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bb -> RE: The best Tremolo lesson ever (Mar. 12 2008 19:48:20)
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quote:
There was once when Gerardo approached tremolo for the very first time too!
I became interested in flamenco during the 1940’s when hearing it occasionally in the States via Spanish shortwave broadcasts. While attending high school in the 1950’s I worked evenings as a popular music disk-jockey for a U.S. broadcast station. The station had subscribed to a service that had been sending new recordings from all over the world since the early 1930’s and it had a huge music library. Even though I had to pretend on the air to like the music I played, I have never had much interest in popular music and I used to listen to other kinds of music (primarily classical and flamenco) from the station music library while playing popular music to the listening audience.
One day the station manager asked if I would be willing to come in on a Saturday and haul all the records in the music library that were not popular music to a dump, because the station had run out of storage space and it only played popular music on the air. Wow – I couldn’t believe it. He was asking me to throw thousands of perfectly good recordings away. In fact, many of them had never been played. I asked if he had any objection to me keeping the ones I wanted for myself. He said he didn’t care what I did with them, except that the contract the station had with its supplier stipulated that they couldn’t be sold.
Well, you can imagine what my bedroom, our garage, and every other spot I could find to stash records looked like after that Saturday. Most of those records were eventually given or thrown away over the years, but I still have some rare old flamenco recordings. Among them are some early Sabicas flamenco recorded in the 1920's, but released in the early 1930's. Ron’s comment about Gerardo also having to approach tremolo for the very first time caused me to think of Sabicas. Sometimes when I am frustrated with my own playing I listen to the way Sabicas was playing early-on and I think if Sabicas was able to progress from that to the way he played years later, maybe there is hope for me.
We all should keep in mind as we struggle to learn new things that the terrific players we all admire probably didn’t sound any better at some point early on than we do.
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