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RE: FINE TUNING A GUITAR
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estebanana
Posts: 9273
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: FINE TUNING A GUITAR (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
I tend to agree his personality and unique style come through loud and clear when accompanying his favorite singers from Lebrija. However this Buleria is like 95% early 70's style PDL influence. Not a bad thing in anyway IMO, but just saying. Perhaps Bach was likewise strongly influenced by some unknown, yet takes all the credit these days?
Not a bad thing at all to play like Paco in the early 70's. And Pedro does it much better - tastier than the other Paco who plays like The Paco.
It's pretty well known who Bach's teacher was and how he was trained, there's not much to dispute, unless you're given to notions like the Apollo program was faked or that Big foot was little Johann's teacher. He spent a lot of time at the organ being a professional player in church from an early age. Bach on the organ when he was young was like Jimmy Page on Les Paul or the other Jimmy on Strat, respectively. He was a young man full of life and oats who got lots of women pregnant and played the best musical organs as well; and you have to think he was jamming to find out how much those new powerful organs of his day could take. That is why he put together secular jamming pieces that were so outside and crazy.
The 5th cello suite, which I am so loathe to refer to as a lute suite, was written in the French Style. It the style is called Style Brise' or literally 'the broken style'. It meant the chords where articulated to be broken into parts and they sounded a bit disjointed. You can hear really good examples of this style in the works of Vaux Gautier the French baroque lute player /composer. Harpsichordists used this style also. He gave that stylistic flair to the piece on purpose..who knows why, maybe he just felt like it.
My idea is not that Bach was as many people erroneously understand William Shakespeare, a compendium of different authors, but that he was a towering genius who commanded the ability to change music. The same as Paco de Lucia changed flamenco singlehandedly. Or John Coltrane changed jazz. Shakespeare, to me, is the guy who had his iambic pentameter compas down cold and wrote all the sonnets.
Some artists destroy the early work, but not Cezzane. If you look at Cezzane's pictures from his early stages you see a guy who wants to be elegant like Manet, he paints thickly and with lots of gusto, but he's not Manet. Mary Cassatt comes closer to Manet and she is elegant. Her works stays like that the rest of her life and she basically gets better and better at the one Manetish groove. Cezanne goes over to study with Pissaro and Pissaro blows his mind and he's never the same, puts Manet down. He totally changes and goes to a style that is unrecognizable if you were to only see his early work. It's not only that he changes style, he changes the way we see, because he changed the way he saw things.
Cezzane's early work does not give much of an indication which way he would go, it looks like a dead end actually. And for him it was. Listen to Paco de Lucia's early work when he was 16. Does Paco following Nino Ricardo sound like Paco after he digested Sabicas for five years? Perhaps Bach was no different than Cezzane or Paco. When he was young he played differently and had different ideas and real stylistic inconsistencies like an artist would normally have.
Bach also changed his style depending on who his employer was at the time. In his late 20's in Cothen he wrote more freely, more secularly and did a lot of the instrumental solo pieces. His employer was a young count with whom Bach drank, carried on with the ladies and wrote gamba parts for. Bach wrote the gamba parts so the count could play with the chamber orchestra he hired for Bach to write music for. Bach wrote the gamba parts so they were not as difficult and the non professional count could get in the group. Later he worked for a religious boys school and one of the things the 40 year old Herr Bach had to do was get up at 5:30 am every morning and wake up the kids and chase them into choral rehearsal and then breakfast. In those days he was writing his sacred music and sticking to Gods plan. How he must have missed the days in Cothen, the middle of nowhere, drinking and whoring with the count.
Can you imagine the town 20 miles away gets a new powerful organ and they call Bach over to try out. If he was in Cothen, he was probably thinking Ok I don't l have to hold back to keep the count from getting lost in the music, I'm going to rip the pedals off this machine and make it honk like only I can make it honk. Or conversely if he was was baby sitting the school boys that must have been drudgery for a guy with that musical mind. I bet if the next town over called him to try out the organ he was going to go over there and pretend John Bonham was playing drums for him and take it out. He wrote that un-Bach sounding stuff to test organs, but I never said it did not sound like Bach. It sounds like Bach to me, the same way the sonnets of Shakespeare sound like Bill himself.
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 18 2013 20:44:19
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estebanana
Posts: 9273
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: FINE TUNING A GUITAR (in reply to Tom Blackshear)
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When I went looking for a studio to work on guitars here in Akune I looked at the abandoned house next to us. It was too dilapidated and had bad energy. There were sad old Japanese dolls left to moulder, the tatami was deeply grooved, holes were poked in the paper panels of the sliding doors. It would have been a lot of love to clean it up and work on it. Someday I might buy it, it would cost about 15,000 dollars to buy the land it sits on, the house is a tear down. But there was something sad about it that backed me off.
Two blocks from where I live there's a coffee shop called 'Harmonicon', it's owned by a funny lady named Matsumoto, I call her Matsumotosan. Her family was in the mineral business until her husband died. When Mr. Matsumoto passed on she decided to sell the business and open a cafe and also give cooking lessons. She also lives in a former country inn which she restored little by little over the years. She gave me a tour one day, it's gorgeous inside. A traditional Japanese inn.
On the back end of her property there is a modern steel framed warehouse that her family used to store the mineral stocks that they sold. I asked her when her family dealt in. She said they were salt merchants and that this warehouse at one time full of thousands of bags of salt. Then she showed me the room upstairs on the second floor, I said I would rent it. Matsumotosan and I have been good buddies ever since. She is a true supporter of those who want to do a traditional art or craft. She gave me a good deal, a really, really good deal.
I moved in and began building, over the next couple of weeks I realized how lucky I am to have such a great place to work. It's so peaceful, and even though this town can be boring, I'm happy to be bored and sequestered here rather than fearing for my life in a gun toting 'hood in West Oakland. I realized then that the universe was telling me something by setting me up in a former salt storage house. I had teased Tom and been mean to him for talking about his salt finger brace technique, which I think he himself takes with a grain of salt. It was coincidence to have landed in this salt warehouse, but I'm paying attention the content of the coincidence. It made me realize I needed to re-evaluate the way I was teasing Old Salty Finger's. He does not mind me calling him that.
It has nothing to do with anything fishy or under the table. I wish him well with his work. I am not worried at all about this type of more large scale work he has undertaken being inappropriate subject matter for the Foro. We've gone very far afield with the off topic posting in Tom's thread. I 'm a main offender, guilty sorry about that. But now I hope my salty warehouse story turns the thread back over to Tom's continuation of his narrative about his new project.
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 20 2013 3:16:18
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