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I was enjoying the beautiful, blindingly fast playing of Paco de Lucia yesterday. One track, “En la Caleta,” was an astonishing presentation with multiple stylistic elements blended into a seamless and subtly complex richness. De Lucia’s playing (which has always sounded more rhythmically accurate to me than, say, Andres Segovia’s) covers a diverse repertoire including classical, flamenco, and other styles.

I had been aware for some time that the Spanish guitar we tend to think of today often adapts Bach pieces not specifically written for the guitar, for example, but I did not realize until I saw a documentary about the Romany people and their music what other stylistic influences there had been. I cannot remember the name of the documentary, which I saw on cable TV a while back, but if it is to be believed (and the filmmaker[s] made a convincing enough case) the Rom have exerted tremendous influence there and elsewhere throughout Europe. Like much else in history, I suspect there was a fair amount of cultural interplay and unconscious exchange among the Rom (often referred to pejoratively as Gypsies) and the peoples with whom they came into contact in their sojourns from their supposed ancestral home in India through South-Central Europe and even into Iberian Europe and the Americas.

Django Reinhardt, the legendary jazz guitar great is said to have acknowledged a debt to Romany music. The flamenco tradition appears to reflect distinctively Romany techniques, scale- and melody- progressions and chordal structures. Serbian, Macedonian, other Balkan, Rumanian, Hungarian, and Greek musics exhibit unquestionable characteristics (over a wider variety of instrumentation, it should be noted).

After listening to De Lucia, I remembered a favorite record of mine when I was in high school called (I think) ”Southwestern Scenarios” by a guitarist named Ben Tavera King. I heard him in a recorded concert once refer to a song he’d written which he wanted to call ”Mariachi Minimalist” which seemed to crack up the audience. (I didn’t get the joke then.) I was heavily into Robert Fripp at this time, particularly his duets with Andy Summers and his work with the League of Crafty Guitarists. I was taken aback by a talent whose loss I still regret, Michael Hedges. Hedges was a true virtuoso and original in a way that few others have been. Imitators abounded after his debut in the late 80s, many trying to mimic his percussive techniques, double-handed tapping and single-handed pull-offs and hammer-ons, but the thing they lacked was his compositional genius. The song was never secondary to the techniques he employed and the dazzling freneticism he displayed in live performance. (He performed a concert one time while bouncing around on a big rubber ball.) Hedges studied composition at the Peabody Conservatory and, it would seem. considered himself a composer who happened to be a guitarist.

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Tags: guitar, Michael Hedges, Robert Fripp, Spanish guitar