De Grassi is one of the quarterbacks in new instrumental music. The guitarist recorded his first album, the classic "Turning Turning Back" back in 1978 on the Windham Hill label and with the release of "Now and Then" he is still stretching the boundaries and rules. We chatted with de Grassi via phone on July 28, 2003.

John Beaudin - Hi Alex and welcome to Smooth Jazz Now. I have been playing your music since 1986 on radio so it's nice to finally catch up with you. I was just on your website and noticed you do Guitar workshops and as a matter of fact you did one this weekend.

Alex De Grassi - Well, I've done them for various programs throughout the years like the National Guitar workshop in Connecticut every summer and I've them here and there and other places. I started doing my own three days intensive weekend workshops a few years ago. We usually do a couple in the summer. We do them in this old lodge in the Santa Cruz Mountains which is between San Francisco and Santa Cruz so yeah they're a lot of fun.

John - And you only invite twelve people which is a bonus for any young musician.

Alex - Yeah, we generally limit the workshops to twelve people because we really want to get to everybody and not feeling like I'm talking to a big group. It's a very hands on workshop. You know people walk away and say, "Boy, I haven't played that much guitar for a long time."

John - That's kind of cool. I bet some of those guitarists hope five people show up. (Laughing)

Alex - Laughing.

John - You must run into situations where like group counseling you have someone who needs too much attention who really needs a one on one session?

Alex - Yeah, I've had that for both players who aren't quite up to the rest of the group and sometimes you get a player who's just so good you feel that most of the workshop is not really addressing their needs. One of my students a couple of years ago who was a real guitar phenomena called Kaki King. She's creating quite a stir in the solo guitar scene right now and she's traveling a lot with Charlie Hunter. So she came and she kind of blew everybody away and so after I heard her play I thought "Oh I'm in trouble now" (laughing). I had a lot of really good hobby players in the group and a few who were aspiring to be professionals and she was just ready to explode here. So I thought that this workshop was going to be a challenge for me to make it worthwhile to her.

John - Lets talk about the new album "Now and Then," Folk songs for the 21st Century. It really grabbed me.

Alex - Good!

John - This CD brings me to a nice place in my own history. I know you're big on wanting the listener to draw their own conclusions on the inspiration or the effect a song has. I've always liked the acoustic folk/Americana tunes. Why did you go in this direction?

Alex - For so many years when I started out I was always writing my own music and I had a lot of different influences, there was a little bit of folk, Jazz, World music. I was on a tour about four years ago called "The International Guitar Night" which features four players and one of the players was a guy from Brazil name Paulo Bellinati who's a wonderful guitarist and composer. I started to realize that most of the music he was playing, composing and performing was rooted in the folk music and the various ethnic music of Brazil. He played the pieces rooted in different rhythms or different regional sections but he's taken them to a different place by the fact that he was composing his own music using those rhythms or certain aspects of that folk tradition in his music. I started thinking that I hadn't heard that many people do that with American or north American music. There's a wealth of musical idioms out there. There's Blues, R&B, Jazz, Gospel and Bluegrass and so I started thinking why don't I look into this. Rather than play these tunes and play them in a traditional manner where there are plenty of people doing that who are very good at it. It could be Ralph Stanley or whoever so I thought maybe I should look into these songs that are such a strong part of the American tradition and see if I can bring my experience as a guitar player to these songs. On for instance "When Johnny Come Marching Home" which is an Irish/American melody I've tried to capture the original feel but at the same time I've injected it with different things since I wrote some original music in there as well. I've also injected it with some non western scales that maybe gave it a contemporary quality and considering what's happening in the horrors of war of today.

John - I like the way you brought your national anthem into "Single Girl" it made me look at the track listing thinking this was the next track.

Alex - I did that with that tune and a piece called "Sweet William" which is a very old English folk song which you can find in books of American Folk songs. I tried to do that one with kind of a hip hop rhythm and in that I also quote the nursery rhyme "It's raining, it's pouring the old man is snoring." I also wanted to have musical quotes that would help create more of a collage effect of those music experiences of growing up in this part of the world. That meant if the national anthem came out subconsciously when I was improvising in a section it was less born out of a sense of patriotism but just because it kind of fit in the song or with the theme. I had in the spiritual "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" a quote from an Elvis Presley tune so I wanted to show that those things kind of coexist in space, it's not in time. I wanted to find a connection in a traditional music and all the contemporary music idioms today whether it's R&B or Reggae or the influence of other cultures. For instance "Oh Susanna" is done as a samba and it kind of has a Brazilian twist so I'm kind of exploring the relationship between North American banjo music and the samba. That's sort of the subtexed I guess you could say because the casual listener might not pick up on that right away. I just think it tries to mix a lot of different aspects of this culture that we live in today.

John - One of the thoughts I had from the album is this guy is following his nose here. He's having this journey which means something to him as he's connecting the dots in his musical history. He's also following the dots in his emotional non musical history and it's a good marriage. It sounds like it was challenging though?

Alex - It was. I started this maybe a year and a half before I recorded it. I started getting a few ideas together and I kind of got stuck. I had this basic idea and the only thing I could play was "Oh Susanna" and "Streets of Laredo" and I couldn't figure out how I wanted to arrange them. My first thought was to make them world music projects but the more I investigated the more I thought that maybe that would be ok since that's part of our culture to have Brazilian influences or a Latin influence but I also wanted to invest all those musical idioms that we recognize as being from this part of the world. For example on "Single Girl" which is an old frontier song that you might hear in Appalachian in a very old time traditional sense. When I heard it I thought what if the group Lydia Pence and Cold Blood were to play this song. (Laughing) How would they do it? You see I wanted to get that sense of an R&B group and a singer so I invented a chorus for it and it's done in more of an R&B kind of style. I sort of let my imagination run with some of these ideas of how it might sound transformed in different musical idioms. To get back to your question I think what I've realized over time is that it almost doesn't matter what I think or what my experience is. I might have all these little subtext behind the scene that I'm trying to invest the music with and try to put a story together as it were but the listener might not get the same story. You may be thinking about a cowboy who's lost in New York City and their thinking about a trip to Jamaica or something. It doesn't really matter, the point is by investing that time in trying to create a story the listener will find that there's something more to the music than just the notes on the surface. They'll feel that there's a story there but there's a place for their imagination to go as well even if it doesn't go to the same place that mine did.

John - Just like you said on "An Evening with Windham Hill" years ago referring to "Turning Turning Back." How so many people use the song for weddings or for births when it's really about a trip to Philadelphia? (Laughing)

Alex - Yeah. (Laughing)

John - Are you familiar with carts that are used in radio? Before there were CD's and computers we put everything on carts.

Alex - Oh Yeah sure.

John - At one station CKXM - FM in Edmonton our longest carts were seven minutes and of course "Turning Turning Back" is nine minutes on that live album. The dilemma was should I use more of the body of the song for on air or should I include your intro and I chose to use the intro because it says a lot about each persons own experience with music plus of course you got a pretty good reaction from the crowd. On the new one "Now and Then" it was nice to hear Michael Manring on there. Have you hung out with him or stayed in close contact with him since the eighties?

Alex - As you'll remember Michael played a lot with Michael Hedges and they did a lot of touring together. I think they really rubbed off on each other. Michael Manring does some pretty phenomenal things bass that you can see that connection to the way Michael Hedges played and was such an innovator. I don't know who influenced who more but you can hear that they really rubbed off on each other. Michael Manring and I didn't see each other much but over the last few years we kind of run into each other at some gigs or festivals. We did a few dates together back east this spring and I'm going to have Michael play on a project I'm producing next week. So we're staying in touch, we don't hang out a lot but our paths cross and we do get a chance to play live on the occasional gig and when we do we'll have maybe one or two things that we've got semi arranged and we'll often just play something totally improvisational.

John - His "Unusual Weather" album was one of those CD's that changed my life. Interestingly every album that followed for him was more and more progressive and it made me realize that the musician on Windham Hill were a lot more than that New Age tag. I still don't know what to call what you do but New Age is too small a term. What do you say when a fan asks you what you are?

Alex - Well I've struggled with that term and I've tried over time to leave it alone in a sense of trying not to worry about it or use it much. In the late eighties I left Windham Hill for a while to go record for RCA Novas and to be honest one of the things that motivated me was that it was at the height of that term and with it perhaps some backlash in the music scene. It wasn't doing much either for my career or my moral. If you stick around long enough people begin to see that regardless of what genre you play or draw from what you're doing survives because you're dedicated to doing it. When people ask me what I do I sort of shrug my shoulder and say it's pretty eclectic and it's drawn a little bit from this and that. When I got out and play the types of people who would present me in a concert, the core audience who would come and the media whether it's guitar magazines or whatever they're less concerned with the term. I think they're more concerned with what you're doing with the music so I think they're less concerned in what genre it's in. I get called everything from New Age to Jazz to folk. I've even appeared on classical guitar series. I try not to think about it too much. I just keep doing what I do. I did a record that came out about a year and a half ago with an electric guitarist named G.E. Stinson for a little Italian label that was 100% improvised.

John - I remember him from Shadowfax.

Alex - Yeah he was but since he's been playing mostly avant garde experimental stuff and the project we did together is pretty far off the New Age (laughing). I like to think that my music comes across or transcends some of those genre boundaries that we get a little bit trapped with sometimes.


     Watch for part two of our interview with Alex de Grassi coming soon

Watch for part two of our interview with Alex de Grassi coming soon