De Grassi plays old folk songs
with contemporary arrangements
The cover of Alex de Grassi's latest album, "Now and Then: Folk Songs for the 21st Century," depicts sailing ships at anchor off a small port town. There's a few horses, burros and a few dozen people, some in Western attire, others clearly Chinese.
But at the far left of this quaint-looking panorama is a skyscraper, a blurry image of urban encroachment and the impending future.
COURTESY PHOTOAlex de Grassi
Where: The Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Academy of Arts
When: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow
Tickets: $20
Call: 532-8768
Yes, de Grassi confirmed, that's his old hometown of San Francisco as it looked in the middle of the 19th century.
"It was kind of a fluke (that we used that picture). I had a book of 19th-century lithographs, and it just seemed to capture the spirit of what we wanted to do in making a visual connection between the past and the present," he explained in a phone interview from his current home about two hours north of the Bay area.
De Grassi wraps up a series of concerts and promotional appearances here with a concert tomorrow night at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, featuring this new album of contemporary rearrangements of traditional American folk melodies.
Some of the melodies he'll be playing will be familiar to the ear. He worked out new arrangements for such folk standards as "Oh Susanna" and "Streets of Laredo," and also drew material from America's colonial period ("Sweet William") and popular tunes of the 19th century, like "Swing Low (Sweet Chariot)" and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home."
"(The album) was meant to be a little bit of a collage in that sense, but also to connect the past and the present. I wanted to see if I could find a connection between what could be called traditional American music idioms and ones that are around today, and also include a lot of world-music influences."
DE GRASSI was raised in a musical family. He started off playing the trumpet but discovered the guitar at 13 and switched instruments immediately. From that point on he was a serious guitarist and taught himself the basics before receiving formal instruction. De Grassi found "quite a gap between my experience playing guitar and the academic experience of studying music" while attending college, and got a degree in economic geography from the University of California at Berkeley instead.
For a while he thought he'd get a postgraduate degree, but when he was offered the opportunity to record, he decided he'd "give the guitar thing a try and see if I could make a living at it."
De Grassi recorded his debut album, "Turning Back," for George Winston's Windham Hill label in 1978 -- and he's never looked back since.
"I certainly had my influences -- I was a big fan of British Isles folk music, a fan of jazz (although I hadn't played a lot of it at that time) and I'd also played some classical guitar, so (my style) was inherently eclectic but very much my own world."
In 1996 de Grassi recorded his first album of arrangements of "other people's music," a collection of lullabies from around the world.
Since then de Grassi and his wife have searched out interesting melodies from throughout the world, including Brazil, the Ukraine, Lebanon and West Africa.
De Grassi also enjoys working with unusual instruments. He experimented with a guitar/sitar hybrid called the sympitar, and with an instrument with 39 strings that he says is something of a cross between a guitar, sitar and zither.
"Fred Carlson started out building guitars and Celtic harps many years ago ... and has kind of made a career out of building unusual instruments, and so he had built this guitar with sympathetic strings, sort of like a sitar. He dropped it off at my house and asked me to check it out."
There are, at last count, at least seven sympitar players, counting de Grassi and Carlson.
"I've been using it a little bit more as a specialty instrument, but I have recorded several pieces with it over the years," he said, adding that he played sympitar on "Angel," the Jimi Hendrix tune that he contributed to the just-released compilation album "Guitar Harvest Volume One: Teachers, Mentors, Inspirations ...," a benefit for the New York Guitar Festival. (Among the other contributors are recent island visitor Gary Lucas, Andy Summers, Vernon Reid and Benjamin Verdery.)
De Grassi also played Carlson's 39-string instrument at a guitar builders festival last month.
"Fred was asking me if I'd demonstrate it while he was building it, and he had a clear understanding of how a guitar player or any musician might play it. It's a fully functional instrument. It plays very well. Even the traditional fingerboard on it is a beautiful-sounding guitar. It's pretty fantastical, but it's also quite playable and functional.
"I don't think you're going to see them mass-produced by Gibson ... but I'd certainly like to play it."
Maybe we'll hear de Grassi play that the next time he's traveling through the islands.
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