NAMM Notes, Riffs, and Wishes

After Fallow Pandemic Years, the NAMM Cranks up the Volume and Gear Pitch in Anaheim

Cece Winans at NAMM Show | Credit: Josef Woodard

In certain circles, especially where musicians, music retailers and musical gear folks dwell, the acronym NAMM buzzes with a kind of mythic presence. The big top annual meeting of the National Association of Music Merchants has regained its full glory and regalia after a few pandemic fallow years. As in the Before Times, it is a circus-like annual convention, networking zone and friendly cacophony of musical input which takes over the Anaheim Convention Center every mid-January. Disneyland is literally across the street, somehow fittingly.

Throngs of visitors go to NAMM for multiple reasons, from business dealings to metalheads queuing up for signatures by rockstar-status musicians with endorsement deals. I’ve gone for scores of years (too many to mention without aging myself) as a music journalist as well as a guitarist slobbering over gear. Also, I go as a cultural appreciator of the wonderful Charles Ives-ian chaos which descends on the floor, especially in the guitar and drum zones. Speedy “look at me” guitar riffs and drum-bashing coheres into an avant-garde feast, when viewed from a certain angle.

As for instruments I would happily accept as Christmas gifts, I ogled the new Martin double-neck (6 and 12-string), the “Grand J-28E.” An acoustic double-neck makes more sense than an electric double-neck — or the double-taking triple-neck electric by Minarik on the floor.

For a welcome burst of impractical creativity in instrument design, versus the more general purpose equipment and sellable motive of most gear merchants, a visit to the “Boutique Guitar Showcase” area is inspiring. A quote by modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi appears at the entrance: “things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the frame of mind to make them.”

The sculptural guitar designs this year include Escher-sketch-y designs by the German STS Guitars, and another Germany-based company, Verso, creators of deconstructed elements, in wood, sheet metal, and vacuum power coating color. Wild and sleek in appearance, they address function alongside reinventive form. I’ll take one of those, to go.

Just across the aisle from the Boutique Guitars was the decades-deep Santa Barbaran claim to fame at NAMM, the booth of custom guitar pickup guru Seymour Duncan. Duncan has been equipping and endorsing guitarists — from the legendary to the down-the-street weekend jammer — since 1976, operating out of Santa Barbara and now Goleta. This year, the new crop of products included the Billy Gibbons signature “Hades Gate” humbucker pickup and the Joe Bonamassa “Greenburst” Stratocaster pickups.

Seeking some refuge and rest, I wended up to the second floor Taylor Guitar booth, but unfortunately the former woodsy den with a stage from past years has winnowed down to a more workaday space. We see the rise and fall of music companies by the size of their booths — or at least their willingness to go all out or cinch it in at NAMM, year by year.

Other impressions grabbed me from the jungle of stimuli during my one-day “speed NAMM” visit. The Leslie/Hammond organ booth played host to the excellent B-3 player Jim Alfredson, jamming with a chromatic harp player to the tune of Toots Thielmanns’ “Bluesette,” while keyboardists of various genres, ages and races gathered at the go-to keyboard mecca of the Nord booth. A company called Lutefish showed off a streaming device for connecting musicians and allowing them to “jam online in real time,” without the former pesky problem of latency. Musicians could have used this during the COVID times.

As a nice holy capper to a NAMM day, the big courtyard concert in the early evening “Night of Worship” show (the point has been made that the Christian music market accounts for 30 percent of the music marketplace). Super-soulful gospel singer CeCe Winans wowed the shoulder-to-shoulder NAMM crowd. The church ain’t dead yet, or at least the demographic-spanning power of good gospel music. Call it the not-necessarily-sacred church and marketplace of NAMM. See namm.org.