My First Guitar Page 11

  Many years ago, in about 1978, Northwestern University started their classical guitar concert series and hired Julian Bream to perform. Len Novy and I became involved with selling tickets, and we did a great job, using mailing lists and selling out the hall, which was a no-brainer at that time. We were then asked to take care of hospitality and asked to pick up Bream from the airport, which we of course obliged, saying, “Sure!” We picked up Bream and, during the ride, he came to realize I was a guitar maker, so he asked to visit the shop. I said, “Sure!” which, of course, had been the intention all along. We walked into the shop that, at the time, had the storefront windows and I was also making harpsichords in addition to guitars. Julian asked if I had a guitar available and I said, “I do! I have one that I made about ten years ago.”

  Immediately, Bream said to me, “I don’t like cedar.” So that kind of slammed the door on that and I’d thought, oh, okay. At that point, he walked over to the harpsichord, which was parked in front of the storefront window, right next to Len’s teaching studio. Bream then asked, “Did you make this harpsichord?”

  I said, “I did, actually.”

  “Is it English?” he asked.

  I said, surprised, “Very good! It is an English model. I didn’t realize you knew so much about harpsichords.”

  “May I play it?” he asked.

  I said, “Be my guest.”

  So Bream sat down to play the harpsichord and started exclaiming, “Lovely tone! Very fruity!”

  I said, “Really? You like it?”

  “It’s so colorful,” he said.

  “Indeed — thank you,” I said.

  “It has a French coupler, does it not?” Bream asked. “It is a French instrument within an English case.”

  I said, “Wow, you really know harpsichords!”

  “Well, I studied this in college, you know.”

  “Great,” I said. “So you really like the sound?”

  “I do. It’s very colorful.”

  “Well, you know, it has a cedar soundboard.”

  “You’re leading me on now!”

  “No, look! It’s a cedar soundboard!”

  He said, “I don’t like cedar!”

  I thought, “Oh man, he’s got to be like this with Brussels sprouts, too.”

  So he never played the guitar that I had here. That 1977 instrument was the first instrument that Segovia received from me, and he did not even want to try to play it. I told Bream that Segovia had played this guitar, but it did not faze him one bit. He told me a story of how he went to take a lesson from Segovia and became so nervous that he forgot his guitar.

  This guitar I had made came into Segovia’s possession through a fellow who grew up in South America from Montevideo whose name is Carlos Mendez Bower, who was head of the gynecology department here for many years at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. When he was a kid, growing up in Montevideo, it was at the time when Segovia had fled Spain during the Civil War to relocate in Montevideo, and Segovia had been one of the best teachers in the city. Carlos’ family was originally been from Spain as well and fled for the same reasons. Carlos studied with Segovia when he was a boy so they had been lifelong friends.

  Carlos told me, “El Maestro would like to try one of your guitars.” This guitar I had was the only one I had lying around, available, and though I had not made it for him and it did not have the features or specifications I thought he would want, I sent it along with the offer to drop everything and make a guitar to his specifications and measurements if he liked it. To my surprise, he came back with a payment, stating that El Maestro (as he always referred to Segovia) wanted the guitar. This happened in 1984, though the guitar had been made in 1977. That letter with Segovia thanking me in Spanish is framed and hung in the alcove of my studio. In 1986, Carlos came to my shop and told me that El Maestro would like to try my Hauser model guitar. What Hauser model?

  Carlos supposed that Segovia meant he wanted to try a spruce version of what I had made so I said, “Well, I’ve got this guitar here that is due to be delivered to a client this week and it is made of spruce. Why don’t you take it and just have him play it and try it. If this is what he likes, I’ll drop everything and make one for him.” Much to my shock, a payment arrived from Segovia for this guitar, so it was the second guitar he had obtained from me. He had it for only six months before he died. He bought this guitar in December 1986 and died in June 1987. That guitar came back to me. Segovia willed that spruce guitar to Carlos as a gift.

  Carlos, who had retired at this point and moved from Chicago to Madrid, returned to my shop in Evanston and said, “Richard, I know you would really like to have this guitar.” I bought the guitar back from him and have it in my cabinet here in the shop.

  Carlos Barbosa-Lima

  A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Carlos Barbosa-Lima is famous for being an expert arranger of popular tunes for the classical guitar. He has collaborated with numerous artists, including jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd and Brazilian songwriter and composer Antonio Carlos Jobim. His style ranges from classical to contemporary and Brazilian to jazz.

  I’ve always enjoyed performing in public because it gives me an “up” energy. As a performing artist, you have to enjoy it — it is not just a job. The highest aim of music is to be able to renew yourself. I am very impressed with the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. He is 104 years old, and not only is he alive and well but he is still challenging everything possible. He has renewed his interest in architecture with new styles. We have many artists who also approach music in this way.

  I first played at Agustín Barrios’ grave in El Salvador in 1993, accompanied by guitarist Rico Stover. The last time I visited Barrios’ grave in 2010 was a different experience. It had been poured rain every day so they scheduled the visit right on his birthday, the fifth of May. I had said, “Wow, good luck, because it is soaking.” We took a chance and the afternoon turned beautiful. Every day following that, it poured rain. Very wild. There must be something otherworldly to it. I would love to go back to El Salvador because it is a magical place.

  Carlos Barbosa-Lima, age fifteen, featured on his first recording. (Courtesy Carlos Barbosa-Lima)

  Montevideo I have very strong links to, not only because of my teacher Savio, but because it was the first place outside of Brazil I visited, when I went for a series of concerts in 1960. Don’t forget that since I started playing very young, many people were still living who had once known Barrios. Those days they did not have much mixing but I met a mixer who knew Barrios and a conductor who thought Barrios was the greatest, Maestro Sousa Lima. The image of Barrios had been so alive that it was unbelievable. Attilio Bernardini had studied with Josefina Robledo back in the early 1900s, and she was a pupil of Tárrega so he and a guy in Rio had been the first major guitar teachers in Brazil who claimed to come from the Tárrega School, though we know today no such school had existed. Each student had his or her own views of what he did. In principle, you could see more or less what his ideas were. Anyway, my father had a good way to smooth down Bernardini, and he made me study counterpoint and write out four against three. He did not know I was sight-reading already at fourteen. I played for Bernardini and played one of his pieces.

  It was an interesting beginning — I was about seven years of age when my father had the interest to learn the guitar, just to have fun. He hired a local teacher named Benedito Moreira for nine months but found that he did not make any progress with the guitar. My father walked home tired from work. He was busy as a salesman for a pharmaceutical company and had no time to practice. During those months, I had been watching the lessons and became inquisitive about many things. My parents have told me that one day I surprised them by picking up my father’s guitar and playing what was supposed to be his lesson. At that point, my father told the teacher to continue with the lessons but to teach me, instead, because I seemed to be very interested in the guitar. That is how I started playing the guitar. My parents told me when I was two
years old, when they were playing 78s of popular Brazilian music, big bands, classical music, opera — they noticed when they tried to get me to sleep my eyes would open to the size of a night bird’s upon hearing the music.

  I continued playing on my father’s guitar, which was a gift from the Di Giorgio Company. The old Mr. Di Giorgio was still alive, the man who knew the legendary Paraguayan composer Agustín Barrios. His son Reynaldo, who was adopted into the Di Giorgio family, is the one who gave the guitar to my father. So this guitar was my first guitar. My teacher had, incidentally, studied under Isaias Savio, one of the great teachers of classical guitar in Brazil. I made huge progress within three years and practiced maybe just an hour to an hour and a half daily because I was doing other things like playing soccer. We lived near São Paolo, though my parents came from the hinterlands and had met in Rio. I think I was called to this world in Rio.

  I had a huge repertoire simply from picking up music I heard on the radio. When I was ten, I needed a little spark in order to progress to the next level, a crucial point in my life. My father was concerned that I needed to become more organized with my repertoire. We were in a music store in downtown São Paulo, which, today, is totally different. We are talking now about the 1950s. Luiz Bonfá pretty much owned the scene there in the Delvecchio store, which was a central meeting place for musicians. They called me to play for Luis Bonfá, who happened to be in town. This was an important moment in my career because, once they heard me play, they told my father that I urgently needed to study with Isaias Savio. They insisted I do this right away in order to cure bad habits like biting my fingernails — I had been playing without fingernails as a result. You have to let the nails grow. That was a lesson for me right there about the nails. My father’s solution was to put some hot spices on my fingertips so that if I slipped to chew my nails, boom! Yet, as a result, I developed a taste for hot food!

  The next evening, I met Savio and found him to be very stern and full of conditions. He said that he was going to treat me as an adult student, not as a child student, which is very interesting. He made that point and I committed myself. I took everything seriously. I had not played any other instrument besides the guitar but must make one exception: when my father brought home the Di Giorgio guitar, he had bought a cavaquinho as well, which is like a very small guitar. I had always liked the sound of a cavaquinho. He had wanted us to become good enough to have a little father-son jam session. But as would have it, I drifted toward playing the guitar. Prior to my studies with Savio, I do remember visiting a music store and trying not the electric guitar, but an electrified acoustic. I liked the sound of these guitars. But then, the lights went out in the shop. Perhaps that had been a lucky moment because it defined my choice to play the unelectrified acoustic. There had been a touch of destiny there.

  When my father had to tell my first teacher, Benedito Moreira, that I was going to be studying with Savio, he was nervous. He did not have the guts to tell him that I was going to make a switch so my mother told him. There was a bit of a scene there because Moreira felt hurt. He did not understand that I needed to make this switch in instructors in order to improve my playing. Years later, when he began to follow my career, I saw him two or three times at concerts and he acknowledged this had been a positive choice for me.

  We had a very good radio program in São Paulo that was focused on the guitar, run by a wonderful director who programmed everything from Brazilian to classical music and acoustic guitar. I heard recordings of Segovia and Laurindo Almeida and Dilermando Reis on this radio program. Luis Bonfá had been very much on the regular radio and television scene. There had been a great wealth of music during the 1950s as big companies sponsored many acts. Unfortunately, this kind of funding was cut in 1964 when the military came into power. It seemed as if Brazil took a step back by about twenty years in progress.

  But we had very good music like Duke Ellington’s jazz bands and Nat King Cole, which made a big impact. Symphony orchestras came in later. In the months soon after I began studying with Savio, my father came home with some recordings because he traded free samples prescribed by doctors in exchange for items like this. He brought home a large collection of music from Segovia, which was really fantastic so I was exposed in a more direct way to classical guitar music. My career started soon after this. It was in November of 1957, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old that I performed and then I made my first recording at age fifteen.

  My parents encouraged me to study the guitar but to do other things as well, like reading and schoolwork. I was a huge soccer fan because Brazil won the World Cup for the first time in 1958. As far back as I can remember, I was involved in soccer and I used to play until I became more serious about the guitar. I had to quit playing soccer at thirteen because one can get hurt, even with riding a bicycle. I have always been a quick learner and Savio reinforced the merits of practicing with quality time, not quantity time. Almost immediately, my father took the advice of Theodoro Nogueira, who suggested I extend my learning into theory and arrangement. Nogueira was an important figure for me because he was self-taught. He had studied music to its depths and had worked as an arranger. And he was very much into the national movement, which had been led by composers like Heitor Villa-Lobos. He had taken lessons from Guarneiri. He was a good mentor. I loved other subjects in school like the Humanities and humanistic studies and I was not so good at mathematics.

  Savio fixed my right hand technique and you know my hand was better when he gave me “Las Abejas” and “Estudio Brillante” to play. Don’t forget that certain habits stick with you. Because I was ten years old when I met Savio, the guitar was bigger than me, so I had my right hand slightly falling to the right. Then Savio taught me to hold it at a proper perpendicular angle, with the wrist at a natural angle and not held too high. Savio claimed this technique came from Llobet, whom he studied with during the 1920s when Llobet lived in Buenos Aires and made frequent trips to Montevideo where Savio lived until he left for Brazil in 1931. It took me about four or five years to conquer my bad habits.

  What I love about the guitar is its sound, portability and the beauty of the instrument. What I love the most about the guitar is that it has a piano-type shape to it but I never played the piano. The guitar allowed me to explore my own inquisitiveness and find chords along the fretboard right into the music. When I brought home a new record that Savio introduced me to, he gave me a new spark of enthusiasm and taught me big left-hand jumps. I studied with Savio’s own rare method book that incorporated left-hand stretches. As one grows more mature, you find what works for you but sometimes you are in haze. You have to let yourself go and usually, this works.

  My first performance was at the Teatro São Paulo when I was twelve. It does not exist anymore. It held close to 2,000 people. My father and his friends promoted the concert well, and I was put on TV Tupi in São Paulo prior to the concert. There were only two television stations at that time. I did well on television, and the concert sold out as a result. I performed three pieces that one must have in their repertoire to play no matter what — which included “Las Abejas” and a shortened version of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2, a guitar transcription by Tárrega with a cadenza that the left hand plays alone. This was a cadenza created by the great violinist Sarazate and Tárrega had incorporated it. On television, one must play a shortened version and this left-hand cadenza had a very showy, visual effect. And I played “Tico Tico,” which had been on the list of pieces, including those by Dilarmando Reis, that Savio wanted me to stop playing but I did not. I always played that stuff for my friends. They’re such beautiful pieces.

  When I came to the U.S. in the autumn of 1967, I was not quite twenty-three years old and had brought a Brazilian-made guitar that did fine for ten years in Brazil. Then, my tour within the U.S. became extended by three months. I gave my first recital at Carnegie Hall after Washington and the Spanish Institute. The weather grew colder and central heating kicked in, those building
s had been so overheated until the first oil crisis of the ’70s. The guitar did not hold up well. My first trip to Ottawa in Canada, the guitar just gave up with big cracks all over. I actually had to borrow a guitar to play a concert in New York. I say that I think that guitar committed suicide. You know how some people just give up? This guitar gave up. It did not like the Northern climate.

  Juan Martín

  Born in Málaga, Spain, Juan Martín has studied flamenco with Niño Ricardo and Paco de Lucía. He has recorded with Herbie Hancock and Rory Gallagher and performed with Miles Davis. He is the author of two flamenco guitar methods and has been voted one of the top three guitarists in the world in Guitar Player Magazine.

  I started to play when I was six years old and my first guitar was a Conde Hermanos flamenco guitar made of cypress on the back and sides with old pegheads called clavija de madera. It was not a first-class model, but it had a good flamenco tone. In fact, it was so used, so secondhand, that it had a big dip between each fret. The strings were very high so you had to press down a long way. It was very tough to play. But someone gave it to me, and I was so keen to play that anything was great. Just the look of the guitar and its sound attracted me. In the end, the difficult features of my guitar proved to be a strengthening thing, because when I eventually got a good one, it felt very easy to play. It was good thing to have done. I am not sure I would recommend it for children. You shouldn’t have to fight an instrument. But I was so passionate to play that it just didn’t bother me — I just thought, well, somehow, I will make a sound.