My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  “Well, I know it’s not John Lennon,” I answered.

  “Ooooh! You’ve forgotten me already, then? It’s Andy. Andy Summers. I’ve just emailed you the foreword for your book.” Small faces gathered around me, abruptly silent. I’d forgotten my cell phone had been set to speaker.

  One boy leaned in, “Andy Summers?! From The Police? My mother has their albums.”

  Andy invited me to dinner at La Trattoria to ask my advice on selecting a literary agent for his memoir. I recommended my own agent, whom he signed with. He later invited me to attend his photography exhibit on the top floor of the Hermés store on Madison Avenue one autumn evening, an event that attracted many celebrities. One of the Hermés shop clerks ventured to ask me, with great politeness, if the necklace I was wearing was estate jewelry. I hated to break the news that it was an $11 rhinestone necklace I had purchased from a thrift shop in Skokie, Illinois, when I was sixteen years old. This sadly left one more person in the room squinting at me, trying to make out just who the hell I was in the scheme of things.

  Male models in white waiter jackets and black bowties served up tiny hors d’oeuvres and glasses of wine. I backed up against the wall, terrified that I might spill a drop of wine on a set of $500 silk scarves. Manhattan’s ubiquitous society photographer Patrick McMullan was on hand with his flash-pan camera. I am not practiced in the art of the female celebrity three-quarter-swirl-and-pose-with-hand-on-hip, so the only record of me at this event is a photo of me huddled over the pages of Andy Summers and Ralph Gibson’s book collaboration, looking like Cousin Itt with a champagne flute clutched tightly in hand.

  If it felt strange to be in the big-top company of Page Six boldface names, but I soon realized how much scarier it was if you were up on the tightrope trying to balance public and private personas. Andy invited me to attend his jazz trio set at Birdland, where I was accosted by a beefy middle-aged man who possessed the wattles of an amiable St. Bernard. He asked if I was Andy’s wife or girlfriend, and I replied neither, that I was a music journalist. He slipped me a handwritten note with the request that I give it to Andy. One brief scan of its contents prompted me to seek Andy’s bodyguard, who took the note and sat beside me for safety.

  After the show, when this fan approached to request an autograph, Andy handled the encounter with a tough finesse, establishing a defined boundary and defusing the situation. The crush of people seeking autographs also helped to propel this fan along and on his way. I was still feeling shaky about the note, but Andy brushed off the incident, telling me it comes with the territory and that handling these things was a skill he had learned early on in his career. I recalled Dave Alvin’s story of discovering his guitar came in handy for walloping an aggressive, disgruntled audience member who tried to storm his stage. Different ways to get the same thing done.

  At another event that I was covering for several guitar magazines, I ran into Andy again. We sat in on a concert by Vernon Reid’s Living Colour and loped out into the theater lobby afterward to check out the array of CDs and books for sale. Andy noticed the woman before I did — she was wearing that stupefied expression that veered from recognition to disbelief to incredulousness upon spotting him. She wandered toward us, wide-eyed. I saw Andy’s body tighten a little. He turned toward me and grimaced. This was an inescapable facet of his life — the guitar has turned him forever into an instantly recognizable curiosity to strangers wherever he goes. This is the trade-off that comes with writing guitar riffs that more or less define a generation.

  He composed himself when she approached and asked if he was indeed Andy Summers of The Police. When he said yes, she gushed that she’d been a huge Police fan since high school. Andy murmured his thanks. A few awkward seconds of silence hung tensely in the air. She wanted to say something more but looked overwhelmed. This woman was accompanied by her preschool-aged daughter dressed in a long tutu and pink gym shoes, with glittery barrettes affixed to her long, curled brunette hair. The little girl wore a pair of long tube socks on her arms, an obvious intent to be elegant, elbow-length opera gloves. She looked at her mother questioningly.

  Andy crouched down and spoke to the daughter at eye-level. “Are you a ballerina? May I spin you around?” He took ahold of her little sock-encased hand and held it high as she obliged, inching her way around in a full-circle pirouette with a bright smile on her face.

  David Russell

  Grammy-winning classical guitarist David Russell was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the age of five moved to Minorca, Spain, where he started studying the guitar and where a street is now named in his honor, “Avinguda David Russell.” In 2005, the Music Conservatory of Vigo, Spain, christened their new auditorium in his honor as well, naming it “Auditorio David Russell.”

  My first guitar belonged to my mother. My father had given my mother a guitar when they got married. It was a really pretty, old French guitar from the nineteenth century that he had discovered in a junk store. That was my guitar from the age of zero till about eight and then I got my real first one, a Spanish one that my brother still has in Minorca, Spain. It cost about a thousand pesetas, which is about $6. It was a normal, cheap Spanish guitar. Even the rosette design was just a couple circles — very basic. It was actually quite nice, though now it is fairly beat up. I keep asking my brother for it back but he tells me, “Eh, I have got nothing else.” So he’s got it.

  My mother tells the story — I don’t quite remember this — but she learned to play while she was pregnant with me. She insists I was learning along with her while still inside the womb. My father had all these old 78s of Segovia, so that is the music we heard all the time. I learned how to play “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” by ear. With my father, that’s the way we did it. When I started to become proficient at playing, he switched from classical to flamenco. I never studied flamenco because that was special to him. I remember getting together and playing with him, but then he moved on to learn flamenco — it was not because things got competitive, but more of a personal preference. He loved jazz. He would have loved Les Paul.

  David Russell, eighteen years old, with his younger brother Vincent. (Courtesy David Russell)

  What I loved about playing the guitar as a kid was the satisfaction of hearing myself get better, almost by the week or by the month when I practiced a lot. It’s great. You learn a new piece and arrive at another level. Then there is also something nice about doing something nobody else does, doing it well or better than everyone else. I was a very, very shy little boy — painfully shy. Papa would say, “Give him a guitar. He may not be talking to anyone yet but give him the guitar.” And I would sit down and play my “Recuerdos.” So there was that little mix of show-off between the shyness. Socially, the guitar really helped me get used to being with people.

  When I just finished my degree, I realized I had felt protected from the world during the time I was in school. I had made my own world within the Royal Academy and was not aware, till the moment I got out of school, that there is this really huge world I knew absolutely nothing about, such as how to make a living and how to pay the rent. This is not easy for anyone coming out of college, not unless you are really lucky and things go smoothly. It was a horrible moment when I thought I would have to give up guitar and get a job. I was kind of lucky in that a few months after graduation I won an Andrés Segovia competition. I was not ready to give up. I had to look for a way to make this work. I won a Ramírez guitar for it, and up till then, I did not have a nice guitar because they are too expensive. So that was my first really nice guitar.

  I have no one defining moment of an early performance simply because I played so often with my dad or about our small town in Minorca. I do remember my New York debut at Carnegie Hall, particularly how obsessed I became. You hope that reviewers will come, you hope to play perfectly and cleanly and all that.

  About three weeks after this concert, I went to play in the Philippines. I was taken to a Vietnamese refugee camp with about four thousand people the
re and I performed in an open square. There was a full moon, and because we were located right on the equator, the moon was shining directly from above. It was an unbelievable sight, surrounded by a big, glowing halo. There were thousands of people in front of me, all standing. Things were really rough for these people. It was a very difficult time, about 1980. I played piece after piece, every single piece I knew and it was really such a contrast from my New York concert because all the things I had been worried and concerned about really did not matter. It really did not matter how it came out. I just played and played and played. Also, when I look into an audience people will often look away, but all these Vietnamese, if you looked at them, they would all smile back. It was a fantastic night, just fantastic. I meant, things were really difficult for these people but afterward I got to hang out with them.

  Some years later, I was on a bus in Australia when an Asian-looking guy said to me, “Mr. Russell?” He was one of the other guitarists at this festival. He said, “Do you remember playing at Palawan on this island?”

  I said, “Yes, sure, of course I remember.”

  “Do you remember going into the water with a group of children? I was one of them,” he said.

  And he’d grown up to play guitar.

  Roland Dyens

  Tunisian-French classical guitarist, arranger and composer Roland Dyens is a unique artist, known for his extraordinary improvisatory skills and his brilliantly colorful and evocative compositions that incorporate elements of jazz and folk music. He was the only classical guitarist invited to participate in the concert honoring the great Django Reinhardt at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Dyens teaches at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris.

  I was nine, maybe ten years old when I received my first guitar. It was a very rudimentary, classical nylon-string guitar — not the worst, mind you but it had been made from some kind of imitation wood. Of course, I was not very demanding at the time. I still have this guitar and it is very close to my heart. I played a bit of piano when I was a music composition student later on, but I play just enough piano as I need — my focus has always been on the guitar.

  In terms of musicians who inspired me, I cannot answer that it was classical players like Segovia. My musical influences were much simpler — mostly French pop singers from when I was very little, about three years old. It was not classical guitar that influenced me but all other kinds of music — jazz, South American, American and French pop songs. I would name the artists but they are not even known by French people as they have all disappeared completely. Harry Belafonte’s music I loved. More than anything, I fell in love with the sound of the guitar at that time.

  I come from a family of artists, so my interest in the guitar did not come as a shock to them. My father is a painter and my uncle is a sculptor in Montreal and nearly everyone in the family was doing something in the arts, so what I was doing with the guitar was not considered at all weird. They supported me and it was great. When I received my first guitar, my intention was to improvise music and find chords and learn it all on my own before I attempted lessons. I was always improvising, just as I do now. And when I start recitals, often it is with an improvisation.

  I was always looking for new sounds and I was a composer already at ten years old. The very first music I wrote was a piece in the style of a barcarolle. I played it to my first teacher, Robert Maison, who was a great man. Teachers like him no longer exist in this world — he seems to have belonged to the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth century. He was my master of music. I was not certain what kind of music it was that I was playing for him, and he informed me it was a barcarolle. It sounded so nice to my ears, and that I was able to write a barcarolle on my own by ear seemed great to me. After two years Maison informed my parents he no longer had anything more to teach me, that I needed to find a new teacher.

  Unfortunately, my second teacher turned out to be very bad for me. At that time, in France during the mid-’60s, the musical landscape was barren. There was nobody who taught guitar. My second teacher was actually a violin teacher who never played the guitar. But she was given the position of teaching guitar because at this time violin and the guitar were considered the same. Only my third teacher, Ernesto Ponce, was a real guitar maestro. I studied with him for seven years. It was very rare to find someone who taught guitar in the big cities in France, and there were no guitar teachers in the conservatories at this time either — you had to go to Spain to find a guitar teacher! I had real support from my parents at this time because they helped me find the right teacher.

  I think the guitar surprises me every day. I have a reverence for the instrument — while it is the most rudimentary instrument, it is also the most complex. I’m always amazed by its possibilities. The piano seems a bit more clear as an instrument, yet the guitar has so many elements to it, such as harmonics and the fact that you can have the same note positioned elsewhere along the fretboard positions — it offers an incredible number of possibilities.

  My first performance took place when I was studying with my bad teacher, unfortunately. She took advantage of my skills to tell the audience that I was her student, yet she had not taught me much of anything, and really had no right to take the credit. The piece I played was a bourée by Robert de Visée and people loved it. And on that day, during that particular performance, I had the very first feeling that maybe I could be a professional musician.

  Roland Dyens holding his first guitar, which he still owns. (Courtesy Roland Dyens)

  In 1986, I was scheduled to perform in one of the most important concerts of my career at Salle Gaveau, which is one of the three biggest concert halls in all of Paris. As usual, I performed an improvisation as my introduction. Roughly thirty seconds into the piece, I heard somebody’s watch alarm ringing. This watch was playing, “Oh! Susanna” in a sharp, loud, high pitch. I thought it would stop after the first few seconds but it didn’t. It continued to play the entire song. I’d thought it would stop then. But it started over at the very beginning. The owner of this watch had ruined my improvisation. This came as a complete shock. I had to surrender. I had to give up. In my brain, I had been fighting it, wondering if I should continue to play the improvisation or whether I should stop playing. What do I do? What I did in that very moment was play “Oh! Susanna” in duet along with the watch alarm. This became the best thing I ever did in my life. People in the audience were amazed and gave me a big standing ovation. Many people told me after the concert that this particular moment had been great and they wanted to know how I had rehearsed it, but I had to tell them the truth — that this had not been prepared or anticipated at all. I did not know whose watch that had been. It had just happened.

  Years later, I came to learn the identity of that watch owner. He was my uncle. He was ashamed of it and waited to tell me, saying, “I wanted to die because I could not stop it.” To this day I remember how I easily could have stopped playing but something in me had said, “No, go on, take it. Go play ‘Oh! Susanna’” because the improvisation I had been doing was ruined now and there was nothing else left to lose. It was the best I had to offer and I did it.

  When it comes to the word challenge and the guitar — I think it is the key word of my life as a musician because I am a real challenger. I am always seeking difficult musical situations — I hate comfortable musical situations. I am always putting myself under great pressure. When faced with almost impossible challenges, I love that. The fact that I am both a soloist and a composer, not to mention the fact that I am a teacher, makes my life more complicated and trickier but much more fun. I have a lot of fun because, in the classical world, we have a few people who are both soloists and composers. There are many composers but they do not play their own music and do not play well, or we have good players who do not compose. That I am doing both is challenging and extremely important. In the past, it was more common to have composers who were players, especially during the Baroque era. But in this
century, there seems to have been a gradual divorce between the two functions.

  To me, a composer must be a whole musician. This is something I wanted to point out because it is what I love in my life, because it allows me to be both the cook and the eater. I find much in common between the profession of cooks and composers. When I see cooks interviewed, I always feel they say the same things I do, like, “OK, next time, I will try this and I will change my recipe.” When I compose, I think to myself, “I shall change the recipe to make it a little more like this or that.” I love when other people play my music, but I am proud to say I’m both the cook and the first eater of my musical food, and it is a privilege to be the first ambassador of my own music.

  Los Angeles Guitar Quartet

  The original Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, featuring guitarists Andrew York, William Kanengiser, John Dearman and Scott Tennant, won a Grammy in 2005 for Best Classical Crossover for their CD Guitar Heroes. Andrew York, who played with the quartet for sixteen years, has departed for a solo career. William Kanengiser is currently faculty at the guitar department at USC. John Dearman plays the 7-string guitar in the quartet and currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Scott Tennant is the author of the bestselling classical guitar method book series Pumping Nylon. Matthew Greif, not interviewed here, replaced Andrew York in 2006 and is a former student of both Kanengiser and Tennant.

  Andrew York

  My first guitar was actually my father’s guitar. He plays and so does my uncle. I think it was a 1957 Martin. Getting it was huge because I had started playing when I was about seven or eight years old. We’re not sure because even before I really began to play, I was faking it because the guitar was always there. When my dad showed me certain things, I picked it up quickly, so he found a teacher for me. My own guitar, which is lost in the mists of history, was a small cheap guitar with very high action and that quickly gave way to a nylon-string classical guitar. My real first guitar would have to be my dad’s Martin ’57.