On the Festival's Concept:
John, what was your initial reaction when David Spelman first approached you about starting a guitar festival?
JS: Well, as an old hack at the instrument myself, I'd always been predisposed towards guitar events. In fact, one of our most successful New Sounds Live series ever was a set of guitar-oriented shows that we did at Merkin back in the mid 90s. We did a program that traced the instrument's history, one that looked at the guitar in world music traditions, and another that looked at the current state of the art. Both I and the folks at Merkin had been looking for a way to do something along those lines again, when along came David with a proposal to essentially take that earlier idea and run with it. It was, as they say, a no-brainer.
Many say that being a classical guitarist involves some pioneer work; after all, the instrument arrives in the classical concert setting with a need to prove that it can measure up to orchestral cousins in both volume and quality of repertory. As a classical guitarist yourself, was this sense of advocacy a motivation for starting a festival entirely devoted to the instrument?
DS: What with the amazing, pioneering contributions that Andres Segovia and Julian Bream -- not to mention the many other great players from the following generations -- made in terms of expanding the repertoire with their own transcriptions and commissioning composers to write new works, I’m not sure the guitar has so much to”prove” anymore in terms of measuring up with other instruments. I would even guess that there are more solo works and concerti written for the classical guitar than any other instruments other than piano and violin.
I think it was the way guitar music can inspire people, with its powerful yet delicate force, that motivated The New York Guitar Festival and its scholarship program for inner city schoolchildren. When the festival was just a hazy ambition, something the playwright August Wilson said served as my mantra: "Art changes individuals, and individuals change society." Giving free guitars and guitar lessons to school kids, helps those kids grow and perhaps eventually give back to the city with their music.
JS: It's been many years since I had the chops to play classical guitar, but I would admit to some sense of advocacy for the instrument. It is a quirky, harmonically unusual instrument, and is well-suited to composing music that doesn't have the usual harmonic ideas you'd get from composing, say, at a keyboard. There were relatively few composers whose sense of harmony was not built around, and in some cases limited to, their familiarity with the piano keyboard. I maintain that you can often tell when a composer is a guitarist, because their harmonic ideas will often reflect the fourth-based tuning of the guitar.
There seems to be a real historical awareness that goes into the programming of the NYGF. Many of the concerts pay tribute to guitar legends of the past, such as this year's tribute to John Fahey. It's almost like you're helping to write history, no?
JS: I'd say that we're not writing history - that history is still being written. What we're doing with these tribute events is giving people a chance to "read" that history: to see what contemporary musicians are doing with the legacy left behind by some of the instrument's greatest champions.
On Programming:
This year features another wonderfully diverse lineup, with musical forays
into classical, jazz, blues, and many "between-the-cracks" guitar
categories. Is there one theme that particularly emerges in your opinion?
JS: At the risk of being obvious, the theme is the guitar itself -- a single instrument (well, a family of instruments, at any rate) -- that has made itself at home in so many different styles of music. Classical, jazz, rock, blues... the guitar's sound can somehow weave all of those musica; genres together. And for perhaps the same reason, the guitar is especially good at getting into the gray areas between those styles, which, as New Sounds listeners know, is where a lot of fascinating music can be found.
DS: Beyond eclecticism, I’m not sure there is really one overarching theme to this year’s lineup. However, one of the things I really love about working with Schaefer is that we share the same ambition for wanting to expose audiences to music from different continents; from artists playing jazz, avant-garde, standards, classical, rock, blues, new age, folk – all these different things that on paper shouldn't work together. We love surprising people and giving them an idea of what the guitar can do.
One thread from that seems particularly apparent is 1960s and 70s rock, with tributes to the late Jerry Garcia and George Harrison, not to mention appearances by veteran artists like the Persuasions and Jorma Kaukonen. In your view, what is the legacy of Garcia and Harrison as guitarists? Did the late 60s and early 70s represent a "Golden Age" for the electric guitar in your view?
JS: Well, these concerts are actually part of a longer series of tribute events: we've already done tributes to Andres Segovia, bluesman Robert Johnson, and Jimi Hendrix. And a tribute to the late great avant-folk guitarist/composer John Fahey follows on Oct. 3. So while Jerry Garcia and George Harrison represent the 60s and 70s, the whole tribute idea is tied to guitarists who have made an impact on how the instrument is played and perceived, without regard to when they played or what style. And actually, while the late 60s/early 70s may well have been the beginning of the "Golden Age" of the electric guitar, one of the things that made Garcia and Harrison so interesting is that they didn't just play electric guitars. In Garcia's case, he was never far removed from the acoustic roots of American folk and bluegrass, even when he was plugged in and had the speakers set to eleven. Harrison, of course, was nearly as famous as the proponent of the Indian sitar as he was a guitarist.
In both cases, the legacy of these guitarists goes beyond a cadre of guitar
wonks who wanna play like Jerry or who want to give their guitars that twangy,
jangly sound that George occasionally got. They made music with guitar that
not only affected how later guitarists play, but they affected how the rest
of the music world listened.
On Outreach and Recording Activities:
The compilation CD Guitar Harvest will be a great way to promote the Festival
as well as raise money for an important scholarship fund. When can we look forward
to seeing this?
DS: Yes, John and I are really excited to finish up work on the first two volumes of Guitar Harvest during late October. The first volume is subtitled “Teachers, Mentors and Inspirations” and features some awesome tracks by some of our favorite artists paying tribute the their early teachers and musical mentors. Acoustic guitarist Alex DeGrassi plays a tune by guitar icon Jimi Hendrix; the Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo pay respect to their Cuban mentors in a rendition of Albeniz's Cuba, while eclectic jazzman Bill Frisell actually plays a duet with his old guitar teacher, Dale Breuning. Ralph Towner contributes a multi-tracked duet in tribute to the German lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss, while Gary Lucas fondly remembers his late songwriting partner Jeff Buckley, joined by former Buckley drummer Matt Johnson on tablas. Other guitarists include Andy Summers, Pierre Bensusan, David Patterson of the New World Guitar Trio, Benjamin Verdery, Vernon Reid, the California Guitar Trio, Henry Kaiser and others.
Guitar Harvest, Vol. II: "Live From The New York Guitar Festival” will be a two-disc set featuring highlights from the festival over the past four years. It’s a little too early to announce the full line up, but they will certainly be artists that New Sounds listeners will be familiar with. We hope to have both volumes of Guitar Harvest ready for release by the end of this year. They will be sold exclusive at Festival events and through our website (www.newyorkguitarfestival.org).
We’re deeply indebted to the D'Addario Foundation for the Performing Arts both for underwriting the festival’s concerts and radio broadcasts as well as supporting our educational outreach program. This scholarship fund allows us to provide guitars and musical training free of charge to New York City public school children, and in the process to encourage hope and inspiration through music-making at a time when arts education has fallen prey to so many budgetary cut-backs. The talented kids who benefit from this program are an inspiration to all of us; our contribution to their education is a contribution to our own future.
On the same topic of outreach, the NYGF's program for inner city schoolchildren is a logical extension of your activities, by giving free guitars and guitar lessons to school kids. How has the response to this been so far? Do you find that there's a real need for better music education in NYC schools?
DS: In today’s environment, when arts education has fallen prey to so
many budgetary cut-backs, anything that anyone can do to help bring music into
the schools is a valuable contribution. We’re deeply indebted to the D'Addario
Foundation for the Performing Arts both for underwriting the festival’s
concerts and broadcasts as well as supporting our educational outreach program.
At the moment our outreach program is small, but encouraging hope and inspiration
through music-making is something that we are really committed to. I hope the
sales of the Guitar Harvest CDs will allow us to grow in the years ahead. The
talented kids who benefit from this
program are an inspiration to all of us; our contribution to their education
is a contribution to our own future.
On the Future of the Festival:
Lastly, the festival seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. You've managed
to involve four very prestigious New York venues (spanning three distinct neighborhoods)
in this year's festival. What do these venues bring to the festival? Has this
presented any logistical challenges in any way?
DS: Yes, since we began in 1999 the festival has been a success on several levels. The response from audiences and critics was even stronger than we’d hoped for. The Wall Street Journal classified last year’s festival as “an epic event.” and Time Out New York called it “a comprehensive celebration of all things picked, plucked and strummed...a guitar hounds paradise.”
Working with Karen Chester at Merkin Concert Hall, Bill Bragin at Joe’s Pub, Brice Rosenbloom at Makor and Hanna Gaifman at the 92nd Street Y has been terrific. They each bring so much to the table -- creative programing ideas, tremendous experience in producing events, highly professional staffs...the list goes on and on.
While I’m aware that remote recordings present challenges to even the ace technical crew at WNYC, John and I feel very strongly about working with different venues. Each room has different acoustics, different seating capacity and sight lines, different audiences and so forth.
More information on the 2002 New York Guitar Festival can be found at www.newyorkguitarfestival.org.