together to be good.
Songs on Hard Quartet shamble along loosely between movements and moods, and often, they sort of dogleg and fall apart after wanky outros, just like the end of an in-person jam. Opener “Chrome Mess” is a thrashing, dark, noisy piece of indie-grunge, followed by the quirky, fuzzy alternative of lead single “Earth Hater” and its nursery-rhyme chorus. “Rio’s Song” is like a gentler, college-rock rendition of T. Rex, featuring Sweeney pulling off a Marc Bolan vocal character. Another Sweeney-led joint, “Killed by Death,” is driven by White’s snare-roll shuffle and plucky Americana guitars. The back-to-back of “Six Deaf Rats” into “Action for Military Boys,” both with Malkmus on lead vocals, pull the record into more borderless, atypical grounds. Hard Quartet feels deeply, profoundly artistic not in production or complexity, but via a feeling of total artistic freedom and intuition.
“It’s not magic, it’s actually just work and saying, ‘Do it again.’” —Stephen Malkmus
“When you’re doing a first thing, it’s not so bad to go simple,” says Malkmus. “Like, you know, to have these adherents of the Velvet Underground and the Stones. These songs are like, I wouldn’t say simple, they’re complexly simple to give us some credit.”
Malkmus has been watching a YouTuber who switches between two chords on piano while playing nearly limitless inversions of each chord. “He takes the mystery away from things that I do that I think are really clever or something,” he continues. “At any rate, that’s what we’re doing too. But pianos somehow have less magic because you can’t bend the notes too much. It’s all math, almost. Of course there’s feel and there’s going off the grid, but with the guitar sometimes it feels more magical. Those real simple little moves you make with the bending of the strings. It’s chops and it’s also ideas, creativity. Finding phrases that make it sound not boring is the basic idea: Simple things with twists.”
Stephen Malkmus's Gear
Stephen Malkmus, performing here with his band the Jicks in 2018, has known Matt Sweeney since the beginning of Pavement. After he invited Sweeney to play on his 2020 acoustic record, Sweeney had the idea to take things a step further.
Photo by Mike White
Guitars
- 1959 Fender Jazzmaster
- 1965 Höfner Verithin
- 1958 Martin 000-18 strung with flatwounds
- Vintage Gibson Firebird
- Vintage Guild S-100
Effects
- Roger Mayer Axis Fuzz
- Love Pedal High Power Tweed Twin
- Strymon Flint
- Strymon El Capistan
- Foxx Tone Machine
Malkmus likes to dig around for different voicings, but he prefers to do his digging by feel. “What you don’t know is a good thing,” he says. “Too much knowledge, I think it can hurt you at that early time instead of just being sort of primitive.”
The four members of Hard Quartet share a “musical language,” according to Malkmus, which made it easy to create without much structure to their initial sessions at Strange Weather. “I don’t think any of us wanted to spend the whole time saying, ‘It goes like this,’” says Malkmus. “We just kind of wanted to start messing around, having fun.”
“There’s a throughline in everything I like, that is this aspect of harshness, or bloodiness. Things need to be bloody for me to like them.” —Emmett Kelly
Part of the three guitarists’ shared language on the instrument is a passion for wonky sounds. Kelly explains the aesthetic in-depth: “We really connect on things sounding like shit, kind of. I love the sound of the guitar when it sounds like it’s about to die or it’s broken. We love this music that’s like fucked up and damaged, like the rawest, most screwed-up thing. There’s a throughline in everything I like, that is this aspect of harshness, or bloodiness. Things need to be bloody for me to like them. We just want to sound fucked up and terrible, but it’s gotta sound really good, you know what I mean? You pass through this pain threshold, and that’s when you start to hear all these beautiful, weird harmonic things, especially with a damaged amp or a really insane overdrive or fuzz. You just start to hear aspects of harmonic series come shooting out in really interesting ways. Sometimes you’ll hear phantom notes, things that ring-modulate the sound a little bit.” One time in a studio, Kelly’s friend pointed out a pedal that he said was the least useful pedal of all time. “I immediately went home and bought one,” says Kelly. “I mean, none of this shit’s useful. Should we be plumbers?”
Matt Sweeney's Gear
Matt Sweeney and Emmett Kelly became close friends while on tour with Will Oldham. Here, they flank Oldham on a tour supporting 2022’s Superwolves.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
Guitars
- 1958 Martin 000-18, strung with flatwounds
- Vintage Fender Esquire
- Vintage Gibson ES-335TD
- 1970 Martin dreadnought acoustic
Amps
- Austen Hooks Bell and Howell Filmosound amp
Effects
- Blackstrap Electrik Co. fuzz pedal
Hard Quartet’s debut record is also shaped by the fact that none of the players brought their own gear to the studio; Malkmus, Kelly, and Sweeney all opted to use whatever guitars, amps, and pedals were kicking around at Strange Weather, and later at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, where Sweeney secured the group a few days of extra sessions. A late-’50s Fender Jazzmaster, ’60s Gibson Explorer, vintage Höfner Verithin, 1958 Martin 000-18, Squier Bass VI, and purple Guild S-100 were among the tools used to create Hard Quartet. Malkmus says he didn’t even want to bring his own guitars. “I like to use new shit all the time,” he says. “It’s just fun to hear the little tonal differences. I don’t really have a sound. I just want to try new things and I’m not afraid to do that. And we all know it’s in your hands.”
“I don’t even feel like it’s a guitar record, but obviously that’s all we fucking know how to play.” —Matt Sweeney
“I’ve gone through the whole gamut of identity crises with guitar and I’ve gotten to a point where I really just want something that won’t break if I check it on an airplane,” Kelly says. His main guitar is a 1988 Japan-made Fender Stratocaster, with the middle pickup removed and a TBX circuit instead of the traditional tone control. Kelly is skeptical of too much attention put on gear. “There’s a lot of artifice in music and gear and it all seems to be related to this whole kind of like, rehashing, redoing; sort of like the AI conversation,” he says. “It’s like, just play fucking music. It doesn’t matter.”
The three guitarists often played through one of Sweeney’s amps, built by amp tech Austen Hooks and housed inside an old Bell and Howell Filmosound projector. But it was mostly a matter of convenience—the amp was simply ready at hand. “I think me and Steve are similar in that when you’re making the thing, you’re not thinking about the gear,” says Sweeney. “You’re grateful that there’s stuff there that you can pick up and play.”
Emmett Kelly's Gear
Hard Quartet (from left: Kelly, Sweeney, Malkmus, and White) bonded over an affinity for deliciously crappy guitar tones. Their debut record is a treasure trove of lo-fi 6-string sounds.
Photo by Atiba Jefferson
Guitars and Basses
- 1988 Japan-made Fender Stratocaster with middle pickup removed and TBX tone circuit
- 1994 Fender Jerry Donahue Signature Telecaster
- 2005 Martin 00-28
- 1959 Les Paul Jr. Double Cut
- 1957 Fender Esquire
- Squire Bass VI with Lollar overwound pickups
Amps
- Fender ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb with added master volume
- Peavey Roadmaster with 2x12 cabinet
- 1950s Supro
- Ampeg B12XT
Effects
- Crowther Double Hotcake
- Crowther Prunes & Custard
- Death By Audio Octave Clang
- Fredric Effects Verzerrer
Strings & Picks
- La Bella Pure Vintage (.011–0.50)
- La Bella Silk & Steel
- La Bella Bass VI Stainless Flats
Given the players’ combined ethos, it’s not really a surprise to learn that they rarely, if ever, discussed who would play what instrument on any given song. Leads were improvised and swapped at random, and the bass guitar was passed around from song to song. Some songs and parts would come together quickly; others required massaging. Having to plug away at something doesn’t make it any less valuable than an instant hit, says Malkmus. “It’s not magic,” he says. “It’s actually just work and saying, ‘Do it again.’”
The equal-footing, collaborative nature of the Hard Quartet has been a bright spot for Kelly, who was getting burnt out on the emotional anxiety and tension of being a bandleader. With Malkmus, Sweeney, and White, there are combined decades of camaraderie that equate to an open, trusting ease. “It’s probably safe to say that the Hard Quartet is about the continual relationship between each two people,” says Kelly. “Everyone had a strong connection with each other in some way so that new relationships could then develop.”
In the end, Sweeney’s little jam experiment has paid off. “I’m happy with what we did on it guitar-wise, and that’s because we played together,” says Sweeney. “I don’t even feel like it’s a guitar record, but obviously that’s all we fucking know how to play.”
YouTube It
The Hard Quartet have a ’90s-style, apartment-stoop jam in this video for the Sweeney-fronted, alt-rock-meets-alt-country tune, “Rio’s Song.”
When our columnist stumbled upon this 12-string hanging streetside in NYC, he knew he’d struck gold.
In the pre-internet age, guitar hunting was a “shoe leather” pursuit, requiring continuously scouring music stores, pawnshops, junk stores, small ads, and flea markets. Late one Sunday back in the mid 1990s, I had scorelessly scoped the fleas and antique dealers around 26th St. and 6th Ave. in Manhattan before idly heading west to the usually barren “junk” fields that cropped up on 7th Ave.
Suddenly, hanging from a wire fence, this 12-string loomed into sight, but what a sorry sight it was. The detached back and several braces were stuffed into a shopping bag. The bridge was splintered, the top a nest of cracks, and all covered with a veneer of grime. The sad-looking wreck, tagged at $100, had been there all day. After a quick perusal (while silently calculating luthier bills), I proffered the classic end-of-the-day “50 bucks on that?” I got the dealer’s weary side-eye, but quickly accepted his predictable $75 counter. Later showing off my find to guitar friends, the general opinion was it had been better left hanging!
And yet, luthier Bill Merchant was willing to undertake the project. He sealed the many cracks in the top and reattached the badly shrunken back, adding extra center strips to fit it to the rim. He also reset the neck and crafted an exact replica bridge and bridge plate. Recently, after decades under tension, the top was beginning to fold up around the soundhole—so luthier Amy Mills added diagonal wing braces on either side to stabilize it. We left the extensive playwear (including missing pieces of the inlaid pickguard) unaltered, as it befits this battered but beautiful survivor of a unique time and place in New York musical history.
This guitar was made within walking distance of where I found it, on Kenmare St. in Manhattan. What’s left of the label reads “A. Galiano, fabbricante di Chitarre e Mandolini.” There was no “A. Galiano”; the name was a sort of generic brand shared by several small NYC Italian-American music shops from the 1910s into the Depression. The term “Italian Guild” has been applied to them, but there was no organized guild, just sometimes interrelated-but-independent immigrant luthiers working in New York’s bustling Italian community.
“Suddenly, hanging from a wire fence, this 12-string loomed into sight, but what a sorry sight it was.”
One such luthier was Raphael Ciani, often remembered as John D’Angelico’s uncle and mentor. A few Galianos also have “Ciani” on the label; identical features allow others to be attributed to him. Ciani appeared in New York dealing musical goods by 1904. By 1913, he had settled his shop at 57 Kenmare St., a block from where D’Angelico would set up in 1932. John was born in 1905; by around age 9, he was already apprenticing in Ciani’s shop.
Raphael died in 1923 at the young age of 44, leaving the 18-year-old D’Angelico in charge of the shop. Ciani/Galiano instruments of the 1920s were built under John’s supervision, if not by his own hand. Survivors include different styles of mandolins and rare 6- and 12-string maple-bodied flattops like this one, a distinctive shop specialty in the 1920s. Before f-hole archtops existed, these steel-string Galianos were intended for ensemble use, built to compete with accordions and violins and to cut through the din in cafes, restaurants and vaudeville theaters. Mostly associated with Piedmont blues players or Mexican performers like Lydia Mendoza, 1910–’20s 12-string guitars were cited at the time for supposedly offering the greatest possible volume.
This is a large guitar for the period, 16 1/8" wide and 4 1/2" deep, with a 26" scale. It has solid maple back and sides and a spruce top bordered with colored-wood marquetry and bound in rosewood. The mandolin-style celluloid pickguard with inset pearl is inlaid into the top. The swooping “mustache” bridge sits over a wide, flat bridge plate and ladder bracing. The one-piece, soft-V mahogany neck has a bound “ebonized” fretboard with a common New York-shaped pearl inlay pattern. The initials “JV” are inlaid in pearl on the bound headstock. Such Ciani/Galianos can rarely be dated exactly, but a similar 6-string guitar exists with “July 15 ’22” on the label.
Only a handful of these deluxe maple Ciani/Galianos are still in existence. The National Music Museum in South Dakota has an even more ornate 12-string. Country pioneer Ernest Stoneman played a similar jumbo 6-string that lacked the inlaid pickguard and personalized headstock. He likely obtained it during 1925–’26 New York recording trips. Before his Gibson endorsement, Nick Lucas’ 1922 Pathé Actuelle recordings “Teasing the Frets” and “Picking the Guitar” (the first recorded flatpicked guitar instrumentals) were almost certainly waxed with a Ciani/Galiano. In a 1970s interview, Lucas related buying the guitar in New York for $35 in the early ’20s.
About a century along, this Galiano 12-string remains a fully playable instrument, offering a powerful, bright-but-still-mellow sound and plenty of volume. If relegated to historical footnotes now, the best Ciani/Galiano instruments were not only beautiful but advanced for their time. Raphael Ciani did not live to see it, but his protégé would build on what they accomplished in the next decade, becoming the defining master of the archtop guitar.