I thought that before we get to the story of my start in music we should establish where I am now, where I’ve gotten to. I’ve had all sorts of passions, teachers, bands, projects, experiments and experiences over the years, and I always try to bring everything along with me into what I do.
What I do, and what I’ve done mainly over the past 22 years, is perform solo guitar music. Instrumental music utilizing a version of classical guitar technique on a nylon string guitar. As an inveterate hustler and absurdist entrepreneur I had a vision that this could be my life upon the discovery of this form in a classroom at the Old Town School of Folk Music from the substitute teacher. A pathway to become something new, or at least it might keep me in music while I was between bands. My first “professional” performances as a solo guitarist were in 2004 at the Green City Market in Lincoln Park in Chicago. And then I had some connections with a catering company who bid me into some private dinner parties.
I played my first wedding in 2005, and then quit a day job in 2008 to practice 4 hours a day and learn wedding repertoire. In 2009 I started playing Sunday brunches at Café 28 in North Center which I would do for a couple years, and by 2010 I learned how to market myself within the events world. Until my daughter was born in 2017 I played for a few hundred weddings plus all sorts of award dinners, backyard parties, memorial services, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras, gallery openings, yoga classes, and mid-day office relaxing sessions. Usually around 100 bookings per year, not enough for a middle class existence on its own, but nothing to sneeze at either.
I played exclusively sitting down until around 2016, and then slowly started to play standing up (unless playing for a seated dinner). This was enabled by starting to play the nicely thin bodied Cordoba GK Pro I purchased in an emergency after my then main instrument suffered a terrible crack from the crash when the shoulder strap of my cheap soft gig case snapped off.
In the years before I became dedicated to solo guitar I played mostly electric rhythm guitar (with flashes of psychedelic soloing) in bands that were focused on playing dance music: dancehall reggae, disco/house/funk, “acid jazz”. Generally I played tight strum patterns against a bass playing short melodic phrases against an unwavering beat, and then also sometimes “bubbling” the bass line, playing along with the bass giving it a top treble edge and adding little variations, stutters and echoes – small chaotic variations, surprises for the ear that can keep the beat going without anything melodic happening for minutes.
In this context I was a cog in a rhythm machine, an element in a sonic molecule. It was essential that I went through the process of learning how to make music like this work in a small band with a tight group of compadres living together in the same house. We practiced for hours and then hung out for hours listening to records and reverse engineering. Over years learning different genres, finding the rules, I gained an appreciation and perhaps the beginning of an understanding of how it all worked together – or a least the beginning to comprehend and to aspire to feel that there were atomic structures at play that ran through the arts of making bodies move.
Solo guitar gave me the opportunity to be the whole machine myself. If you can become deft at classical fingerstyle technique you can play a simple bassline on the low strings while hitting a rhythmic pattern on the middle strings while singing a melody on the top strings all at the same time – the full musical gestalt. And because of this, as well as the variations of sound and texture and dynamics it can produce, the guitar can be one of the few truly satisfying solo instruments, capable of entertaining for hours without people getting sick of it.
The nylon string guitar is simply much better at this than the steel string guitar. A richer instrument that offers an incredibly wide range of expression, still just being explored. The bass notes are deeper and can be hit harder, the higher notes are softer but can be daggers and the mids sit back nice and dry. It requires a lot more hand stretching but there is room to really feel the instrument. Music itself becomes a function of the tactile quality of the neck, as skin. And with classical right hand fingerstyle techniques you get to feel strings in such a way that rhythms are born as pets, caresses, or violence. You dig into them as you would your throat for intense emotional expression. It is an instrument built for dynamics and inventiveness. “Solo guitar” is really a misnomer as you are forged in a duo with your instrument, especially when played standing.
Playing a nylon string guitar hugged against your body is quite literally a visceral experience. Rhythms are belly rubs. You dance with it, your wrestle it. It is a tender lover. It’s a shovel.
I’ll be telling the story of meeting Alfonso Chacón in greater depth as the blog moves to that time but suffice to say at this moment for those not familiar – in that aforementioned Latin Rhythms class I would eventually meet Maestro Chacón, substitute teacher on the last day of class, then a 68 year old legend from Chile who had a significant career performing and recording across South America in the 1950s and 60s.
Chacón taught me the basics of classical guitar technique, not so I could play Bach (which I did just a little of) but to play folkloric and popular styles of Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, and of course Chile. Transcribing around 40 original arrangements of canonical tunes using the cifras notation system, plus pointing me towards the great composers of South American guitar (Yupanqui, Barrios, Lauro, Bonfa, Acevedo, and on and on), plus finding my own paths of interest (chicha/cumbia, tropicalia, malambo), by the end of the ‘00s I developed a working repertoire of around 85 pieces of solo guitar music, easily over four hours, burned into the muscle memory of my hands.
Some of these are slow achingly beautiful romantic pieces meant to be played in almost an open time for full expression, as a singer would catch their breath or linger on a phrase. But the bulk of what I play are tunes rooted in rhythms rooted in dance.
Let’s go back a few hundred/thousand years. First there were dancers. Dancers, drums, and voices. Much later came the guitars. The guitars played to the dancers, made strums that danced with the dancers. Every rhythm had a name, 1000 songs on each rhythm. A guitarist could travel, they could visit or move to a place where the dancing is different and they can play their rhythms and maybe new dancing starts. Or a guitarist can be visited by traveling musicians who can be taught these rhythms. The traveler may or may not remember them well, but something like them will get played somewhere else. And someone new will ask, “how do you do that?”
Simple melodic bassline in the low end, steady rhythmic pattern in the mid range, a melody on top.
But it’s not just the notes, it’s the intent. It’s the getting the music in your body, feeling the accents to spur a body to jerk, keeping the pulse and floor of noise steady so the listener gets used to it as a room. Polyrhythms hypnotize, music for meditation and music for dance work on the same principles, one just thumps a bit. And it is absolutely about tapping into the sexual energy, it is all about the sexual energy, this is tango after all, we need to reproduce. Even if just in the imagination, a little daydream, the music is about bringing bodies together. The more steady you play the longer the bodies move. I will tell you right now, from my personal experience, there are few things more intoxicating than watching people dance to your music. If you know how good that is you have a better shot at playing it right.
As a solo guitarist playing background music at a corporate networking event or a country club clubhouse nobody is dancing, but the music is bringing a vibe, an elevated mood. You’ve never heard this particular piece of music before but it’s all familiar in primal way, you can access joy, your mind relaxes, you can laugh, you get another drink.
I had the motivation and the oceans of time necessary to practice and because I understood the aesthetics and primordial purpose of the music (like having a feel for knowing where and how to stretch things to maximize time) I had nearly 3 hours of solo guitar music ready to go after just a couple years with Alfonso.
But I had 2 big problems. My repertoire was good enough for background music at a farmers’ market, I mean, if played to perfection it is legitimate concert material. But as someone who started classical finger style technique in my 30s I needed to make up for decades: my hands were not strong enough, fast enough, or dexterous enough to really do it. What I was doing might sound like good music and perhaps one talent I may possess is the taste for making things “musical” within my limitations, but I might also be whiffing on 40% of the notes I was trying to play. The other problem was I just hardly understood what I was doing.
UP NEXT: 3. Sweating the Technique