Guitarist Michael Gulezian follows in the steps of Leo Kottke
|
|
Guitarist Michael Gulezian's playing can be described as new American acoustic guitar. |
Toolbox
By Art Edelstein Arts Correspondent - Published: May 12, 2006
Michael Gulezian may be the best recording acoustic guitarist you've never heard of. Considering one of his guitar inspirations was the equally obscure and also brilliant Michael Hedges who died in 1997, it is possible to understand why you've not previously heard of Gulezian.
Gulezian, Hedges, John Fahey and Robbie Bashio belong to a group of guitarists whose music can be best categorized as new American acoustic guitar. To that group add Middlesex guitarist Daniel Hecht, now in retirement and writing horror novels, and the best-known performer in this genre of guitaring, Leo Kottke.
Hedges turned the guitar world on its head in the 1980s and 1990s with his stylistic brilliance and brought this style of playing to a wider audience. Sadly, he died in a car crash in 1996. According to Gulezian's Web page, Hedges had great admiration for Gulezian's guitar playing.
So what is new American acoustic guitar? Think of guitar playing as a musical landscape instead of a distinct guitar style, and often without a structured melody line. Don't think blues with a defined chord progression and a 12-bar structure. Don't think Celtic, with bass drone and jig time reinvented for guitar harp melodies. It's also not ragtime with alternating bass notes setting the time for the bluesy melody line. Nor is it flashy flatpicking a la Tony Rice, and you won't find the key in the jazz motifs of Pat Metheny.
What it is not doesn't quite answer the question that gets us to Gulezian's music. Here is guitar playing with lots of percussive elements where the guitarist uses the body of his instrument to punctuate a passage by slapping or smacking it. In this style you'll find long chord passages without a hummable melody to hang onto. There will also be drones filling the aural space, occasional slide guitar bits and pieces. And if you are a guitarist yourself, you may not find in the performer's hands a chord shape you've ever seen before. And then again, you will but wonder how the guitarist gets all those sounds that you can't even come close to. These guitarists often tune their instrument with odd tunings, ones that go beyond the familiar DADGAD or Vestapol variances, so notes come out in strange cascading waterfalls of sound.
Gulezian, who performs tonight at the Middle Earth Music Hall in Bradford in what may be his first Vermont performance, has mastered this somewhat obscure style of guitar playing. He says in a biographic sketch that he owes a lot to Fahey whose playing, which emerged in the early 1960s, was something of a revelation. Some called the notes that spewed from Fahey's guitar "noise" while others hailed him as a guitar visionary who had freed the instrument from the fetters of conventional music.
Fahey became a mentor to a very young Gulezian and signed him, the youngest performer to earn such a distinction, to his Takoma Records, which was arguably the most influential record label for this genre of solo acoustic guitar. Also on that label was a youthful Kottke whose early compositions include "Vaseline Shotgun" which is to this style of guitaring what "Stairway to Heaven" was to 1960s rock music — a much requested now hackneyed composition.
If the music Gulezian performs seems somewhat obscure, as a performer, he is anything but. An amiable fellow with a good sense of humor and an informal air about him, he seems anything but the serious guitarist he is. He is just as likely to sit on the floor in concert and play Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" on a 12-string guitar inserting slide guitar parts, as he is to sing Foster's venerable "Oh Susannah" in a totally surprising meter with guitar parts that are utterly unexpected.
Whatever he is playing, Gulezian achieves a wonderful tone with his instruments. He uses very heavy gauge strings and tunes them below concert pitch. The tone of his instruments is rich and warm. He can also slap away at the strings or other guitar parts thus achieving amazing harmonic possibilities.
Chris Jones at Middle Earth has been putting on great concerts of late. Solas on Easter Sunday was packed. Gulezian surely is one of the more singular acts Jones has booked. I suspect this will be a show that will dazzle guitar players and listeners alike.