Richard Jernigan -> RE: How did you get into flamenco? (Aug. 19 2014 0:23:13)
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I started on the trumpet when I was nine years old, and was lucky enough to have some good professional teachers. By the time I was in high school, I was fairly active in various scenes in the Washington, DC area. At the University of Texas at Austin I played in the Symphonic Band and the Unversity Symphony during my first two years, but as a science major the schedule became unworkable. I had heard Segovia on records by the time I was a young teenager, and took up the guitar to fill the gap left by lack of trumpet opportunities. But in the second half of the 1950s I found no classical guitar teacher in Austin who was of the same high quality as my trumpet teachers. Then I ran into a couple of guys my age who played flamenco. They were students of Ed Freeman in Dallas. Clearly Freeman knew what he was doing. He taught his students to play accurately transcribed pieces by Ramon Montoya, Niño Ricardo, Esteban de Sanlucar, Sabicas, etc. Unfortunately, Freeman and I were somewhat incompatible. Freeman seemed to me to be a "my way or the highway" kind of guy, and I have almost always had a problem with figures of authority. Most of Freeman's students really liked him, and got on really well with him and his wife. I picked up a few hints of technique from my friends who studied with Freeman, and went my own way. I have no doubt I would have progressed much faster had I stuck with Freeman. There were very few decent transcriptions available in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Most were immediately recognizable as being seriously wrong. A major exception was a collection of pieces by Mario Escudero, transcribed by Joseph Trotter and Freeman. I learned to play all of them. And in my trumpeting days I had learned to cop stuff off records. While I was in the U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD, I went to New York City on weekends, and hung out at the club Zambra, where there was a steady stream of visiting artists from Spain. Sabicas showed up frequently for after hours juergas. I watched closely. Quite a few of the visiting Spaniards were willing to give a lesson or two at reasonable rates. After I got out of the Army I spent a fair amount of time in Mexico City, where there was a lively flamenco scene centered around Manolo Caracol's club El Rincon de Goya, and the competing club Gitanerias. Again, visiting artists were willing to give lessons at a price I could afford. I made the requisite pilgrimage to Spain, and lived in Triana for a few months, traveled to Jerez and Cadiz. Again, a few lessons from a variety of players--nobody famous, or even particularly well know outside Triana. Then I settled down, got married, followed a career in physics, mathematics and engineering. Practice time suffered because I traveled a great deal on business. I even tried to quit playing because I was dissatisfied with the deterioration of my technique--but I couldn't stop. When I took a job at a remote military base in 1991, the constant traveling stopped, and I made substantial progress. Then a few years ago I began to experience numbness in 3 and 4 of the left hand. My brother the medical doctor agreed it was probably due to an old motorcycle injury which eventually led to bone spurs in the neck, trapping the appropriate nerve and giving me sharp pains in the neck from time to time. I put the guitars away. But an active life and luck led to a couple of incidents where I experienced popping and grinding noises in the neck. The neck pain stopped, but the fingers remained a bit numb. My brother said I was lucky not to end up paralyzed. My brother knows something about bone spurs in the neck. As Head of the Flight Medicine Branch of the NASA Manned Spaceflight Center during the Apollo moon landing program, he was the guy who grounded Deke Slayton, the most senior of the astronauts, for a bone spur in his neck. By the time I retired at the end of 2009, my technique was essentially gone. But a couple of years ago I decided to see what progress I could make with regular practice. Of course my left pinky couldn't even find the right string most of the time. But I made progress, slowly at first, then more quickly as time went on. To keep from making an already too long story any longer, I will say I think there is a good chance I will be back playing as well as I ever did within six months or a year. The story goes that the great 'cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he still practiced when he was 90 years old. He replied, "Because I am making progress." RNJ
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