by Julia Crowe
I lay on my back under the great belly of the piano and listened to my grandmother chirp through her usual spiel. No cooking utensils, no hot-plates, no hi-fis, no visitors. She emphasized the word visitors with a certain delicacy and followed it with an abrupt cough. At some juncture, I pushed a series of key pins from underneath the piano. My grandmother jumped up, berating me to get out from under the piano before the entire thing collapsed and crushed me to death.
He unzipped the long, soft black case he’d brought with him that had been sitting at his feet. “I’ve seen you jumping rope out front,” he told me. “I picked up this for you. Figured you might like it.” For a guitar, it was odd-looking — homemade with a thick, U-shaped neck, a rainbow-stained back and grimy strings bowing away from a warped fret board. My first reaction was dismay because it suggested I was going to have to be one of THOSE people — up to something. And it was entirely up to me to figure out what.
Taking advantage of our stunned silence, this man seized the chance to express his admiration for the baby grand player piano. He caressed its keyboard and asked my grandmother if he could play it. She let him. He was only an ear-trained musician, he told us, hinting that we should not expect much. I noticed that in spite of his neatly dressed appearance, he had open and oozing sores all over his fingers. But my focus soon shifted to the astounding sound pouring out of the piano. When he started to sing, his voice filled the room and soared like a canopy of birds in flight. For a moment, I forgot where I was, and when he finished, his music soaked into my skin with a chill.
Not to be outdone, my grandmother pulled out a Scott Joplin piano roll manufactured by the Duolian Company and demonstrated how it snapped into place in a drawer that pulled out from under the keyboard. My grandmother flicked a tiny brass switch and stood back as a gust of air pushed through the piano and commenced the wheezy works and grinding gears. The old piano thundered out a loud ragtime melody as an impossible splay of ivory bobbed up and down all at once.
Before the last chord died away, this man had been granted the key to the basement room, #19. My grandmother considered herself the household expert when it came to music, though her knowledge of it seemed to begin and end in 1925. She sang a song called “Flat Foot Floogie with a Floy Floy” but liked to sing it as “Flat Foot Floozie with a Floy-Floy.” Her other favorite was “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” and she had mixed admiration for Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” Though she claimed to hate the song, saying it was too modern for her taste, I heard her singing it often enough that I couldn’t resist breaking the reverie of her warble with my own hound-dog howl of the chorus. My grandmother tersely informed me I couldn’t carry a tune if I tried, which my mother chimed in was no surprise since she couldn’t, either. So I had better find a way to play this new guitar while keeping my mouth shut.
My mother reluctantly sent me off to a night class at an Evanston grammar school to learn chords from a college girl who taught us tunes about dead American rebels, like Jesse James, Bill Bailey, Tom Dooley and John Brown. After a few weeks, she recommended I study with her bearded boyfriend, a music student at Northwestern University. I met up with him at the school’s ivy-covered practice hall known as The Beehive for the dissonant drone of heavy-footed pianists, belting trombone players and shrilly opera singers, all of them racing up and down their scales in a battle for supremacy between rest notes.
If I showed up early and found a practice room, I would read the graffiti left on the wall, spiraling riffs of debate on Philip Glass versus Steve Reich versus Arvo Pärt, followed by the virtues of sopranos versus mezzos, pianists versus violinists, who played their instruments best in bed, who didn’t and why. These messages would start out with a biting spider of wit that attracted progressively stupider comments until all of it became painted over in white. If I showed up early and could not find a practice room I became a hallway freak show — the kid with the funny-looking guitar. Even the Italian janitor would ask me, “Bella bambina, let’s see you do a G chord.”
I learned to sight-read and, by the summer’s end, my Northwestern student teacher sent me on to luthier Richard Bruné’s studio where I studied with guitar instructor Len Novy. Bruné’s studio was built to look like a white-plastered, Spanish hacienda, with ironwork grilles and an arched wooden door, and it smelled of sawdust and cedar inside. If I arrived early, Bruné would show me his latest project and pull down enormous sheets of cedar and spruce to point out their wood grain and color. I tinkered on his latest harpsichord and admired the ivory doily inlay of one of his guitars that was going to be shipped off to the Smithsonian. During my lesson, my teacher would spend the first few minutes answering his phone or else discussing his crush on Olivia Newton-John in Grease, the moment she breaks into singing “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” Then we’d finally launch into the intricacies of a Sor study while the last minutes ticked off under the orange glow of his prominently placed Westclox alarm clock. Two years later, with the help of Sonia Michelson, I was playing “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” by Tarregá, études by Brouwer and Villa-Lobos.
Room #19 didn’t stay around long enough to see any of this. Three months into his time with us, he set the house on fire with a sock balled up inside an electric popcorn machine and disappeared in the middle of the night. I smelled the smoke and woke my family, who then roused the twenty-one other tenants and shepherded everyone to safety through the thick velvety black plumes of smoke spewing into the back hallway. Firemen in masks with tanks on their backs stampeded through the front and back doors, shouting to each other as they tromped through the house, swinging their axes at the windows and shattering them. In the panic, the one possession I had thought to grab had been my warp-necked guitar.
Eli Kassner
Eli Kassner established the guitar program at the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. His more notable classical guitar students include filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Liona “The First Lady of the Guitar” Boyd and Norbert Kraft, who is the producer of the Naxos label’s guitar collection.
To tell you the truth I do not exactly remember when I received my first guitar. I was probably about seven years old. My oldest sister played mandolin and wanted an accompaniment so my parents bought a cheap little guitar with nylon strings. I went to a local teacher around the corner who did not know much about playing the guitar. That is how I started learning the guitar, by learning to play chords, perform accompaniment and read music. I had that guitar for only a very short time.
I stopped and started with playing. As a kid, one will have these fluctuations in interests. But then I had to leave my parents in Vienna, Austria, to flee from the Nazis and I had no guitar. Just before I left, my parents bought me another guitar, which I took with me on my back.
I did start on the violin, and I had a quarter size violin at four years old but, again, it was an issue of time, money and teachers. When I came to Israel, there was a very good violinist in the kibbutz who saw that I had talent, good pitch and intonation. In the kibbutz, we had a very famous cellist, Joachim Stutschewsky. I played Mendelssohn for him, and he asked me to come to visit him in Tel Aviv, which I did a year later. He gave me a violin, which I’ve had all these years. But my love has always been the guitar.
The sound of the guitar is what attracted me. I loved the harp as a kid and also the cello, but with the guitar, I knew I had the instrument that could emulate both of these sounds. The guitar is cheaper, more portable. The harp is too big. I played guitar all those years but not seriously — I just played. The one really good classical guitar I had, I bought once I arrived in Canada in 1950 and started working at a music store. I was playing guitar as people browsed through the sheet music, and one man came up to me and asked, “Would you like to teach me that?” And I said, “Well, if you’d like to be my guinea pig, I’ll be happy to teach you.” So I was teaching him and, before long, I had twenty students. It did not take long for word to spread quickly, and teaching beca
me a source of income.
I had no family left once I left Vienna — all of them had been killed. They were shipped to Russia and executed there. Once I came to Canada, I started studying the guitar seriously and attending the guitar societies. The guitar society had Segovia come every year to play, and at one party he asked me study with him at Santiago de Compostela. I went a couple of times. He was definitely my idol and inspiration, but then I’d also had the good luck to get in touch with other people whom I could study with, like Ida Presti. At that time there were no teachers available so readily, so one learned and picked up what one could. There was no such thing as a school or university. Teaching was a very neglected and unavailable commodity. Some great players became so scared that you might lift secrets from them.
Whenever I hear the guitar, it gives me great pleasure. When I went to Segovia, Bream or Presti concerts, to hear them play was a great experience. I met Odair and Sergio Assad at a party in Rio de Janeiro. Sérgio Abreu held the party. The Assads were such young boys and their playing was fantastic. It’s an ongoing thing. I still derive great joy from listening to my students.
I always knew the guitar was my calling.
Paco Peña
Flamenco guitarist Paco Peña has had a forty-year career that includes sharing the stage with Jimi Hendrex. Peña found a spare moment during the First World Guitar Congress at Towson University in Maryland to do this interview in the front lobby of the Marriott Hotel, with the coffee cart perking aromatically fresh brew nearby and giant cicadas buzzing ferociously outside in the sultry summer heat.
I suppose I had about three first guitars. The first memory of a guitar that I have is maybe from when I was six or seven years old. My brother, who was older than me, had a guitar, and this was the first one that I picked up to tinker with. It was a big Miguel Rodriguez guitar from Córdoba. I had wanted to do what my big brother was doing.
Very soon after that, in school, I encountered a group of kids playing music. Some of the music they were playing was melodic, like the bandurrias, and folk-type of music. I wanted to play so the teacher allocated a guitar to me. It was a horrifying instrument, very dark and very cheap, with steel strings. I didn’t know better, and I was really keen about wanting to learn. It was a remarkable time for me because the teacher encouraged me. We did not have much money so I had to wait until I was eighteen before I finally had a guitar of my own, a Manuel Reyes from Córdoba. It was amazing. Emotionally, I suppose, I feel attached to those three guitars in different stages.
For me, the guitar was the normal thing to play — not only was it in my home but it was the instrument that was most accessible in my community. A lot of other kids might have chosen violin or piano but I did not belong to that class — we were not a cultured family. Flamenco is a music medium much more popular in poorer communities.
I was so fascinated by the guitar. I used to spend hours and hours and hours playing it, late at night doing the patio there, just for myself. My ambitions were not ambitions, as such, but dreams. I did not know much about flamenco or any other type of music, but I used to watch shows featuring parties with a singer and guitar. I used to dream someday about the possibility of me being famous like those successful people in music. I was just a kid. I was dreaming, never thinking it was something I would do. It was fantasy.
My school was very interesting because we did not just play flamenco — flamenco just was not done in that group of kids — we played light Spanish music in the folk tradition. It was rather more about learning to play harmony and subtlety than playing guitar. There was melody, second voices, third voices, accompaniment and a discovery about the arrangement of music. It was very constructive.
I started teaching soon after that. We were very poor, so I started teaching groups like that. I was about twelve or thirteen years old time and earning a little bit of money for it. When I really fell in love with flamenco, I certainly had great idols — Niño Ricardo, for one, for his great emotional output. I looked up to him like all the young kids did from my generation. Also, in town, there were other people who were able players in town and we looked up to them as well.
Obviously, my mother was very concerned with my education and hoped I would not neglect it. Everybody wanted me to travel and play with their group, and more often than not, I would be out late. So my mother was very concerned I would be working with the right people and that I would not waste too much time given the other things I had to do, like school. We were a family of nine children. I had one other brother and the rest were sisters, so my mother was working. She owned a market and she earned the bread for us. But she was also very active in looking after us.
My family felt my guitar playing was cute and wanted me to play with them. There was concern also that life had to be kept in check because I used to go out and play in different directions with flamenco companies traveling to little villages around Córdoba with flamenco companies and then bigger places like Madrid. I was really quite young but I think they appreciated me because I was clever with the guitar and my playing made people happy.
Music is beautiful. It is a beautiful feeling when you can express and move people, even move yourself, when things are moving right with your playing. Being a professional, as I am, doing what I like to do — to sit on the stage and have the responsibility to transmit these emotions and feelings to people and see that it works — is very, very rewarding, indeed. This is the aim of it, to become emotionally involved and touched to the very fiber.
Of course, I have had moments where I feel I have not mastered all that I hope for — one day I would love to be able to play the guitar! It is very demanding to be on top of technical difficulties. Those are terrible moments, really. There is faith on my part that things will get better and usually, they do.
I like all kinds of music so I am tempted to go off into many different directions. It is a challenge, yet it is softened, because I do not have to be a professional in any other form but for flamenco. So my true challenge comes from within world of music, and for that I like to be myself and have something to say. I make sure that shows are choreographed and I arrange a portion of the theatrical production. I look forward to making a convincing contribution.
Solo guitar was not done where I grew up. Solo flamenco guitar came later. You could play it but nobody was interested. I was very young when a company came in from Madrid — it was not a flamenco company but a company of young, beautiful girls. They did some dancing, humor — a variety show, essentially. They wanted me to play a flamenco act with a girl singer. We traveled together through Andalucía, sometimes in atrocious conditions. That was memorable because I was young and surrounded by these young, beautiful girls in the company, you can imagine. It was a good moment. Also, I got the chance to see places I had never visited before.
Once, I was to play a concert using a beautiful guitar and, for some reason, the top of the empty case fell onto the guitar and broke it just minutes before my program. It left a dramatic crack. This had been a brilliant guitar, my first real guitar, the Reyes. Thank god I was actually wise enough not to say anything. I played with a terrible-sounding guitar and made the best of it. I did not tell anyone that it was broken because I was used to a really good-sounding instrument and this guitar lost a lot of sound with that big crack. It was a terrible moment. However, I went through with the concert. At the end, I said, “You must excuse my sound. It’s not really as good.” Had I not done that, a lot of people would have been disappointed. I felt strongly about saying the quality of sound had been my fault rather than blame this flawless instrument.
Pat Martino
Jazz icon and guitarist Pat Martino was faced with relearning to play the guitar and re-establishing his career after undergoing surgery in 1980 for a nearly fatal brain aneurysm. A recording artist for the Prestige, Muse and Warner Bros. labels, Martino is renowned for his fusion of avant-garde jazz, rock, pop and world music played in the bop idiom.
My first guitar was p
urchased by my father from a pawnshop in Philadelphia. I was twelve years old at the time, and it was a child-sized guitar. It was not really a serious instrument. In fact, my father bought it for me to see if I really was interested. He said, “If you can do something with this, then I will get you a serious guitar.” This guitar had no name on it, but in two weeks, my father bought me a Les Paul Standard.
My father was a guitar player and he really loved guitar music. So I guess before I was really even conscious, I was absorbing Eddie Lang and Django Reinhardt. Their playing filled my environment — I was surrounded by it. My first intention with playing the guitar, as it is for every child, was to become well known. Children want to be noticed. I would think that was my first intention, as any child. This brought me to the music business.
Pat Martino, Bobby Rydell, Joe Lano. (Courtesy Pat Martino)
After so many years and the events that took place within those years, I became an established musician in the jazz community and suddenly I forgot all of it, including my guitar playing skills. I’d had a brain operation for an aneurysm, and when I had to relearn the instrument — my intentions were totally different. My intentions were totally focused on one thing, as they are today. That is now, the moment: to be able to enjoy my life. That is what it finally evolved into.
My father was always very happy about my playing the guitar. My mother was a little disappointed. She was very scholarly. She would have been happier if I was involved with education, as she had been a teacher in Italy. My father was the happiest, though, because to him, my playing was a dream come true. I did not really have a teacher — I’ve always had a basic understanding of the instrument that was innate, almost like this is a second life and the instrument is an old friend. I never had any trouble with it. In fact, being self-taught, the instrument revealed itself to me. Due to that innate intuition I had of how the guitar should be played, when I was brought to certain individuals for guidance in those early years I wound up studying them, not particularly what they were teaching. I learned faster, playing my way. When I would return for a lesson, I would have it together and they would be under the impression that I did my study and that I’d learned from it. I did what I did so that I could continue the social interaction with them. The music was secondary to that potential.