Piwin -> RE: Thread about our own individual memories of PdL (Feb. 10 2016 11:42:39)
|
It was one of those last-minute gifts where you run through the store, fully aware that you have to walk out with something, even if you know it's not really what the recipient would have wanted. You just have to get something because his birthday is tomorrow and all the stores are closing soon. The next morning, on my 14th birthday, I was rather quizical when I unwrapped the gift my father had bought for me: a CD entitled Luzia from some artist I'd never heard of. Nor had he for that matter. He said: "I didn't know what to get you. But I know you wanted to learn the guitar and this was in the guitar section". Fair enough. At the time I would have rather gotten the latest Dream Theater CD, but whatever, I thought. I listened to it, and it went completely over my head. At the time, I had that approach to music where you only enjoy what sounds difficult, technical, and in my case, what was rythmically difficult. This sounded too smooth to my ears, I didn't catch the complexity. It was years later that I discovered how difficult his compositions really were, and a few more years after that I realized that it didn't even matter how difficult it was, what mattered was how he somehow managed to tell a story, to speak directly to a person's heart through his music. The mark of a true artist. Years later I got to see him play in Salamanca, where I'd gone to study the basics of the Spanish language, setting foot in Spain for the first time. The following night I went to see Paco Ibáñez, a very close second in the list of artists who have managed to create in me such a strong emotional response. I was all Paco'd out. And I knew I'd be back in this country for more. And so it went. Two years ago, I was in Granada Capital when the Maestro passed. I had a guitar class that afternoon. We kept it short, no one really had it in them to play. I learned two of Paco's falsetas. They weren't particularly sad, but till this day, I can't play them without feeling a tinge of sorrow. That evening, I had to accompany a friend to Manuel Díaz's workshop. A few days earlier he had decided that he wanted to pursue flamenco further, and for him that meant purchasing a proper flamenco guitar. He had got the money from the bank and we we're going back to get his new guitar. Manuel arrived, slowly traipsing up the Cuesta Gomérez. "La vida sigue" he said. And so it does. There was something in that new guitar, some quality that only the circumstances could bestow on it, a naïve sense of life being a circle of endings and beginnings. Naïve, yes, but the sense of it was truly present. And so it goes. A few years earlier, another artist had left us, Lhasa de Sela. I mourned her loss, as I later had to mourn the loss of Paco de Lucia. With her gone, I simply didn't know who would ever be able to express those ineffable feelings that are so hard for most of us to point out. She had put in to words things that would slip away from my grasp as soon as I got close, like a glimpse of something in the corner of your eye, that dissapears as soon as you try to focus your gaze on it. Paco did the same, not through words but through music. Two years later, I'm still a bit dazed but grateful that I got to experience at least a small part of his music while he was amongst the living, grateful that, through technology, I can still listen to the masterful tales he carved out of mere nylon and nail. Two years later, the Maestro is still very much here through his music. But there's this lingering feeling of doubt. Who's to lead the way now? Are we really on our own?
|
|
|
|