by Julia Crowe
My grand plans at the start were to just to learn anything I could. I’d exchange what we call falsetas, short melodic variations, in the way people trade stamps. So I’d meet with one guy and say, “I’ll trade you this variation in soleá for that one you’ve got in bulería or alegría.” In this way, I built up a repertoire of material, just to learn. And then, just to hear as much as possible, I played at baptisms and weddings when I was very young. I thought nothing of walking six or seven kilometers just to play somewhere in Málaga, in the south of Spain. I would find very knowledgeable singers and other guitarists, and in this way, I was picking up things.
When I was seventeen, I went to Madrid and mixed up with the great players in the capital. I used to listen to a record of the great flamenco guitarist Niño Ricardo, and I would do this by slowing down the old 33 rpm LP to the speed of 16, making the music one octave lower. This way, I could more or less work out what I was hearing. So when I traveled to Madrid, I went to the Conde Hermanos shop with the hope of finding a better guitar than the Conde I had or at least to see if they could make it better for me. I played this Ricardo material and there was an old man in the shop, listening. He said to me, gruffly, “¿Tu quien eres?” (“Who are you?”). I said, “Juan Martín.” “¿De donde aprendido estoy?” (“Where did you learn this?”). I told him I learned it from Niño Ricardo.
“Yo soy el Ricardo!” he growled.
At this point, I was so small and he was a maestro. He was very nice. He was flattered that I had bothered to learn so much of his material by ear, so he would advise and correct me, saying, “No, that’s not an open E there, it is played on the second string.” And he would go by the Conde Hermanos shop, which was on Calle Gravina No. 7 in Madrid, every day at about five o’clock. He’d then say to me, “C’mon, let’s have a glass of red wine.” We’d order tintorros, as he’d call them. And this is how I became close to this man who was the number one flamenco guitarist in Spain. It was very exciting. He would correct me, and I’d go back and practice in my pension, or apartment.
Subsequently, I met Paco de Lucía in Madrid also. Paco lived on Calle Ilustracion No. 17. I’d go there and he gave me a lot of material. I studied with him enough to develop a base. From here, a flamenco guitarist has to find their proprio sello or their own voice on the guitar, and I think I did that. This is the most difficult thing about flamenco. Not only do you have to play, but you have to compose your own material. It takes a long time.
The flamenco guitar just has a certain intense resonance. And the technique is amazing along with the sense of rhythm and melodies. There is so much to it. When you’re working with dancers, you have to follow their feet, not have them follow you. It just seemed to me to be such a world of variety. You have three elements: the guitar, singing and dance and on top of that, jaleo, which is the handclapping. Just to be involved in that fascinated me — and the characters involved in flamenco, the people are such interesting people to be with. It’s a beautiful life and you can go to bed very late. For young people, it’s not ideal, particularly if you have to go to school. It’s like a potent drug — flamenco. You can’t lose that passion.
Juan Martín as a teenager working at the dance studio Amor de Dios in Madrid, Spain. (Courtesy Juan Martín)
I listened to a lot of records at home of classical music and jazz, and I thought about flamenco guitar and its technique, thinking it would be wonderful to have a record where flamenco could stand on its own. Even though I loved accompanying, I thought the guitar could grow so much more. In London, I attended a concert at Wigmore Hall and heard wonderful guitarists. And I gave my first really important concert there without a microphone. I did not think the guitar should be covered up, after hearing a lifetime of handclaps and footwork. I wanted the beauty of the guitar and the stability of flamenco technique to be developed. I made seventeen albums. The first were dedicated to solo flamenco guitar. Then I became involved in fusions.
I made an album with Mark Isham, who is a well-known film composer in America for RCA and BMG, and an album with a jazz pianist and an album with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. All of this was a tremendous learning experience. I recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London. I was a bit overwhelmed by it all. Now it comes full circle, with my return to flamenco. It was very educational to be open to all those things.
I played a concert once for a Spanish association. It was overnight, by the embassy. And everybody clapped at the end of the pieces but for one person. This one guy in the second row looked rather miserable. I thought, normally, in a formal concert, I would not say anything. You never know. They might be critics. It’s amazing how vulnerable you feel onstage. I mean, this guy just sat there. He never moved. So after a number of pieces, I said, “Excuse me, sir, but do you not like flamenco? Do you not like my playing?” He just lifted an arm, which turned out to be encased inside a plaster cast all the way up to his elbow. I felt terrible. That’s why he looked miserable. He couldn’t clap. His wife came up to me afterward, yelling at me: “You had no right to chat up my husband like that.” I just had no idea.
But it just goes to show how, in a way, we’re all so dedicated, insecure and transparent onstage, so that if you are really open to the audience, it affects you. The more you are reactive, the more I feel they can join you. It only takes one or two people to do that.
Dennis Koster
Dennis Koster is an American concert-classical flamenco guitarist who studied with flamenco legends Mario Escudero and Sabicas. He is the author of a bestselling, three-volume flamenco method published by Mel Bay Publications.
I started out studying violin but, when my teacher died, I lost all interest in playing, which greatly upset my parents. I was about thirteen years old when I became interested in the guitar. However, my parents did not want to buy me one, given they had already invested in a violin that I now refused to play.
So I wound up borrowing a guitar from my dentist’s son. It was a Danelectro, a solid-body electric guitar made of Masonite. The pickups were made out of old chrome lipstick tubes. Apparently, the Danelectro factory bought up 50,000 lipstick tubes from a company that went out of business and converted these things into the pickups used on their guitars. You plugged the guitar into the case, which had a built-in speaker, and away you’d go — it was great.
When I proved to be fairly serious about the guitar, my dad picked up an inexpensive guitar during a business trip to Spain. It was a mahogany Juan Estruch, made in Barcelona. Basically it was a Fleta knockoff. I was about fifteen years old at the time and started studying with Howard David, one of the first American flamenco guitarists to write a method book, under the name of Juan Grecos.
My big hero was the gypsy flamenco guitarist Mario Escudero. I was thirteen years old when I first heard flamenco on a tinny radio, and I just flipped out. To me, it was a way of playing guitar that captured all the expression in the world. I got the chance to see Escudero perform at the 92nd Street Y on a magnificent guitar and thought to myself, “If only I could some day play a guitar like that!”
A month later, my teacher told me he was packing up and moving to Spain. I almost fainted. “But you’re my teacher,” I told him. “You can’t go!” He told me not to worry because he had a teacher lined up for me already. I told him did not want to study with anyone else. When I found out my new teacher was going to be Mario Escudero, I nearly fainted again.
Mario did not speak much English at the time, and I did not speak Spanish yet but for a few basic phrases I was learning in high school. So I started learning by copying what he showed me. A year later, Mario needed to sell his Ramírez guitar because he needed to buy some furniture. I worked at the shipping and loading dock of a table and lamp factory all summer — this was 1965 — in order to save up $700 for his magnificent concert Ramírez.
Two years later, at age seventeen, I had my first Carnegie Hall recital with a Spanish dance company. Carlos Ibañez, the director of the dance company, asked me to dress up w
earing a frilly shirt and Cordoban hat. Minutes before I was due to go onstage, I went into the hallway to get a drink of water. I opened a door and found myself standing in a stairwell as the door locked shut behind me. Making matters worse, there was no doorknob on my side of the door.
I ran down the steps and stepped outside onto the corner of 57th Street and 7th Avenue in the pouring rain. Here I was with my guitar in hand, wearing this ruffled shirt, Cordoban hat — instantly wet. I had to go back in through the front door with the rest of the crowd, and a couple of my high school buddies snickered at me. Once I got backstage, I used my shirt to frantically dry off my guitar. Then I went on and played. Everything went fine. Playing in Carnegie Hall, under any circumstance, is an unforgettable experience.
Guitar can be a tough field but I can’t say there has ever been a day where I did not have one in my hands. My parents, who are in their eighties, still wonder what it is I am going to do with myself when I grow up. I wonder about that myself from time to time. But then I put that on the back burner to go play.
The Assad Brothers
The Brazilian-born brothers Sergio and Odair Assad are a legendary Latin-Grammy-winning classical guitar duo that sounds uncannily like one guitar whenever they perform. They have expanded the repertoire of music for guitar duos and have collaborated with renowned artists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Yo-Yo Ma and Paquito D’Rivera. Odair Assad, who also has his own solo career, teaches at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts in Brussels, and Sergio teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory.
Odair Assad: The story is that Sergio is the one who first wanted to play the guitar.
Sergio Assad: I was twelve years old when I received my first guitar, which I wanted to play very badly. Our father is a mandolin player who plays traditional Brazilian chorinhos, and because he was bringing musicians to our house all the time, we were very accustomed to listening to music from a very young age. When I was about eight or nine years old, I first asked if he would teach me to play, and he said, “No! Not for kids!” So I was very disappointed.
Odair Assad: [Laughing.] Poor Sergio!
Sergio Assad: I felt as if our father would never teach me! When I was twelve, an uncle of mine, came by our house and played a bit of guitar. He was much more accessible, so I immediately asked if he could teach me a few chords. The first chord he taught me was D Minor. He also taught me a simple progression of Dm, A7, Dm, and then he showed me G Minor, which is very awkward because you have to do the barre, but I could do it! I know for many people that chord is difficult and challenging, but I could do it and this made me excited.
I then asked my mother, because I was accustomed to hearing her sing in the house, if she would sing songs so that I might be able to play and fit in these three new chords. She hesitated and balked, and I begged her to give me a break, “Please sing that song! Sing that other one!” In these days, our father used to be gone much of the time. He played serenades with his friends, so he would never be home during the evening until very late. When he returned from his work one day, he heard me play and said, “Wow!” He immediately picked up his mandolin and taught me my first major chord — D Major. A7 was the same, and I learned the G Major chord. He was very impressed with my effort and played a waltz, saying, “Great!” He was so excited, more excited than I was! The following day, a long gray day, he wanted to repeat the experience to show my mother. “Listen to this!” my father told her. I played my guitar in their bedroom and my dad played along his mandolin — and there was Odair, eight years old, standing in the door watching.
Odair Assad: I came to watch. Jealous!
Sergio Assad: Odair said, “I want to do that, too!”
Odair Assad: I was just jealous. I saw that my mother was in tears, too. I knew I had to play the guitar.
Sergio Assad: I said, “Give Odair the guitar.” And it turned out to be a walk in the park for him. Whatever had taken me ten minutes to learn, it took Odair about one minute to learn. We had one guitar in the house, only one — a Di Giorgio. Odair and I shared this one guitar. Our father immediately brought home a second nylon-string guitar, a Giannini, which is another really bad kind of Brazilian guitar. We played on these guitars for at least three years. We lived in a city in the state of São Paulo at the time, and one year after we had started playing with our father, we learned his entire repertoire of choros within the space of a year, which was amazing because this numbered about 300 choros. We played everything with the same intricate passages that he had showed us and, by the end of one year, a friend of his came to the city and heard us play. He was a friend of Jacob Bittencourt, whose stage name is Jacob do Bandolim, a huge choro figure in Brazil, one of the most famous musicians of all time. He told Jacob about us! And word came back that Jacob said if we were as good players as this friend had assured, that he would invite us to come play on his television show. So one year after we had only started to play guitar, we found ourselves playing musical accompaniment in one of the biggest, most prestigious venues in São Paolo with Jacob do Bandolim. This was a huge feat for any Brazilian, to say you had played with Jacob Bittencourt!
Our father was recording all his friends early on. He had some friends who played classical guitar. We did not know of Segovia or any of the big names in classical guitar because we lived in this small town in the state of São Paolo. But our father’s friends played quite well. They were not professional musicians but amateur players who played at a very high level. We started playing guitar solos because our father encouraged us. But we could not read music and there were no teachers available. It was very tough to find someone who could teach us.
We had simple recordings of my father’s friends playing Barrios, which had been the first classical music we had ever heard. My father obtained the scores for these Barrios pieces, and we tried to figure out where the notes were in addition to listening to the recordings and copying the rhythm in order to learn how to play. This is what we did for a year or so. Then it became serious because both Odair and I entered competitions in São Paolo, and we both won. For Odair, it was a walk in the park. He was playing all this Barrios with “Choro de Saudade.” He was nine years old and playing this stuff.
Odair Assad: Our father had recordings of this music, that’s why!
Sergio Assad: This event was the first guitar competition ever in São Paolo, and I did not want to compete with Odair because he was too strong for me. So I moved to a category that was higher actually, according to age, for teens at the time. Odair entered the category that was for children and won — but I had won my category, too! I simply did not want to compete with Odair. For us, the guitar was not an obsession at all. I really wanted to play but Odair was starting to skip playing because our father wanted us to play all the time.
Odair Assad: He’d started to say to others, “Look! Come and hear my kids play!” It was a nightmare. I hated it because we started to play at eight p.m. and were still playing at midnight, and I was only eight years old. He would have us out playing through two a.m. some mornings, and I would start faking that I was sleeping.
Sergio Assad: Odair had his fee to stay awake. It was chocolate.
Odair Assad: Generally, we were not allowed to have chocolate. But if I stayed awake and played more again, our father would say, “I promise you chocolate!” At three a.m., I was eating more chocolate, right before going to bed, which is not very good for you but …
Sergio Assad: The guitar, from the first moment on, became our life. The guitar had been a surprise, and we were totally devoted to it. The guitar is family and a great companion, because with it you are never alone. I discovered this very early on because I always liked to imagine music in my head. You can spend hours and hours by yourself with a guitar. We were happy with playing traditional music and learning a bit of classical music, but we never expected that our lives would turn out the way they have.
Being two kids from a town that was not the capital of Brazil but a small city, we pretty much had an idea h
ow life was going to go. Maybe we would earn a degree in some field, but then you never leave that town. Most of our friends from those days still live there. Nobody left. Or, if they left, they left for São Paulo as the bigger city but they never left the country. We have created a life outside the country yet had no idea at the time where the guitar would take us. No idea at all. When we were exposed to classical music three years into our playing, our father, who is a bright man, knew he had two skilled children and gave us opportunities. He was not prepared and did not know where to take us or what to do with us but he was constantly seeking what was possible and had received advice that the best teacher to be found resided in Rio de Janeiro — Monina Távora, teacher of the Abreu brothers, Sérgio and Eduardo. She said she would coach us. Because we lived far away, my father asked how many lessons she felt we might need and when she answered, “Once a week,” he moved us to Rio so we could have the lessons.
Odair Assad: That’s a good father!
Sergio Assad: He did that for us. It was a challenge for us to present a new face of music because before this, music to us had been the chorinho and a little bit of Barrios. That was our world. When we had Monina as our instructor, this was a revelation to us. The first time we met her, she saw us play all this traditional music and said she could teach us but handed us a bunch of scores. She said if we could come back to her in one week playing this sheet music, then she would coach us. Odair and I locked ourselves into this apartment in Rio.
Odair Assad: It was the first time in our lives that we never saw the ocean.
Sergio Assad: We had learned all this Renaissance music, and we did not have a clue what this was. She wanted to test our grasp for it, and she was very pleased. Our challenge with the guitar was to learn classical music.