Blues Salad - Part Two is an extension of Blues Salad, The Avocado Sessions - Part One which is available here. The Avocado Sessions - Blues Salad Part Two - Raw Fingerpicking and Slide Guitar is very primal. I think that’s what people like best about it. There are no frills. There are moments with some natural distortion on a few cuts where the mic was over-driven and it’s perfectly fine. A couple of cuts like the Strollin’ Blues, Baby Gone and Left Me, and Hello were recorded in the El Paso Library during my 2013 library tour. I performed in all of the libraries in town. The Killin’ Blues and Almost Took My Life were recorded on the living room floor of a Syracuse, NY apartment during a period when I was awaiting back surgery. They were performed on a Sears Silvertone children’s acoustic guitar I borrowed from my sister-in-law. Margarita, named for my wife and not the drink, is a little instrumental I wrote back in the day tuned to the key of ‘E’. Anyway, I'm pretty excited. Part Two is also very interesting to me for this reason. With the use of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (lalal.ai) I was able to revisit some of my older recordings mentioned above from the 70s and 80s. Where my fingerpicking was pretty decent, my vocals were not. Artificial Intelligence allowed me to remove my old vocals and redo them. It's incredible really. For instance, the first cut, The Train Song was written on November 17, 1977. It was recorded in Chillicothe, Ohio at The Recording Workshop. I was attending a six-week program learning how to record. I borrowed somebody's 12-string acoustic. I recently added the bass, snare, shaker, and new vocals. The guitar picking is the original track from Chillicothe. In the lead section of this original picking piece, I have attempted to create the sound of a train speeding it's ass down the railroad tracks to New Orleans. You can listen to full cuts here. This is a continuation of the 2920 Sessions recorded at El Rancho Pequeño in El Paso, TX.

The name Diddle comes from just what you might imagine: the act of diddling around, loosening up, freelancing, or just letting go. But most importantly, having fun. A huge thank you to bassist Curt Bushaw, keyboardist Ruben Gutierrez and saxophonist Frank Zona.

For the past three years, award-winning singer/songwriter, author and artist James Robert Murphy, AKA Austin Jimmy Murphy, has ventured off his well-beaten bluesy folk path he successfully traversed for decades and veered toward the less familiar, more complicated and syncopated rhythmic path of jazz. “It was a personal challenge that I accepted. It was a mental and physical strategy. An ultimate challenge. No doubt, you can write a million songs using the three chords that so many hit songs use. I have accomplished that many times over (in my own small way). But I wanted to face the biggest musical challenge a bluesy folksy musician can face. Creating tight jazz and funk rhythms laced with memorable melodies and sincere lyrics.”

Diddle: Instrumental Jazz Sessions came to life at the same time I released Blues Salad: The Avocado Sessions Part One. To note, I am writing or playing all of the time - every day. I always work to create something new. Something that hopefully won't be compared to something, or somebody. I find a rhythm and almost magically a theme comes to mind and off I go. Diddle borrows a couple of instrumental pieces from my release Jazz: The 2920 Sessions and Park North. From that point I knew I only needed a few more instrumental pieces to complete the project so I got to work and penned Devil's Tower, Hondo Pass, Brookside Drive, and I Won't Have It. It's magic. I'm not kidding. This is a continuation of the 2920 Sessions recorded at El Rancho Pequeño in El Paso, TX.