Since the release of his
debut recording, Turning: Turning Back, in 1978, Alex de Grassi
has concentrated largely on writing his own material: evocative and
adventurous compositions with jazz, folk, and classical influences that
seem the perfect musical vehicles for his lyrical and virtuosic fingerstyle
guitar work. Over the next two decades, de Grassi helped define the
contemporary fingerstyle movement, playing his highly original music
in venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Montreux Jazz Festival and recording
13 albums for a variety of labels, including Narada and RCA Novus. In
1998, his album The Water Garden was nominated for a Grammy.
Over the past few years,
de Grassi has occasionally applied his light but dynamic touch on steel-string
guitar to nonoriginal material: traditional lullabies on Beyond the
Night Sky and jazz standards on Bolivian Blues Bar. De Grassi's
most recent CD, Now and Then, is another collection of existing
material: songs from the American folk tradition. The pieces on the
albumÐ"Shortnin' Bread," "Hushabye" (aka "All the Pretty Little Horses"),
"Bury Me Not," "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," and othersÐare well known;
so well known, in fact, that they've become a sort of musical wallpaper
in our culture, always present but so familiar as to be invisible. On
Now and Then, de Grassi reveals new depths in these pieces with
arrangements that explore their not-so-obvious cultural, musical, and
lyrical implications.
The dizzying chromatic runs
on the up-tempo "Shortnin' Bread," for example, evoke a gaggle of mischievous
four-year-olds who have ingested far too much of the sugary confection
for which the song was named. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" interpolates
an apt "hup-two-three-four" march feel with a 12/8 Celtic rhythm, a
nod to the song's Irish roots, which were revealed to de Grassi when
he researched the genesis of the songs covered on the CD. "I kept looking
for the essential American melody and found that it was pretty elusive
ground," de Grassi says. "Many of those songs that we tend to think
of as AmericanÐand I say that in the North American senseÐhave melodies
derived from two main currents: the British Isles and the Afro-American
traditionÐblues, gospel, spirituals, and so forth."
While the origins of these
songs influenced many of de Grassi's arrangements, he was not simply
interested in what the tunes once were, but in what they might become
if shaped by rhythms such as reggae, bossa nova, hip-hop, and samba,
as well as by modern jazz harmony. These influences give many of the
tunes on Now and Then an international flavor, but de Grassi
says that he was not aiming for a blatantly multicultural approach.
"It's all in the context of the American tradition," he says.
Shortly after the release
of Now and Then last spring, de Grassi and I talked about his
evolving guitar style and the conceptual and practical approach he took
to rejuvenating the material on this innovative new album.
What inspired you to
record an entire album of American traditional material?
De
Grassi I'd been thinking about it for a long time. I toured
a few years back with [Brazilian guitarist/composer] Paulo Bellinati.
So much of what he was composing was rooted in the folk music and native
rhythms of Brazil. Béla Bartók and lots of other composers
turned to the culture in which they grew up for inspiration. I wanted
to rediscover some American traditional music and maybe discover a few
folk songs that I didn't know. I wanted to see if I could get a feeling
for them in their most traditional form and then see if I could make
connections with more contemporary musical idioms, bringing the threads
of the past together with the present.
You've arranged the tunes
as solo guitar instrumentals. Were your arrangements influenced by the
lyrics of the songs?
De
Grassi Yes, definitely. For example, "Streets of Laredo"
is an old cowboy song from the Southwest, and I tried to work with the
actual content of the lyrics of the song. I thought about what that
song was when it was written and what it could be today. Instead of
horses and gunfights on the street, maybe in Laredo today there are
people driving around [blasting music] from their cars. So I changed
it from a waltz to 4/4 time and tried to give it a little bit of a hip-hop
feel to make it sound more urban.
The lyrics to "Oh Susanna"
are very interesting because they're absurd: "The day I left, it rained
so hard, the weather it was dry." So I wanted to give it an unlikely
setting and came up with the samba concept to capture the almost Dada-esque
spirit of the song. Then there's the banjo reference. I thought about
inviting a banjo player to be on the recording but decided it would
be more interesting if I tried to play the guitar like a banjo.
I realized that there's actually a connection between samba and American
banjo. There's this 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 [right-hand pattern] that we
think of as a classic Scruggs banjo roll. It's almost like a samba when
you start to massage it a little.
Speaking of banjo, you
often play fast arpeggios using open and fretted strings that bring
to mind melodic banjo playing. Has your guitar technique been influenced
by banjo?
De Grassi
Yes and no. I bought a banjo in college and played it for a few months,
but I never took a lesson and never learned to play it properly. Then,
years later, I was reading something on an old Stanley Brothers record
about the banjo style and how it evolved, and I realized that there
are certain banjo-like patterns that crop up in my playing. So perhaps
I've been influenced on a subconscious level.
One of the things I do a
lot on this recording is cross-string picking. If you listen to "Sweet
William," there are a lot of fast runs using both fretted and open notes.
I'm doing it more and more in less likely modes, getting more into chromatic
and flat things and unusual scales and so forth, rather than just playing
the obvious major scales. It comes out as a texture throughout the whole
record.
There's certainly a lot
of chromaticism in these arrangements.
De
Grassi Yes. I coined a term I use a lot when I teach workshops:
chromodalism. Basically, I mix chromaticism with modal scales.
It adds a folky quality with the modal thing and at the same time perhaps
a jazzier or more classical feel with the chromatic thing on top. Take
D A D G A D [tuning]. You have that open D string on top, and let's
say you're going to utilize that pitch [D] a lot in the piece. You could
have a D-minor scale or a D-major scale, and of course there are all
kinds of different modes you could utilize with D in it. But if you
were to play that D and then play a chromatic line all the way up the
bass string and still have that open D string sounding against it, you
could look for all the different kinds of harmonies that incorporate
the D and work off that root to come up with some pretty interesting
things. You end up using all the pitches and implying a lot of scales
and modes, but they all kind of work off of that one pitch, the D. There's
also some truly chromatic stuff on the record, passages that don't have
that D in them. I try to blend those things.
Each tune begins with
a faithful reading of its original melody before you head off into the
development section. What was your approach in arranging the opening
themes of the pieces?
De Grassi
Each piece was different. With "Sweet William" I wanted to evoke a sense
of a cappella [singing]. That song is a mother's lament about her son
going off to fight in the war. I wanted to capture some of that feeling,
like you could be sitting in Massachusetts in 1684. Then when I get
into the tune, I rearrange the melody. It's basically the same melody,
but it's rephrased against the new rhythm I've produced so that it works
in that context too.
I'd heard "Single Girl"
done in a more traditional manner, so I had an idea in my head of how
that would sound. But I wanted to get a different underlying rhythm
so it would be recognizable to people who might be familiar with the
tradition but would also have the feel of an R&B band with a horn section.
I was going for a specific sound. Remember that ['70s R&B] group Lydia
Pense and Cold Blood? I was thinking of that feel. So there are all
these connections through time on Now and Then.
The development sections
are very different from the opening themes in terms of structure. They're
more than simple variations.
De Grassi
Often what I do is write out a melody that has X amount of bars
before I develop it. I try not to be very symmetrical; I don't make
the development the same number of bars as the melody. A lot of times,
the development happens in an asymmetrical or nonlinear way. I might
repeat part of the melody and use that as a springboard for developing
something else. So the piece unfolds in a way that is not easy to analyze
in terms of its structure but stays with the intent of the music. But
if you spend a lot of time looking at it, there is hopefully some sort
of internal logic to it.
Is "Sweet William" an
example of that? Certain parts of the melody reappear in unexpected
places.
De Grassi
Yeah, that's one. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" is also like that.
You get the main theme repeated a few times throughout the course of
the song, but you also get some different passages. It goes into one
passage where I'm playing on the low string and move to really fast
cross-string picking. It goes somewhere else and then comes back a second
time played differently. There's a lot of this reworking of material
and little internal variations. If you blocked it out on a chalkboard,
you'd probably see a lot of irregular numbers of measures and so forth.
Another thing I've done a lot is insert a measure or two into the melody
to stretch it out, compress something, or add a little turnaround or
countermelody. It makes the structure sound less symmetrical, less obvious.
On "Swing Low Sweet Chariot,"
the shift from the opening theme to the variations is abrupt. Suddenly,
after a pretty straight-ahead reading of the melody, you're playing
this very fast turnaround figure over a new rhythm.
De Grassi
Yeah, I thought of that rhythm as being a fast reggae, like a Jamaican
who had too much coffee and not enough ganja. It's a fairly up-tempo
piece, and I wanted to keep that bright spirit going. There's a quote
in there that sounds like it came from an Elvis tune, "Blue Suede Shoes."
That's a device I use a lot on this record. "Sweet William" has "It's
raining, it's pouring." "Single Girl" has a reference to the "Star-Spangled
Banner," which is actually an old English melody. I wanted to develop
that piece by going into a double-time section, doing some fast, double-time
picking and floating a melody in there, a B section. What I came up
with was a fragment of the "Star-Spangled Banner." Some of that stuff
just came out spontaneously, improvisationally, and I didn't think about
it too much. It's amazing what the subconscious will do. I asked my
wife if it sounded too corny and she said, "No, it makes sense."
On this record you use
standard tuning as well as various open tunings. Did the arrangements
determine the tunings?
De Grassi
I experimented a lot with tunings on all these pieces, and some got
changed in the process. I also changed the keys on some of the tunes.
"Swing Low" started out in standard tuning with the bass in Eb. Then
I thought, "Hey, I'm gonna do it in E. It's easier!" On other tunes,
I had a specific reason for using a particular tuning. On "Single Girl"
and "Streets of Laredo," I used C G D G A D, which is like D A D G A
D with two bass strings tuned lower. I've used that tuning before and
made discoveries about it that I really like. I can get a lot of chord
voicings that are typical of jazz piano left-hand chord voicings. It
just has to do with where the notes fall. You get the root, third, and
fifth, and then the sixth and the ninth. Then you get chords that have
the root, third, sixth, seventh, and ninth, and for altered chords you
can get the flat 13th and both major and minor thirds in there. I wanted
to get those kinds of voicings into tunes with jazzy sections. I also
like having the bottom string tuned down to C because it gives me a
certain kind of bottom sound I want. The other tuning I use on there
is an Eb or G-minor tuning, depending on how you look at it. It's Eb
G D G Bb D. I use that on "St. James Infirmary," "Shortnin' Bread,"
and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." You can play in G minor, obviously,
or you can play in Eb, and it works really well in Bb.
One of the very "now" things
about Now and Then are the rhythms you used. Was that part of
your conception from the outset?
De Grassi
I often think very specifically of rhythm. It's one of the first things
that I hit on with a piece: "How's the rhythm going to work?" Everything
else, harmonies and stuff, derives from that. Once I got an R&B feel
for "Single Girl," for example, I thought, "Ah, horn section. Let me
get these little triads going in here that sound like three horns playing
together or three backup singers."
Originally I planned for
this to be much more of a world music kind of record. I thought about
having a lot more guest musicians and having some tabla and some flutes
from South America or Asia. And then when I started to get down to working
on the arrangements, it seemed more of a solo guitar project. I did
stay with that idea of trying to introduce various rhythms, but I found
myself starting to bring it back more into those kind of idioms and
rhythms that have grown out of North American culture: a little hip-hop,
a little R&B, some banjo-like stuff.
"Lay This Body Down,"
on the other hand, reaches back in the opposite direction to its African
roots with African poly-rhythms and tonal references to kalimba (African
thumb piano).
De Grassi
That song is a spiritual that was written down during the Civil War
era when a lot of people were being buried. In the black community in
southeast Georgia and other areas, it was used as a funeral song. It's
almost dirgelike. The lyrics are very simple but very heavy: "I'm walkin'
through this graveyard / Lay this body down." First of all, I wanted
to keep that gravity. It plays through the melody and then there are
some jazz harmonies. Then it goes into a variation that has a polyrhythmic
quality and into another section where I mute the strings with the palm
of my right hand. I was trying to get the feel of a thumb piano. Those
two elementsÐthe polyrhythms and the sound of the kalimbaÐgive that
piece a particular character.
Were any of the arrangements
affected by current events?
De
Grassi Yes. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" is a traditional
Irish melody, but in the droney middle section I intentionally threw
in some flat seconds and non-Western sounding scales. They give it an
intensity I think is appropriate in light of what's going on in the
world today.
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, December 2003,
No. 132.
