When I began the process of putting together my Retrospective, reviewing old recordings, it wasn’t all the joyful experience of unearthing forgotten treasures. It is the nature of the relatively amateur and short-term quality of so many of these projects and the often rushed and chaotic recording processes that not every track was a golden success. Some of my old songwriting can hit me as a bit, uh, cringey, or there are takes in the vocals and guitar I wish I could’ve spent more time on, perhaps gotten a bit more critical feedback. If I felt that way in the slightest about any recording it didn’t make the cut.
With the possible exception of Late Nite Delight (40oz Dub) by Butterfly, which is there to represent both the aesthetics of the mid-late 90s and the end of the band, I think just about everything in the Retrospective collection is perfect in its own Wabi-sabi way.
The toughest to review though were the solo guitar recordings.
I can remember long frustrating nights in 2004/2005 with a little Sony Mini-Disc recorder trying to capture any decent full performance of any solo guitar piece, and hopefully not while a train went by. I had already learned an immense repertoire of solo guitar tunes, just enough to squeak through 3 hours if I took long enough breaks. I could cover time well enough to put myself out there to the world inasmuch as I knew how to, enlisting early web designer friends to help me get up my first rudimentary versions of neildixonsmith.com. But there wasn’t any one particular piece that I could play in impressive enough fashion to record. Things is, I never had enough time to focus on any one tune as my higher priority was fostering the ability to play solidly for three hours and be gigworthy.
In the last chapter I wrote about my efforts of turning my hands into little athletes on the fingerboard and strings. In the Karate Kid parlance, the wax on wax off. But that was only half the story for now I also had to get out there and fight. I had to actually play the music. Do the job. In public. In front of people. With the expectation of money, however modest. In becoming a solo guitarist, learning as an apprentice, I’m not just playing music I’m joining a tradition. And solo guitarists work.
When I began it seemed to me there was great potential for solo guitar music and I was not wrong. It is its own gnostic path, truths are revealed after years of diligent disciplined service and this was something I could work on to my hardest extent. It was only true if I did it. And the music I was learning also happened to be the greatest guitar music I’d ever heard. Why play anything else? I am no longer a cog, I am the machine. I could channel the full force of my energy through these incredible rhythms, first to exhaustion and then to sublimation. And I could feel and express emotions so directly, no fuss, no neurosis, each tune a little wordless drama of love and loss and memory, and then just waves of joy. And I began my path to learn about the histories of the places where the music I was learning came from and how unbelievably ignorant I was and how unbelievably ignorant most white North Americans are of the shared history and beautiful cultures of the people called Americans. I became a single cell revolutionary evangelical panamericanist. I’m here to keep this music alive, this solo guitar tradition alive. And hopefully for someone else to learn. Maybe from me. And while first and foremost I’m here to deliver a good time, in the subtext I’m here to help transition white people’s consciousness to a broader view of the continent, to see beauty in something fresh and perhaps spark a curiosity. And I developed a revolutionary ethos about how there needs to be more live music around in every day life, and there was nothing more powerful than to play music to life as it is actually happening around you, be it in a park, a dining room, a backyard, a conference room, or a restaurant. I love the feeling of playing to an environment, playing to the energy of a room, enhancing the mood, being the collective social tissue to a gathering. I am part of a solo guitar tradition that delivers elegant sexuality, driving energy, deep reflection, archetypal nostalgia, spiritual ecstasy, and a sense of fun. Funky loveliness. It is really something to be an agent of mood livening. And I got the entrepreneurial bug to go after it in a professional manner creating opportunities to be excellent in many contexts while decoding my value on the market. I’m still figuring out what’s possible. But as a white dude from the suburbs of Syracuse it is all so insane, the whole endeavor, that it has been equally an absurdist situationist shaggy dog joke. I dig it all.
And all because of this crazy collection of music I call my repertoire.
I’m nothing without my repertoire and my repertoire comes from Alfonso Chacón. A revolutionary himself, I am his vision for the variety of music a guitarist should play to create opportunities to work and open doors for the experience of the richness of life. He was not wrong.
As a music-obsessive since birth in my mid-30s with extensive experience in bands and college/community radio not to mention a love music biographies and histories I knew a ton about all facets of rocknroll music. I also knew a good deal about the history of jazz, blues and reggae, plus a decent amount of funk, soul, hip hop, electronic, folk, gospel, avant-garde, and country music plus more than your average music fan’s knowledge of regional African styles. But before I moved to Chicago I knew nothing about Latin American music beyond the basics of bossa nova and the Buena Vista Social Club.
As a Chilean born man who as a young professional guitarist supported many of the greatest touring singers and instrumentalists of his generation on the radio and in the concert halls of Santiago, who toured himself all the way to the beaches of Brazil and would spend months at a time in Lima, Peru, who then later moved to Buenos Aires in Argentina for the first half of the 70s followed by 15 years in Caracas, Venezuela before his last 20 years in Chicago where he performed, taught and worshipped with people from Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, played Chicago Peruvian and Chilean cultural festivals and earthquake relief concerts, entertained immigration rallies in Catholic churches and sometimes subbed in at the Old Town School of Folk Mucis, Alfonso had a broad and historic view of Latin American folkloric and popular music.
He did not believe in musical nationalism which he would describe as the air many South American musicians breathe. He wanted to play all the styles, as good as the locals, so good that the locals couldn’t tell a non-native was doing it. The Rosetta Stone was classical guitar technique, which gave the fingers the maximum ability for expression and prepared the hands to efficiently pick up and replicate idiosyncratic regional folk techniques – ways of playing guitar forged in remote places to achieve singular textures and rhythms for singular dances.
Lest I go down any one rabbit hole too far his teaching method was to give constant contrasts: first an Argentine tune in the gato rhythm (gaucho dance music), then a standard of Cuban son, then a vals (waltz) from Peru, then some cumbia from Colombia, then a bossa nova standard from Brazil, then an Ecuadorian drinking song, then a tremolo piece, then a Chilean cueca, then back to Argentina but this time a tango, etc. etc. etc. In addition to the above he introduced me to tunes and musical genres from Venezuela, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, plus Spain and Italy.
Each one of these genres contains multitudes of songs and unique instrumental conventions. The manner and/or the frequency in which a guitarist might play little riffs between lines in a verse can be special to each style not to mention the subtleties of strumming. There’s a very fundamental polyrhythmic right hand strumming pattern that achieves a 3 feel in the bass while a feel of 2 in the treble that is utilized over a sprawling family of folkloric music styles in the nations that surround the Andes Mountains. With slight variations you are using it to play Peruvian marinera, as well as Argentine chacarera, Paraguyan guarania, Venezuelan joropo, and Chilean cueca, among many many others. What is essential though are the “slight variations”, the ways certain elements of the basic strumming pattern are muted or choked while others are more open. When I’d be trying to play a cueca pattern and Alfonso would stop me exclaiming “you’re playing like a Mexican!” one cannot help but appreciate the concept of the “narcissism of slim difference” on a cultural scale, but that’s life’s rich pageant.
I was in reggae music long enough to get an internal feel for the guitar conventions so I could create a legitimate feel of “reggaeness”: how much weight to put on the chop, when to hit the delay pedal, when to shift from skanks to bubbles, etc. Things can be easily overdone by an overenthusiastic rookie that break the spell.
Nonetheless that was from many years of reggae school, many gigs, many jam sessions, and many hours listening. The cumulative knowledge builds and the repetitions get it into your physical operating system and it becomes easier and easier to anticipate what you should be doing on original and/or new material. And maybe most importantly I had enough of a positive feedback loop with other musicians and on stage that I could recognize, understand and appreciate this process.
But in the mid-00’s I was learning 20 styles all at the same time. Each solo guitar arrangement was it’s own little obstacle course, fast and slow up and down the neck, left hand fingers twisting in endless permutations. I used to like to describe solo guitar as something closer to figure skating than piano. Alfonso would dictate his arrangements of tunes one riff at a time while I sat with a sketchbook following his instructions using the “cifras” method of guitar notation, similar to tablature but easier to write on the fly. And if I could make each piece sound something like “nice music” and close enough to what he was doing to get Alfonso’s blessing, I could forgive myself for imperfections.
“Imperfections” could be “I have no real idea how this song goes”. This was still before youtube as a resource. It was the dawn of the Apple iTunes Store which was super helpful, but for a great deal of what I was learning the only version of tune I had to go one was Alfonso’s arrangement. I’m learning a sequence of musical events but I have no idea if any given section is a verse or a chorus or if a particular phrase is part of the melody or some kind of ornamentation. Alfonso was incapable of playing anything the same way twice and he liked to put in little allusions to other tunes, sometimes as a kind of an inside joke for himself.
Alfonso was an old man who had lived a hard life. He knew he didn’t have a lot of time and he was trying to get down as much of his knowledge as he could. He had a handful of students and I swear he taught each of us a completely different repertoire. But I was his most serious student and probably his best note taker. In his last years he was so manic I have pages of notes for several arrangements I never learned because I just couldn’t keep up.
Of course I had no way of comprehending how little I comprehended about this music until I got out and actually played it in public in front of people who know it more than being nice sounding guitar music. The first opportunity I had came in the early days of Alfonso forming a guitar ensemble, later to be known simply as Los Guitarristas. Two of the original members were Peruvian guys I quickly befriended who had a trio with a singer and performed weekly at the Taste of Peru restaurant up in Rogers Park, Chicago, and they invited me to come out and play during their set breaks.
At this time I had just finished learning my first Peruvian waltz, a tune from the 1930s called El Plebeyo, a deeply romantic tune about a young man who is poor and in love with a rich girl and I think a deeply important tune in Limeño culture. But at that moment to me it’s just a super cool sounding dance on my strings – I had never heard a recorded version, I probably had no idea it was even a song that was sung. To me it was a piece of solo guitar music that I knew to be from Peru. This is in the spring of 2004, it’s a sunny evening and there’s a decent dinner crowd. The Trio is amazing, I think people know Brazil and Argentina as places with deep guitar traditions, but I would put Peru right there too, if not on the same scale. Anyways, I take center stage and begin El Plebeyo and the most amazing thing happened. I get to a very particular moment early in the tune and everyone in the restaurant started clapping in applause at exactly the same time – the applause that comes, I think, when everyone recognizes what tune is happening. I triggered their recognition of El Plebeyo. It felt amazing.
I was embraced so warmly at Taste of Peru I was a bit of a regular over the next year, so much so that the owner started calling me “El Perucho” which is a name they jokingly give to Peruvians who are a bit too into being Peruvian. There were some good and encouraging performances, and I made friendships with regulars that are still with me today. But also there were several total disasters when I attempted to play pieces that my hands were not ready for. Hitting loud and ugly bad notes, whiffing on chords my fingers can not get used to reaching or getting halfway into a tune and having to awkwardly bail for not remembering what happens next. I am eternally grateful to Taste of Peru, but I played myself out there. I was not ready for a spotlight.
More forgiving were farmer’s markets and another huge early break for me was becoming a regular at the Green City Market in Lincoln Park. My first real background music gig, I could play for hours and start playing with sequencing, 5-6 song blocks that in those days really helped with my muscle memory. I got the feel for conquering time.
And I get to play for an urban white educated Lincoln Park crowd. People who travel and have nice tastes and were sick of Beatles covers. They dig me. I get used to playing with kids going bananas in front of me, or the occasional crazy person. I’m playing sitting down, in a cocoon. I’m invisible, like there’s a blanket over me. I’m an existential hero anonymously giving up my soul for the greater ambience, sacrificing any need for personal valor. Don’t look at me. I get asked to play for dinner parties. I get asked to play for gallery events and neighborhood police meetings at the Old Town Triangle. And then someone came up and asked if I would play at her wedding, I told her this music you hear me playing is all I know and she said that’s the music she wanted. It was happening.
I slowly worked my way into gigging as a solo guitarist in Chicago. But that didn’t mean I had achieved anything except the momentum to keep going. Keep working at it. Keep developing. Keep getting stronger. Keep getting better, because I know if you only heard me play one tune you might think I sucked.
The metaphor I use for my repertoire for myself is that of a garden. It’s a big ass garden, a football field. If I want the whole thing to look decent it’s a constant process of pulling weeds here and there but the land is too big to worry about any one particular corner – I got to keep the whole thing alive.
At times I work on sections. I caught the Brazilian music bug first, discovering late 60s Tropicalia and working backwards and forwards. I bought every Brazilian guitar book I could find and learned a ton more tunes on my own. Much of the most favorite things I play today. I even came across a clique of folks in Chicago dedicated to Brazilian styles who host regular jam sessions, warm and welcoming people and brilliant musicians. But after hanging with them a few times I saw that was not my path. I can’t go all in one thing, hedgehog style, I need the variety, the full panamericanist vision, fox style.
When I work too hard on any one section, other parts of the garden become neglected and periodically I have to go back to full garden maintenance mode, or else I run the risk of not being able to cover 3 hours..
Psychologically I had to create a strategy to cope with all of this, a kind of controlled ignorance. There was no way I could possibly learn the deep logics of each genre I was playing. I have no formal musical education, I barely understand the chord progressions that are happening underneath, let alone the stylistic signifiers. Despite what you may think, I am not an academic-style player, I play from feel, from the heart and groin, I don’t want to think while I play. I can read music, but it takes me time.
So I begin a slow process of accepting that my understandings and abilities are incomplete, works in progress, that over time this condition will improve with repetitions and further supplemental education, but it is ok if I take what I do as purely and primarily “making good guitar music” as a mode along the way to “playing tango properly”. The mountain is huge. I have no idea how far I can go but I’m on the climb.
The reason I am writing this today in July of 2026 over 20 years later I have gotten somewhere. I no longer play in a cocoon, I seek visibility. I whiff less, and I play with more authority. I can almost make recordings I am happy with.
Some things have just taken 20 years, like the speed and dexterity I’ve achieved in my hands with such efficient technique that I can play for 3 hours without breaks and barely be fatigued.
The strategy of controlled ignorance bought be years of time, but slowly it hardened into blocks, locking me into my arrangements. It took me years to play some pieces well enough that I could truly be proud of my performance only to realize that if I didn’t broaden my musical understanding I would be trapped inside them.
There is one more big chapter to go about my development as a solo guitarist. About how I came to confront these blocks – but that will be for the final chapter of this blog.
But before we move on to my full story we do have one more chapter, maybe a short one, I don’t know, about where I am today and what I want to do while I’m still doing it.
Next up: The Present Tense
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