Remebrances of remarkable individuals I’ve known whose lives illuminate important truths.
After seven years of studying classical guitar, I was moving toward what eventually became known as “American fingerstyle.” The intricate solos I wrote incorporated elements of whatever I’d listened to and loved: English and American folk, pop, jazz, blues, ragtime, Indian music, and Western classical and Baroque. I bought a...
I had been making instruments, sort of, since high school. I fell in love with the classical guitar thanks to Andres Segovia and not long after fell in love with luthiery thanks to Irving Sloane’s marvelous book Classical Guitar Construction. I’m not sure when Glenn Johnson caught the romance...
This is my second post about Moondog, another study of one of the remarkable people I’ve known. His real name, we learned, was Louis Hardin. He had grown up in Kansas, Wyoming, Arkansas, and Tennessee, then spent three decades in Manhattan. He had a curious, double reputation. On one...
This is the sixth portrait in my series on “Meetings With Remarkable People” — ruminations on exceptional individuals I have known and explorations of just what qualities make a person “remarkable.” Moondog was certainly a unique man, one whose unusual circumstances resulted equally from fate, predisposition, and personal choice. My...
The summer of 1965 — when I shook hands with Martin Luther King — was perhaps the most blissful period of my life. After Chicago, the trees of the North Shore liberated me. There were long narrow beaches beneath towering lakeside bluffs, the chilly water of Lake Michigan to...
My last two posts in this series about “Meetings With Remarkable People” dealt with the inexplicable power of some performers to enthrall a roomful of people and hold them in a selfless state of merger with the music. I differentiated between that magic and the “charisma” we often ascribe...
I first heard Michael Hedges’s Breakfast in the Field when Windham Hill Records sent me a copy (vinyl) upon its release. By then, my Windham Hill record, Willow, had been out for two years, and during that time I’d been doing a lot of concerts with Alex de Grassi,...
In writing this series of posts about Meetings With Remarkable People, I’ve been reluctant to write about living ones. Why? First, I worry that the individuals I’m portraying might not appreciate my perspectives; I’m sure Nina Gitana and Bill Lederer would take exception to much of what I’ve written...
This is the fourth and last post about Fidel, the third person in my series Meetings With Remarkable People. Fidel is a non-human person — a cat — who demonstrates attributes I deem essential to the fulfillment of (human) personhood. My notes here are emphatically not about a cute, or...
This is the third in a series of posts about a remarkable non-human person, Fidel, a charismatic, handsome, utterly black cat who is now 18 years old and is one of the most remarkable people in my life. The same summer that he drove the trespassing dog down to...