If you are looking for Bach and Bach-adjacent guitar music, check out this album by Plinio Fernandes. I really enjoyed his first album Saudade and this second album is also very good. I especially love the Adagio from the Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974 – LINK. Fernandes is my favorite classical guitarist. Extra points for having a great first name!
We both arrived in Boston in 1979 to play guitar. A year or two later I met Eric Schermerhorn (wikiwand – LINK & Eric’s website – LINK) who played guitar in the band Ooh-Ah-Ah!, which featured Cinde Lager on vocals and Japanese bass player Akio Akashi. My band was called Red and, like Ooh-Ah-Ah!, we used a drum machine. They had a Roland TR-808, which Akashi had brought from Japan, and we used an Oberheim DX.
I left Boston in 1986. That same year Eric was in a new band called East of Eden. We weren’t in touch until sometime in 1995. I don ‘t remember how we reconnected, but suddenly we started talking on the phone… He was living in New York City, had toured with David Bowie and Iggy Pop and many others. I invited him to my place in Santa Fe and we decided to record some music. I remember Eric told me he had to use a radio to play white noise so he could sleep because Santa Fe was too quiet compared to the city.
Here is a recording from 1995 with Eric and me playing guitars, Jon Gagan on bass guitar and keyboards, and the late Carl Coletti on drums:
There is a whole unreleased album of music we recorded that year… we called the project Lava. I am going to give the original multitrack recordings a listen today… perhaps I should do some new mixes!
Eric also played an electric guitar solo on Butterfly & Juniper, on the album Opium:
And here Eric plays steel string acoustic and slide guitar on Little Wing:
Eric moved to California in 2001 and worked with P!nk, Christina Aguilera, and Seal. I remember Stephen Duros playing the DVD of Seal Live in Paris on our tour bus one night. For me Eric’s guitar playing was the best part of the performance.
Years passed and then we had several phone conversations starting in 2020. I was thinking about making a big change, perhaps even moving away from Santa Fe, and listened to Eric talk about Portugal and Lisbon in particular. He had performed in the country several times, and although touring provides only snapshots of life, he liked the country and the people. I was intrigued and in December 2021 I visited Portugal for the first time. Three months later I had an apartment in Lisbon.
Of course I knew about the fires in the L.A. area but then I got a call from Eric. His house was outside the fire zone but it burned down. Here are photos from before and after:
More than 50 guitars, old microphones like the Neumann U67 and many other, hard drives, multi-track tapes… all gone. Nothing can bring back some of the unique guitars and mics. I got rid of a lot of stuff before I left Santa Fe… but I did it voluntarily. This is a radical forced purge. I can’t imagine what that’s like.
There is a fundraiser for Eric and his family – LINK
The piece softly softly from the album one guitar two. 40 minutes, 14 tracks, all recorded in hi-def during a week-long retreat at the Prajna Mountain Refuge in the Pecos, New Mexico, in the beginning of this month. I improvised the music between hours of meditation. There are a few upbeat pieces… like how did a rumba appear out of nowhere, or the bossa nova… but there also more quiet, soft, pieces like the one in this video. The album will appear on Backstage in September and will eventually show up on Bandcamp, too, but I don’t yet know when that will happen.
I found this yesterday, while searching for something else. It’s an old live recording of the late Baden Powell playing (his?) Prelude in Am. I can’t seem to find the music on any of his albums. Does anyone know more about this piece?
Quote from the book Love and Murder in the Time of Covid by Qiu Xiaolong.
i am playing the guitar
i am being played by the guitar
Deciding to do anything deeply, one opens a path through which that very thing one wants to work with also works on us. It changes us physically–the mouth (armature) of a trumpet player or the callus on the finger of a string player are obvious examples–and it also changes us mentally.
This is true for any relationship we have.
In Brazilian Portuguese an acoustic guitar is called violão, while the electric guitar is called guitarra. The Portuguese guitar is a very different instrument. The rest of the world calls it a Portuguese guitar, but in Portugal it’s simply a guitar. So a different word was used for what the Spanish call a guitar.
What I find interesting is that the guitar is female in all romance languages and even in German, which tends to try to be different. (the moon is male in German and the sun female. Craziness!!) But while it’s a guitarra (female) it is o violão (male). I supposed this shows that all languages develop around what feels good saying, not around what actually makes sense – as shown by aluminum or critter in American English – and perhaps people found that o violão and a guitarra sounded better. Or perhaps these genders really don’t mean anything… they are simply a way to make language more complicated. It’s something that English has solved beautifully.
