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Ireland to It's a guitarama! Arguably the guitar is the most popular portable musical instrument in history -- try taking a piano to the beach. There are as many ways of playing guitars as there are people on the planet, and for good reason. You can achieve harmony, melody and rhythm on it; it's an accompanying as well as a lead instrument.
Okinawa,
guitars rule
By Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinYou can hear at least a half-dozen examples over the next four days.
First out of the blocks is Chicago bluesmaster Dave Specter, performing at O'Toole's Pub tonight and playing with Chris Planas and Third Degree Saturday at Anna Bannanas.
Specter grew up in the stringed shadows of guitar legends like T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy.
"That was my education," says Specter, whose most recent record is "Speculatin'."
"Those guys could make the guitar sing. I gravitated to the guitar because of it's lyrical capabilities. And also because it's the easiest to play!"
Like many guitarists, Specter feels like he's part of a musical continuum, an ongoing and developing cultural watershed. "There's a whole history of blues guitar to draw on," said Specter. "For the average guy, it was a cheap, affordable instrument. A sharecropper could buy a guitar, while a piano or saxophone was out of reach. It made musicians out of the common man, brought it to the people."
Guitarama
Dave Specter plays 8 p.m. today at O'Toole's Pub. $5. Also performs 9 p.m. Saturday at Anna Bannanas with Chris Planas and Third Degree. $15; $10 in advance. Information: 637-4475.
From Texas buzz to Delta drone to Chicago lightning to Kansas City hep-jazz, all of these influence Specter's style.
"You develop your playing based on people you like, and then someday someone gives you the ultimate compliment: You don't sound like anyone else.
"I just try to be spontaneous. The key to the blues is to achieve the right feeling, an expressive soulfulness from the notes, and the guitar really does it well, because it's so subtle."
Guitar-playing is also a technical exercise. Guitar-wranglers will endlessly debate the merits of bronze-wound strings, the resonance of cherrywood or swamp maple, the hot sizzle of single-wound pickups, the warm oomph of real tubes in amps, or any of a thousand other things that alter the instrument's sound.
"I go in phases, myself," says Specter. "I started out with solid-body guitars -- like the Telecaster -- moved on to archtop, hollow-body jazz-type guitars, and now I'm splitting the difference, playing a semi-hollow Epiphone Riviera. Got that nice warm sound the hollow body produces, without the feedback problems."
And you thought they just pick on the strings.
Speaking of picking, next up is the "Celtic-Hawaiian Guitar Summit: A Meeting of Hearts and Strings" tomorrow at Hawaii Public Radio. Singer and songwriter J.P. Cormier partners up with flatpicker extrordinaire Dan Crary and goes mano-a-mano with slack-keysters Ledward Kaapana and George Kahumoku Jr. They'll finish the show with a four-way jam.
Crary is known for his spookily fast flat-picking style that ranges from the whoop 'n' holler of bluegrass raves to minor-key Celtic airs.
"They don't come any better," wrote the Washington Post. One of Crary's signatures is the arrangement of traditional fiddle tunes into the guitar canon.
Cormier is a noted songwriter and instrumentalist who began his professional career as a mandolin player for a bluegrass gospel band -- an instrument he learned on the spot. He has moved on to become an interpreter of Cape Breton Celtic-style melodies.
We're most familiar with Kaapana and Kahumoku. They're swell ki ho'alu players from way back.
Then on Sunday, Okinawan "folk" artist Takashi Hirayasu teams up with Yankee slide guitarist Bob Brozman at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Hirayasu's career has been musically retrograde and socially forward -- he started out as a flashy rock 'n' roll guitarist with Shoukichi Kina's Champloose, which overlaid traditional Okinawan folk with the feel-good affectations of surf-rock, African djembe-stomp and good ol' Motown R&B. Now he's struck off on his own with fierce experimentation.
Brozman, on the other hand, who's played guitar from age 5, has also played with just about everyone under the sun, whipping his finger-weight effortlessly through Hawaiian, folk, bluegrass and rock genres.
He's also become a devotee of music from small islands. Brozman and Hirayasu recently sequestered themselves in a wooden hut on Taketomi, one of the most isolated of Okinawa's islands, and didn't emerge until they had reinvented Okinawan folk music.
One person with a guitar may be self-entertainment, but two people with guitars -- that's a concert.
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