REQUIEM FOR A GUITAR TEACHER

par dh, lundi 29 mai 2017, 14:14 (il y a 2535 jours) @ dh

i think mike was a musician and a composer before being a guitarist. he liked better european written classical music than jazz. his technic was very original. he was left handed but played on a right handed guitar, like hendrix did. he used no pick, playing all with the fingers. he was a kind of virtuoso, but not in the usual, spectacular sens of the terme i.e. playing a lot of notes very fast like paganini or rachmaninov, or charlie parker. he did a great work on the sound he produced, the dynamics, the articulation, the harmonious proportions of the phrases, like in the perfect shapes of the ancient greek statuary. to speak about his work as a composer, i would call his music "platonician post-jazz". he was a moral man, and his music was moral, as the platonician ideas or the kantian moral law. it particularly appeared on XXXX, a composition on his first album, recorded live : no disorders, no chaos, no E7#9 chords hammered on the second and fourth time of the measure, no shreding, no technical demonstrations, but rather everything at the right place, a peacefull feeling of eternal serenity, like in an ideal and perfect rear-world, the world of the platonic essences where the good, the beautiful and the fair are the same one thing, or perhaps the garden of eden, before the original sin and the fall. one day he told me that he never used dominant seventh chords in his compositions, because this kind of chords was not pertinent for the purpose he assigned to his music. what was this purpose ? to correct, rather authoritatively, the mediocrity and imperfectness of the modern world, exactly like platon designing the laws of his ideal republic, which are, as karl popper recalls, the matrix for modern totalitarisms. mike excluded dominant seventh chords from his music as platon excluded the poets from his ideal city, as a factor of imbalance and egotism.