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Liner notes: Intro & track listing
by JOHN SCHAEFER, WNYC RADIO, NEW YORK
T
his compilation is the first in a series of benefit CDs produced for the New York Guitar Festival, founded and directed by David Spelman, in association with WNYC’s New Sounds radio series. Since both David and I are old hacks at the instrument, you might want to take the following statement with a large measure of salt; but here goes.
The guitar is unique among the world’s instruments because it is the only instrument (apart from the human voice) to have genuinely and successfully crossed over to all of the world’s major musical traditions: classical, rock/pop, jazz, and traditional musics.
Think of it. Drums and percussion are central to most of the world’s music, but in the classical tradition they’re just accents, brief bursts of color. The piano is certainly a well-traveled instrument, but while there is an interesting little tradition of piano music in Burma, you’d have to look long and hard to find any piano music in most non-Western countries. You could make the case for the flute as the “global instrument,” but the world’s most popular music — rock — has little use for it.
Now try to imagine rock without the guitar. The world of jazz is still recovering from Django Reinhardt’s guitar innovations, and of course developed in part out of the guitar-based blues of the deep south. The classical guitar repertoire exploded with Segovia and has never been more vital and varied. And throughout most of the world, the guitar and its cousins in the lute family are central to traditional music. In Spain, Mali, Kenya, Cuba, India, and Vietnam, to name just a few, an actual guitar tradition has developed, using essentially the same guitar that most of the musicians on this album play. Forget English; the guitar is the international language.
In creating Guitar Harvest, we decided to ask a wide range of guitarists to donate new or unreleased recordings that reflected the influence of a teacher, mentor, or other inspiration. It seemed an appropriate place to begin this series. We had already begun contacting a number of these artists to perform in the annual New Sounds Live/New York Guitar Festival concerts anyway, and those live performances promised us a gold mine of future material (you’ll see what I mean when the next volume is released).
But during the actual process of talking to guitarists about the concerts we were creating — many of them tributes to legendary guitarists of the past — it became evident that almost everyone had a teacher, mentor, or other source of inspiration that they were happy to acknowledge. Some guitarists had pieces at the ready, unreleased works that had just been waiting for the right setting. Many others created new works specifically for us. Notable by its absence, at least to us, is the non-Western guitar tradition. This was to have been represented by the great Cameroonian guitarist/ composer Francis Bebey, who passed away during the early months of this process, before he could make a contribution himself.
Even so, Guitar Harvest has yielded a bumper crop: a globetrotting collection of heartfelt and enthusiastic tributes from guitarists representing classical, jazz, rock, and traditional music.
Guitar Harvest, Volume 1: Teachers, Mentors, Inspirations...
DISC ONE
Alex De Grassi: Angel (Jimi Hendrix)
Ralph Towner: Sarabande for Two Guitars
Benjamin Verdery: Prelude and Wedding Dance
Arlen Roth: Upstate Rag
Tony McManus: A Shepherd’s Dream/Onga Bucharesti
Pierre Bensusan: Sui Sios fa mo Dhidean
Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo: Cuba (from the Suite Española, by Isaac Albéniz)
Frank Vignola: Micro (Django Reinhardt,)
Bill Frisell & Dale Brunning: Seven Come Eleven (Charlie Christian)
David Cullen: Go Ahead and Play
Laurence Juber: Catch!
David Russell: Sonata for Guitar, 3rd movement (Jorge Morel)
DISC TWO
California Guitar Trio & Tony Levin: Eve
Henry Kaiser & Michael Manring: It’s About Those Times
Vernon Reid: Camille
Richard Leo Johnson: John Henry, main theme
David Patterson: White Summer/Black Mountainside (Jimmy Page)
Gary Lucas: Dream of the Wild Horses
Andy Summers: Fables of Faubus (Charles Mingus)
Joel Harrison: Black Muddy River (Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter)
Russell Donnellon: Amazing Grace
More about Guitar Harvest, Vol. 1
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