There’s a story I like to tell about solo guitar. Nothing I’ve studied formally, too much of this kind of thinking becomes a distraction, but picked up and fused together from anecdotes by Alfonso, liner notes on albums and in sheet music collections, some excellent books here and there and some dashed glances at wikipedia. I keep it simple so this seems like enough. Once in a blue moon I’ll get an opportunity to perform in a purely concert setting to a captive seated audience with a green light to talk. It could be in someone’s living room or maybe some kind of folk cafe or even a public library. And given this chance I will frame my performance around this story, the set list as narrative beats. I have many stories to tell but if someone is seeing me for the first time, and maybe the only time, then this presentation is primary. But even in the most backgroundy of background music situations where there is miniscule chance anyone would recognize or care about any of the styles I play, for my own satisfaction it still shapes the structure of my sets from my hottest cocktail party to my most romantic chill. The story tells itself without the verbiage. It’s a Panmericanist Manifesto on Solo Guitar and the first element of my ritual. Feed the roots. Welcome children, I’m here to tell the story of solo guitar in the Americas…
It starts in Brazil in the first decades of the 20th century. It’s now a couple generations past the end of slavery and monarchy and in the 1910s there’s a bit of an economic boom happening due to the demands for rubber and other resources from the European powers at war. A middle class is growing and there’s a new feeling of stability and optimism in the air and an awareness that a new and wholly unique culture was emerging in the industrial port cities. If you’re North American you can think of Brazil as an upside down USA, our American South is like their Brazilian North where there were huge African slave populations that post-liberation began to migrate to the south for work bringing along and then creating new forms of samba and it’s jazz cousin choro as well as all the carnival marches and spectacle we think of when we think of Brazil.
In the late 1910s something of a salon formed in Rio comprised of leading artists, musicians, writers and thinkers – a nascent Brazilian intellectual elite, educated in European standards but seeking their own national identity. One of the leading members was a brilliant orchestral composer who also happened to play guitar named Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Villa-Lobos heard the music of the streets and parties of Rio as something distinctly Brazilian, reflecting of essential Brazilianess, and in the salon he advocated that as cultural leaders they should follow the lead of the people and this organic urban folklorica and create great works of modern art based on these ideas to celebrate and inspire this creative cycle. The job of the conscious nationalist intellectual artist is to foster positive feedback loops with the best elements of the national character. People will see there is great art being made in their culture that is of their culture and this will create pride and good feeling and a desire to keep it all going. And this is what he set out to do.
An early and foundational text to come from this project is the solo guitar piece “Choros No. 1” by Villa-Lobos published in 1920, but I imagine he had been jamming variations for years. It’s piece of music I play in the first minutes of nearly any performance. “Choro” music emerged at the same time as what we now call “traditional jazz” evolved in New Orleans and are effectively cousins by way of Cuba. Choros No.1 is a helluva fun piece of music to play, it’s best thought of and played as party music and it anticipates so much of what we will hear from Brazilian guitarists through the 20th century. Played with verve it does not come off as something over a century old; it’s fresh, sparkling, and direct. It works. It is so rich guitaristically likely because he was also hanging with the spectacularly named guitarist Américo Jacomino aka “Canhoto” (“lefty”, he played his guitar upside down and backwards), who pioneered the solo guitar as a source of parlor room party music in these years and was a grand composer of guitar music in his own right (especially the staggeringly gorgeous “Abismo de Rosas” from the mid 1920s).
Spanish guitar composers of the 19th century had certainly already figured out how to create fully satisfying and exciting three-dimensional solo guitar music with a Northern African influence and that is it’s own epic story. And there had already been centuries of European composers taking motifs from regional folk music to create symphonic works of “classical music”. But this new Brazilian music was not written for the concert hall but for everyday life, for the kitchen, for the rooftop, and it was uniquely and distinctly American – a result of the processes of the English/Spanish/French/Portuguese colonization of the western hemisphere in concert with the African slave trade and in degrees of conquest and/or annihilation of indigenous populations. National histories, such as the epic stories of the United States or Brazil, are important, but I believe it is fruitful and rewarding to take a step back to see that the Americas and all Americans have a shared history shaped by and within the interactions of these colonial forces, often enough for ill, but also sources of beauty and wisdom from the generations that still found love in the face of it all and ground it out in each local stew’s way.. More importantly we share an ecology and when the climate change shit hits the fan national histories and borders will become quaint. From the northern territories of Canada to Patagonia and across the Caribbean, Americans. As consequential as the American Revolutionary War was, you can’t understand anything from the 19th century onward without understanding what happened in Haiti, what happened in Barbados, or Bolivia, or how came the Chinatowns, or all the mini empires built on sugar, potatoes, silver, rubber, fertilizer, corn, tobacco, beef, horses, railroads and motorcylces.
And music.
I’ve read that it was from ships of Italian merchants landing on the coast of Venezuela that brought the first string instruments that evolved into the Cuban tres, the Puerto Rican quatro, the myriad of stringed instruments that constitute Mexican son jarocho music, as well as, of course, the mandolin up north. Africans brought the banjo. Guitars came a bit later. Fiddles were everywhere. Germans brought accordions. It was important for armies to have marching bands to hype the troops and the result of skirmishes could be the stockpiling of brass instruments that would then flood local markets second hand after the fighting was over which is how New Orleans got its brass. Where drums were banned by religious authorities new percussionist instruments were forged, most dramatically as by the dockworkers of coastal Peru who fashioned wooden crates with loose screws into the cajon used worldwide today.
But when we’re talking music in the Americas, especially the urban dance music forms, from tango to samba to cumbia to early jazz and New Orleans funk and everything that spun out of those (which is everything), the ground zero is Havana Cuba. Here I will rely on the scholarship of musicologist (and guitarist) Ned Sublette and his books Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo and The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, the two most incredible and important works summarizing an understanding American music I have read – both immensely fun and readable to the casual fan with mind blowing histories on every page. Basically, in Cuba in the 18th into the 19th centuries there was a mix of African populations who lived as free people who evolved musical styles into wholly new and distinct forms, influenced of African ideas but at the atomic level but now fundamentally Cuban in origin – and another massive story are the subsequent feedback loops back to Africa. And as Havana became a stopping point or a refuge (at different times controlled by the Spanish, French and English empires) for travelers to the north to New Orleans or across to Veracruz or to the south to Cartegena, Salvador, Rio and Buenos Aires, the “habanero” rhythm became the molecular blueprint for body movement in the 20th century Western Hemisphere.
And now with Villa-Lobos we get another electric feedback loop of an idea. The idea of breaking the colonial consciousness of European supremacy and the coldness of the concert stage by embracing and elevating the organic dance music of the block parties, of the brothels, of the ports, of the ranch pit fires to the status of high art, and applying the tools of advanced technique and modern harmony to create works of real substance that the people with love and want to play themselves.
Solo guitar in the Americas begins here. And in Brazil the solo guitar movement stays alive through the 30s with Dilermando Reis and into the 40s with Uruguayan immigrant turned true believer Isaias Savio who became a mentor to a young Luiz Bonfa who redefined the standards for the bossa nova age in the 50s all the way into the fusion age of the 70s and flung the door wide open for the genius of Baden Powell in the 60s who expanded the possibilities to abstraction and became an inspiration to the tropicalia movement, the brilliant and essential reaction against the nationalist music project of Villa-Lobos era as it became a tool of reactionary authoritarianism. To highlight but a few, these names are the creators whose work is the backbone of what I do. I honor them by keeping their music alive, and I’ve had a career because the music they created is the reigning Most Badness, channeling the highest of levels energy through the full range of expression the instrument offers.
But this is not just about Brazil. In the 1920s we are beginning what is called The Golden Age of Guitar in South America, peaking in the 40s and 50s and lasting into the 60s until military dictatorships, rock and roll, and cocaine complicated the chat. Jibing right with the Folk Revival in North America that started with the Carters in the 20s and Woody Guthrie in the 30s up to Bob Dylan and thereafter in the 60s, but obviously also very different in the palate of music it drew from, but you can put artists like Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong and Bill Monroe and many more in the same continuum. But in terms of richness and inventiveness and a broader vision of what guitars can do together and by themselves, North America doesn’t hold a candle to the South.
In Argentina in the 1920s a young boy moves out to northwest provinces of the pampa, massive flat ranchland home to centuries of beef cultivation and the tender roughneck culture of gauchos, Argentina cowboys. His parents are educated civil servants and as a teenager he gets a job as a mail carrier, traveling across the pampa to remote villages and begins to learn to play their unique guitar strumming styles and along with local folklore, songs and poetry. He also becomes politically radicalized and changes his name to that of an Incan warrior who fought Spanish conquest, Atahualpa Yupanqui. With this education he moves to Buenos Aires and by the 1930s he’s writing hit songs and becoming a legend.
Yupanqui is both the Andres Segovia and Woody Guthrie of Argentina, a brilliant and virtuoso guitarist, a foundational interpreter of Argentine culture and a prime encoder of its strong folkloric guitar legacy who was also arrested many times for being an outspoken communist. Guitars are a central part of Argentine culture and after Brazil I think it has the deepest and most unique guitar traditions. Darker moods and song forms that invite the breaking of time.
Of the family of gaucho musical styles the baddest is the malambo, the music of the gaucho dance off. There are many regional folkloric dance forms for which song structures have been built around, but malambo is purely instrumental and without melody. It’s for the end of the night, and a chance for the super macho gauchos to prove who is the best dancer in their boots and big shirts. The guitar plays this simple three chord I IV V pattern in 6, but its not a song, it’s a jam. It’s a particular rhythm and and a concept of a riff that you dig into and endlessly vary like a drill with a morphing bit. Riffs are added to, repeated, then again but now with another note squeezed in, another round and another note or ornamentation added, and then a break down, jumping an electron shell to a higher level of energy and a new technique to match, maybe now a strum pattern that gets faster and faster from 8th notes to 16ths to flutters between until hysterical until the hands can do nothing but start playing drums on the strings, on the body, hitting harder, pushing the dancer to greater intensity. It’s trance music. It’s my favorite form solo guitar music, though I go through long periods (including currently) where I lack the confidence to attempt my own malambo in public, but I can only imagine what it would be like to play it to an actual dancer in that environment. Absolute intensity.
I don’t really listen to much solo guitar music but two albums I do love to listen to are Luiz Bonfa’s Introspection from 1972, and then the late career live album from Yupanqui called Conceirto Instrumental (1978), which features a track called “Malambo” (studio versions list this piece as “Cruz del Sur”), which is just about my favorite recorded solo guitar performance, the guitar twirls like a dervish into ecstasy. Giving the status of ballet to the roughest of the rough.
And then there is the tango music, the standard being Roberto Grela in the 1940s and 50s. There are fantastic recordings of him though not so much in solo guitar but in duet with another guitarists or playing with a bandoneon. He plays with completely fluidity and toughness and elegance and an awesome rubbery thickness. But in general you can’t always rely on searching out records for great Argentine guitar performances, there are plenty but it’s a smaller recording industry. Better for our age to just hit youtube and find people playing in their kitchens and you’ll see the solo guitar tradition is quite alive, as well as the awesome Argentine ethic of creating wholly new and unique arrangements for every song. No Argentine standard is every performed the same way (which makes the process of learning them a bit maddening). Both in Brazil and Argentina there an unimaginably strong tradition of high amateur musicianship amongst regular middle class people living their lives. When you start to see this as a North American any previous notion of US cultural supremacy melts away.
And then in Paraguay in this same time 1920s time period you have maybe the greatest of the South American greats, Agustín Barrios Mangoré. A brilliant composer he was more in the pure classical guitar world. Paraguay is a small landlocked country of mostly jungle, so he wasn’t leading a music scene that would break worldwide dance crazes. But like Yupanqui and Villa-Lobos he took as his mission to create high art and thrilling guitar music from the folklore of the indigineous guaraní people, of which he was one. His pieces “Danza Paraguaya” and “Las Abejas” truck like a punk rock tunes, and two more pieces from him that I play, “Choro de Saudade” (in the Brazilian choro style) and the epic tremolo “Una Limosna Por el Amor de Dios”, often the final song I play at any engagement, are among the most emotional experiences of my sets.
Hero of Panamerianism and the fight for American folkloric music to be taken as seriously, the legendary Barrios moment is when he arrived for his super hyped first European tour to perform in the fanciest concert halls with white men in black ties and the women in fabulous gowns and he walks out and takes center stage to perform solo guitar in full guaraní headdress and regalia. These are hard men.
Besides Brazil and Argentina, the other South American country that fostered a real, unique and thoroughly badass guitar culture is Peru. Again, it’s not a large enough country and economy to produce a vast output in terms of a record industry, but Peruvian guitarists have their own thing going from the folkloric Afro-Peruvian styles like festejo and then on electric guitars creating their own surf cumbia hybrid called chicha which in the 21st century continues to find new audiences.
In Peru like elsewhere the folk revivals came in the 30s and 40s, and a central figure in the codification of “Peruvian guitar style” was a man named Oscar Avilés, who passed away in 2014 in his 90s. He achieved early success playing with a string of commercially popular folkloric groups and then he had a long career as a genius accompanist to every Peruvian singer for several generations. If you travel to the Lima airport you might find a kiosk of CDs half of which feature Andean pipe groups the other half a myriad of different singers each photographed with a large man with black hair and a black mustache, that’s Oscar. He was not a songwriter himself, he was taught music within his family and developed his own idiosyncratic way of playing. He was a big man with huge hands, and gets a huge tone from his bass strings, and loves riffing bass arpeggios and then stabbing in the treble range. He plays with space. Alfonso was good friends with Oscar and would stay at his home during his Lima trips and I think got a lot his own style from Oscar.
There’s a recording Oscar made with the singer “Zambo” Cavero, a singular dance tune called “El Alcatraz” (where a man dances with a candle attempting to light a piece of string dangling from behind his female dance partner) that is just about the sickest track I’ve ever heard, an incredible demonstration as to how powerful 3 bass notes and cajon can be. It’s a song but really more of a chant, there’s no bridge, just a groove. Along with Yupanqui’s Malambo its one of my bedrock core faves of South American guitar music.
I got to tell him that personally, as I spent an afternoon with Oscar in his home in 2008, but that’s a story for a later time.
Alfonso created two solo guitar arrangements of iconic Peruvian waltzes associated with him that showcase the Avilés style, the first being “El Plebeyo” which I discussed previously performing the Taste of Peru restaurant in Chicago, and then the massively important “La Flor de la Canela”, based on his accompaniment with the songwriter legend Chabuca Granda on the absolutely classic and essential album Dialogando. If you are intrigued about the possibilities of the “voice and guitar” format, this album is of the highest order, a true work of modern art. Avilés can take a two chord song and make it sound like a symphony composed by a radical techno DJ, constantly deconstructing, violently dissembling chords and then giving her a feather bed for a landing, so tactile in how he grabs 2 strings with three fingers and rips from underneath. He was not part of an intellectual elite like Villa-Lobos, but he’s a powerful presence in the genius of South American guitar.
As I may play longer mini-sets of Brazilian and Argentine tunes, working through larger canons, these Peruvian valses, along with a couple pasillas from Ecuador and a bambuco from Colombia, are the dramatic or soothing stand alones, palate cleansers, in between epic medleys. A more extensive journey through Peruvian riff styles is something I have planned for the future.
The last country that I have enough material for a couple different mini-sets is Venezuela. Our hero here is Antonio Lauro who came to prominence in the 1950s and like Barrios is known to any student of classical guitar. He’s best known for a series of 4 waltzes, often referred to just by their numbers but they have names too I can never keep straight. I play #2 (“Andreina”) and #3 (“Natalia”) and both of these were full band instrumental pop hits in the 70s and known by the general public.
The sickest Lauro piece though is “Seis Por Derecho”, a tune I first attempted to perform on stage at a Los Guitarristas performance at the Old Town School of Folk Music in 2007. It’s been one of my career-long white whales, though one I feel very good about how I play these days. The style here is joropo, a super fast ebullient 6/8 rhythm. The primary instrument in a lot of Venezuelan folkloric music is the harp and Seis Por Derecho mimics a harp jam. Like a malambo in Seis there is no melody, just a series of dance moves that builds intensity, breaks down and builds back up again into ecstasy. It is a full aerobic workout.
Another joropo standard and maybe the most culturally nationalistic tune of the Venezuelan canon is called “Alma Llanera” (Llaneras are herders, so another kind of South American cowboy). I first fell in love with it in my first term of Latin Rhythms at the Old Town School and I even sang it at a solo performance in Ann Arbor in the early aughts. Later in Los Guitarristas we incorporated it into our rhapsody “Paisaje de Venezuela” and from that I created a solo guitar arrangement that rocks probably harder than anything else I do. It’s one of the tunes I would be most worried about getting wrong yet I play it with full reckless force as this is a song that can only be sung full throated. Before I was doing it as a solo piece I remember once I was hired for a Venezuelan wedding for ceremony and cocktail hour and at the end of my set it was arranged that I would play it for the whole party to sing along to and what an intensely powerful feeling of joy.
Along with the joropos I play Aflonso’s arrangement of a tambor called “Barlovento” and then my own deconstruction of Venezuelan classical guitar composer Rodrigo Riera’s “Preludio Criollo”. Collectively these are the tunes that feature my most intense and spectacular strumming. It’s also probably the music that is least known to my audiences. I know for myself it took me a long time to acclimate to these rhythms but they are the most fun and most cardiovascular. They also feel like the most political to play, and when I rock Almo Llanera in a country club setting I feel I am there to crack skulls open for their minds to broaden.
So here’s a typical first set from me, it’s a cocktail party, it’s a polemic. The horizontal listings with slashes means no space between, usually a musical transitions as opposed to just starting and stopping, but not like I leave much space between anyways. This is 50 minutes:
[warm up] Preludio No 1 (Villa-Lobos, Brazil)
Manha de Carnaval (Bonfa, Brazil)
Choros No 1 (Villa-Lobos)
Passeio No Rio (Bonfa) /Batucada (Savio) / Dobradino (Bonfa)
Los Ejes de Mi Carreta (Yupanqui, Argentina)
Te Vas Milonga (Fleury, Argentina) / La Cumparsita (Matos Rodriquez, Argentina)
Choro de Saudade (Barrios, Paraguay)
El Plebeyo (Alva, arr Chacon, Peru)
Andreina (Lauro, Venezuela) / Natalia / Alma Llanera (Guitiérrez, Venezuela)
To create a satisfying concert performance I try to make sure I’m doing something spectacular every 20 minutes or so and here in this set there are three: Dobradinho is a carnival march that caps off a long build of Brazilian rhythms and the highlight are a couple moments where I twist my 5th string over my 6th to create a snare drum sound that’s always startling to the crowd. Especially if I’m in a setting where I can go a little wild I will have fun improvising a drum solo before the hard transition into the cool milonga rhythm that kicks off Los Ejes de Mi Carreta.
Then at the end of the tango La Cumparsita there is what is called within the Chacon circle the “impossible solo” enlisting the tango convention of playing through the main theme with a blisteringly fast fury of notes. “Sheets of sound” as John Coltrane called it. I’ve been working on this for 20 years and I’m just starting to get it down, in perfect conditions in my home practice I can nail it but I’m still not consistent with it on stage, but that’s still immense progress and I am so close. And lastly at the end of Alma Llanera I’ve created a guitar solo section where I sustain flutters of high notes while maintaining the bass arpeggio, I’m still just exploring the possibilities as I’m just achieving the speed to make this actually musical.
From here I would take the energy back down with a romantic piece or a tremolo. My sets are all put together by these blocks of 2-5 tunes. I have a couple other Brazilian mini-sets, one that celebrates Antonio Carlos Jobim (including “The Girl from Ipanema”), another that celebrates Canhoto and another legendary songwriter, Pixinguinha. And I have a couple other Argentine sets, with more tango, more Yupanqui, and spectaculars like Julio Sagreras’s flutter workout “El Colibrí” (“the hummingbird”). And then another favorite mini-set mixes Peruvian chicha classics with those of Colombian cumbia, with an intro tune of W African palm wine.
But the heart and soul of my show though is this one:
Xodo da Baiana (Reis, Brazil) / Canto de Ossanha (Powell, Brazil) / Cumbia de Chacon / La Pollera Colora (Choperena y Madera, Colombia) / Son de la Loma (Matamoros, Cuba) / Duerme Negrito (arr Brouwer, Cuba)
This 6 track set clocks in at around 20 minutes. Xodo da Baiana is ripping choro by Dilermando Reis with a bassline that sounds ready for Fugazi that I use as an introduction for Canto de Ossanha, the classic tune by Baden Powell, first recorded as an instrumental and then later came the iconic vocal version in 1966. This tune has become the emotional, spiritual and revolutionary center of my entire project. There is a vivacious and triumphant joy in the chorus, and the lyrical theme (as if that matters) expresses a pantheistic spirituality that resonates with me and will be something that will be more fully explored later on this blog. Most significantly this is a track where I dug a wormhole in the middle where I create my own personal excursion – my buddy Wes once described it as a treatise on loneliness and violence – where I start with an almost Santana-like guitar solo opening that hurls into space, culminating and peaking into a sampling of the Damsel Pandemonium riddim from mid 1990s Jamaican dancehall, and the source of a Butterfly track called “Doublethink”, this is a space where you witness my entire musical history coming together until another portal opens and we return to the final chorus of Canto.
This jam is so out there that as a buffer I immediately segue into my favorite mini party set. An arrangement of two cumbias by Chacon, the first is unknown, I call it “Cumbia de Chacon” here but folks have suggested the riffs may be from a Colombian Christmas tune, then into the more known cumbia standard La Pollera Colora (also covered by my band Más Trueno), into the mainstay Cuban standard Son de la Loma and finally cools down with the gorgeous and spacious lullaby “Duerme Negrito”, another contender for “most beautiful song ever written”, here using the arrangement by revolutionary Cuban guitarist Leo Brouwer.
And there it is.
I celebrate this history and the ideals it was built on as well as my own educational lineage. I frame this story this way because this is how Alfonso framed it to me. This is how he lived it. Alfonso had been a professional guitarist performing folkloric styles for years before he finally enrolled in a guitar conservatory to get more hardcore on classical guitar. He loved playing Bach, but his age was the age that fought the fight that Villa-Lobos started, battling with Eurocentric professors who did not appreciate the right hand techniques of campesinos.
These debates seem almost silly now as we are now generations past the collective and global defanging of elite high art. No one defends it anymore. It’s hard to imagine that ever changing unless there’s a mad rearranging of public priorities and a massive influx of art education It’s wild to think snoots used to the show but now they’re nothing but strawmen.
But all of that is the underneath. You don’t really need to know it any more than you need to know that water is H2O in order to enjoy it.
What is my fight in this?
Here’s what I’m telling you: this music is awesome. These ways of playing guitar are beyond fun. Getting there is a gnostic path. Truth is revealed with time, effort, and guidance. It can be learned that if you can just be chill you can become friends with people from other places and we need more of that. I invite you to learn what has happened in the Americas. I invite you to dig into the wide breadth of American roots music and all of it’s endless connections, we havn’t even mentioned the Irish. Also, Latin American immigration to Chicago saved the city, I will tell you that too. Love your neighbor.
The actual music I make with this material, and the original work I still am on fire to create, the arcs of energy, the waves, the invitations, the climbs, the peaks, the entrancement, the space, is the sum of this repertoire plus the sum of the experiences I will be describing in the rest of this blog.
I’ll be telling the long story of my musical education, coming to consciousness and understanding of what talent I might possess (spoiler alert, I’m a knucklehead), and what it means for something to sound good to me. It’s also the long story of my motivations for being a musician and continuing to find new ways of loving to play guitar.
That’s enough solo guitar for now. We’ll get back to it after I’ve moved to Chicago.
It’s time to go back. Back in time. To Syracuse.
NEXT UP: My Musical Youth
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