A memorable gig

At the end of November 2011, I played a concert in a synagogue in Wrocław, Poland, as part of the Wrocław Guitar Festival.

What made this gig stand out was a convergence of things I love: travel, international culture, language, food, drink and nightlife, not to mention a professionally-orchestrated introduction to a new audience in a great European country.

I did four interviews in a row the afternoon of the show, for two internet blogs, a radio station and a newspaper, as well as a television interview in the evening before going on.

I was impressed by the research and thoughtfulness that went into the interview questions, clearly designed to elicit interesting answers and insights into what I do, how I do it and why I do it.

The venue for the show was a beautiful, historic 19th Century synagogue with an oval-shaped ceiling and galleries that had been recently restored after decades of neglect.

The sound was magnificent.

I used no reverb for the show.

The experience of playing for my first Polish audience at the sold-out show was astounding.

They were an exceptionally appreciative, enthusiastic all-ages audience who seemed to take everything in and thoroughly enjoy themselves.

I signed cds and tickets for the entire thirty-minute break, and more after the show.

At the end of the show I was presented on stage with a rose.

The audience asked for an encore, which I gave them. Then they gave me a standing ovation.

Not sure if it was because it was the last show of a great year of shows, or because it was my first show in a new country, or because of how awesomely warm and wonderful they were, but the audience’s response filled me with emotion and it was difficult to hold back tears.

After the show I was taken to dinner in a restaurant across a beautiful medieval courtyard from the synagogue, where I was treated to mushroom soup, stewed rabbit, wine, and vodka flavored with special grass from an area of Poland inhabited by wild buffalo.

Later, I wandered the cobbled streets and alleys of the old section of Wrocław, visiting atmospheric bars, taking snapshots of street scenes, buildings and cafés, and sampling more Polish food.

I was greeted several times in my wanderings by people who had been at the concert. They expressed enthusiasm and gratitude for what they had experienced.

I thanked them back.

On the way back to the hotel (at 3am) two women — one Polish and the other from France — stepped out of a bar and invited me in.

They had been to the concert and bought my cd “Ladies Night”.

I spent the next three hours there, drinking. conversing, laughing and relaxing.

Beata, the Polish woman, got the deejay in the bar to play her copy of “Ladies Night” over the house system.

People already on the dance floor danced to it, not noticing it was a solo acoustic guitar record.

It was a Bohemian experience befitting the locale of Wrocław, a region of Europe once known as Bohemia.

When I headed back to the hotel at 6am the bar was in full swing.

“When does this place close?” I asked the bartender.

He answered, “It doesn’t.”

I arrived back at the hotel feeling a combination of tired, energized and happy.

I fell asleep smiling. Ah. What a day. What a night.

Zzz.

The phone rang abruptly at 10am.

I was needed downstairs for a television interview.

I negotiated 45-minutes to shower, dress and wake up, then went downstairs where the interview was filmed in the hotel bar.

The interviewer (for the local news channel) asked me how I liked the audience at my show (loved them), and what I thought of Poland (loved it).

I think I appeared to be happy.

I was.

I spent the afternoon exploring the huge Christmas market that took up much of the pedestrianized center of the old section of Wrocław. It was a lovely sunny day, unseasonably warm for Poland in November.

That evening I attended the main event of the festival, the legendary Paco de Lucia and his band performing for six thousand people at the Halle Stulecia, an amazing early 20th Century edifice made entirely of poured concrete.

After the concert, I had dinner with them along with the hard-working festival personnel and invited guests. At the conclusion of the meal a flamenco guitar was put in my hands by one of the band members and I was asked to play something.

I played “Ladies Night” and “Shinkansen”.

They liked it :^)

Thanks to Aleksandra Furtak for photos 2-5 and 8. http://www.pracowniafotografii.athanor.pl/.

The first year with my new guitar

The first year with my Bailey baritone guitar was a great one.

Custom built in autumn 2010 by Scottish-based luthier Mark Bailey to my design and specifications, it is the flagship prototype for the Bailey Guitars Preston Reed Signature Series, which includes a normal scale-length version.

The custom cedar-and-mahogany acoustic cutaway has been my primary instrument at every show since its debut a liitle over a year ago in Irvine (Scotland).

Over the past year I have performed with it in the U.K., Ireland, the U.S., Croatia and Poland.

I can honestly report that on every level it has surpassed my expectations.

I am delighted not only with its sound, feel, playability and tone onstage, in radio station control rooms, in hotel rooms, at home and everywhere else, but with its rugged, road-and-airline-tested reliability.

It seems to get richer, deeper and more powerful-sounding every time I pick it up.

The English cedar top continues to darken and get more beautiful.

I will be recording my next album with it in January.

Basically, the guitar just seems too good to be true.

I still cannot quite believe that my dream instrument was nothing more than an idea in my head a year and a half ago (see earlier post in this blog: “My New Guitar”)

But Mark Bailey made it happen.

I look forward to working with him on more exciting projects in the future.

Thanks Mark!

The value of identifying your values

I was asked a few months ago by Pat Strother of Strother Communications to name my three core values as an artist, musician and composer.

He was looking for a three-word distillation of the guiding principles that motivate me to get up in the morning and move forward every day.

When I received this question (via e-mail) I was on a tour of Ireland.

I sat down with my iphone on a sofa in the lobby of the hotel I was staying at in Cork, thinking I would be there for some time.

But it took less than a minute.

I suddenly realized, no one had ever asked me.

My three core values are (and have always been) originality, universality and timelessness.

What do these terms mean to me?

Originality means something came from a creator and is uniquely theirs, containing and communicating their unique personal stamp, character, design, expression or brand.

It means something was not borrowed, derived, adapted or tweaked from someone else’s work or someone else’s idea. It is original. One of a kind.

Original does not mean without influences. Everything has influences and everything had a starting point.

It means without precedent.

Something that is original has transcended its influences to convey something truly new.

Listen to John Coltrane’s music.

You can hear many influences in it: blues, bebop jazz, the popular music of the time, perhaps some techniques or phrasing identifiably borrowed from some of his musical heroes.

Yet his sound is original. Many (if not all) jazz saxophone players have tried to play like Coltrane, yet no one has ever succeeded in sounding like him.

Universality means that what someone has created posesses a universal character and appeal. It has the quality of being understandable, relevant and involving to all people, of all ages, from all cultures. It transcends cultural and geographical boundaries.

Music as an art form always has the potential to be universal because it reaches a different area of the psyche from other forms of expression.

Music can help us all experience our human connection to each other (instrumental music possibly more so because there are no lyrics needing translation).

Timelessness means that a creation doesn’t date, but rather remains meaningful, applicable and valuable through time and across generations.

These are the qualities I have always admired, embraced and striven to embody in my creative work.

I found this exercise to be of great value in identifying the reasons and motivations for what I do, i.e. to look at what has always been operating behind the scenes.

It has made it possible to move forward creatively with even greater confidence.

Thanks for asking, Pat.

By the way, what are your three core values?

The romance of commercial air travel

Remembering the distant sound of a single engine airplane passing overhead when I was a little boy growing up in a small town in upstate New York. It was the sound of possibility, travel, adventure and the wider world.

I spent much of my boyhood building model airplanes and hanging them with thread and thumbtacks from the ceiling of my room. My favorite TV show was “Twelve O’Clock High”.

Once, when I was eleven, I chanced upon a P-51 Mustang, my favorite WWII fighter plane, at the local airport, and was able to check it out up close.

When I was seventeen I took my first international flight from New York to Stockholm on the stylish (for its time) European airline SAS.

I remember how excited I was to arrive at Kennedy airport and board the plane (a Douglas DC-8).

I remember not quite believing the impossible physical event of such a massive structure actually reaching one hundred eighty miles per hour and lifting off the runway.

Years later when I lived in Minneapolis, a guitar student who was an A&P (airframe and powerplant) mechanic took me on a guided tour of the Northwest Airlines maintenance hangar at Minneapolis International Airport.

I got to walk on the wings and snoop inside the fuselages of Boeing 747′s and Douglas DC-10′s, examine imposing Pratt & Whitney, General Electric and Rolls Royce fan-jet engines in various states of re-build, learn just how powerful they were (incredible!) and learn fascinating facts like how much a new coat of paint weighs and how many tons of extra fuel were consumed on an average flight as a result of the added weight.

What impressed me most on this tour was learning about the maintenance and safety procedures: how regularly engines were removed and rebuilt, engine mounts inspected and mounting bolts replaced, how often fuel sytems, avionics, navigation, landing gear, emergency escape slides and every other part and system making up the complicated entity of an airplane were inspected, tested, serviced, overhauled and replaced.

I may not have ended up being a pilot, but for the past forty years I have lived a life of air travel.

The air travel experience has changed with post-911 security procedures and the advent of discount internet airlines with their open-seating policies, excess baggage charges and excess weight charges.

But has it really changed that much?

What’s different today?

The biggest change I find is not the flying experience. That has stayed largely the same, except planes are now smoother, quieter, faster and more energy-efficient.

Increased security hassles, increased passenger volumes resulting in more waiting in lines, longer journeys (on foot and via moving walkways, trains and buses) to the gate, and the overall treatment of customers comes to mind.

There has been a downgrade in individual customer attention and pampering from airline staff that was once the norm.

The customer experience at airports now can feel rushed, rude and take-it-or-leave-it, highlighting inexperienced, poorly-trained and underpaid staff with alarming people skills taking no responsibility for, and showing no involvement in, the quality of your travel experience.

But has the glamor and romance of air travel really gone away?

Or has our bubble simply been burst as we all find ourselves — airlines, airports and passengers — having to deal with the same nervous, stress-filled world of rising fuel and operating costs, rising taxes, charges for services that were once free and taken for granted, and ever-more-complicated and costly security equipment and procedures?

To some extent, this has effected my sense of the magic of the air travel experience.

But I still find it magical — even after checking my luggage, paying the excess weight and excess baggage charges, getting my boarding passes, dropping off the guitar(s) at the fragile zone and showing my boarding pass, joining the security line, showing my passport and boarding pass there, answering security questions, removing my jacket, belt, shoes and pocket items, putting them on the security belt, going through the security scanner, recovering my belongings on the other side of the security belt, and putting jacket, belt and shoes back on and pocket items back in my pockets — to sit down with a drink and wait for boarding time.

(Ahhhh. That wasn’t so bad. I can do this.)

After all, I will soon be sitting in a plane that accelerates on the runway, lifts me up into the sky and delivers me to an impossibly faraway place where adventure awaits.

It is still worth it, still amazing, and I still love it.

Do you want to be original?

Somebody called me crazy in a guitar blog recently, referring to the integrated percussive guitar style I invented.

It made me smile.

I took it as a compliment.

To me, “crazy” means things like refreshing, innovative, ahead of its time, and most of all, original.

When guitar players see me play for the first time, they often ask me questions like:

Where did you get that?

How did you come up with that?

What motivated you to go there?

Well, I didn’t get it from guitar players or guitar music (although I did utilize some techniques and ideas learned from watching other guitar players).

I got it from asking a new question:

How do I play drums and guitar at the same time, i.e. how do I integrate a percussive groove into a solo guitar composition?

In 1987 I already had a five-album recording history and a strong foundation in guitar playing and composing guitar tunes.

I was very good at something a lot of other players were also very good at.

But I didn’t want to sound like anyone else.

By trusting in the music I heard in my head, and my composing skills, and being willing to let go of everything I knew at the time about guitar playing, I was able to invent a new, compositional approach that turned the guitar into a new instrument.

I need to say here that I was not the first to play the guitar differently. I received ideas and insights from innovative players like Stanley Jordan, Jeff Healey, Eddie Van Halen, Michael Hedges, Jimi Hendrix and others. I am grateful to those players for their bold, pioneering example of what was new and possible on the guitar. They prompted me to ask myself: what do I have to say?

If I have achieved something original, it is not about the individual guitar techniques I use (some of which I did invent), but rather a conceptual approach to composing music on the guitar that evolved out of asking new questions and then answering them.

My new approach felt strange (and it certainly looked strange). But I knew it was right because I could hear the music. It was like arriving on the shores of a new continent and recognizing it.

My point in this post is this:

If you want achieve something original, it may be necessary to forget everything that came before, and everything you think you know, and start again.

In other words, it may be necessary to leave what is comfortable and familiar, with its limiting conventions, rules and practices, behind so new thinking can come in.

Never become too attached to what you think you know, especially if you are really good at it. It can get in the way of your growth and evolution as a musician, artist, human being and everything else.

Always be willing to ask a new question, and always be willing to be a beginner.

I believe that how you end up as a guitarist, musician or anything else in life is the result of the choices you make, whether you realize you are making them or not.

If it is important to you to make your own mark, to be original, then those choices need to be about relentlessly nurturing and developing your own creative voice and point of view, finding new questions to ask, and answering them in your own unique way.

Do you have something new to say?

Are you nurturing your creative voice so it evolves and grows?

Are you asking new questions?

Photoblog: The U.S. tour 2011

Here are some random photos from my U.S. west coast tour. The four-week tour began at the end of September in Portland, Oregon and headed south to spots in northern, southern, central California, the Bay Area, and finished in Yosemite National Park/Sierra National Forest.
Both Oregon and California are full of stunning natural beauty, so you will find a disproportionate number of landscape shots.
The tour also provided an opportunity to catch up with some old friends, one of whom I hadn’t seen in 37 years.
Once again, thanks to GAC for making this tour possible :^)

What is practicing?

I am often asked how I practice, what I practice, and how much time I spend practicing guitar.

I always feel like answering: I don’t :^)

This is not true of course. But what is true is, the practicing I do takes the form of pursuing particular goals that I enjoy pursuing, so I don’t think of it as practicing.

My practicing falls into three different areas: composing new music, preparing for shows and tours, and warming up on the day of a show.

When I am writing new music, the content (and goal) of the practicing is the tune I am developing.

I spend this time creating and mastering new ideas, as well as deciding how different ideas and sections fit together in the composition.

Hours can roll by before I notice it.

You could call this composing-oriented practicing.

When I am preparing for a show or a tour, the content (and goal) of the practicing is the repertoire of tunes I will be performing.

This time is spent familiarizing (or re-familiarizing) myself with the chosen material. I like to feel comfortable and confident with a tune before playing it in front of people, so I play the tune all the way through, usually twice, before moving on to the next one.

This kind of practicing can take up many hours as well.

You could call it preparation-oriented practicing.

And then there’s warm-up practicing.

I find it essential to warm-up on the guitar on the day of a performance, but I have also learned that it is equally important not to over-play, as this can result in hand fatigue during a show (a scary situation to find yourself in). So I am careful not to over-practice on gig days.

I pick a few representative tunes (i.e. tunes containing typical techniques and moves I will be doing throughout the concert) and play them through once or twice, looking for that “point” of feeling physically relaxed and musically in touch.

This takes a half an hour at the most.

When I reach that point I put the guitar away (no matter how much fun I’m having) until soundcheck time.

What it means to be sponsored

My upcoming U.S. tour is being sponsored by a global shipping and logistics company called GAC.

How did I find this sponsor?

I didn’t. They found me.

One of their ten thousand employees saw me play in Glasgow a few years ago and has been a fan ever since.

He contacted me a while ago to tell me he thought his company could help me, literally, get where I am going.

Touring internationally is very, very expensive, and never more so than right now. Getting a sponsor to cover some of the costs involved is, in a word, a godsend.

In looking at how and why this sponsorship-endorsement relationship could work, two words kept popping up that we have in common: innovation and integration.

As a company, GAC is known for the innovative, integrated problem-solving they provide for their global customers.

Those same descriptive terms, innovation and integration, have been used again and again to describe my musical approach.

In the oddest way, we are a match.

They like my artistic approach. I like their individually-tailored customer approach.

Being sponsored means, among other things, being directly supported with cash by an organization that benefits from being associated with you, your brand, and your reputation.

After checking out GAC’s reputation and ethical policies, I am more than happy with that.

In addition to the financial support they are putting behind my tour, GAC is introducing me and my music to their thousands of employees and customers around the world.

And I am speaking about them in this blog and on my social networks.

Lots of big companies including GAC sponsor high-profile sporting events like football, golf, formula one racing and yacht racing.

It’s unusual, however, to see a big company reach out to an individual artist.

It has made a big difference to me and what I do.

In supporting my U.S. tour GAC is launching a new sponsorship direction: the arts.

And they seem to be genuinely excited about it.

Bravo!

Surfing your stress

I hate deadlines.

They cause stress.

Stress is uncomfortable and unpleasant.

But I have to admit, stress and deadlines have been a huge part of discovering the most valuable things about myself.

Life without them would be unthinkable, not to mention really boring.

Here is an example.

When I am preparing for the autumn touring season (like I am right now), I experience moments of nagging, generalized stress.

Have I remembered everything?

Am I ready for the rigors of traveling and performing internationally?

Am I happy with the repertoire of tunes I will be playing on the tour?

Are they ready to be performed (shudder)?

Are my guitars and equipment ready to be relied upon night after night?

Are all of the travel and logistical arrangements for the tour sorted?

I have learned to see stress as both dynamic and beneficial.

It is a message from myself to myself, telling me to get into a new rhythm.

It points out details I may be neglecting.

It prods me to make decisions about dangling issues that could cause problems later.

It causes me to finish unfinished things,
including musical compositions (thank you, deadline).

It prompts me to plan ahead, to anticipate and visualize the requirements, contingencies, and people I will be dealing with in the near future.

All in all, stress requires me to change in order to deal with it.

The wierd thing is, as the stress and the deadline push me into a new rhythm of organizing, handling, completing and deciding, I change into something I like.

I suddenly find myself enjoying it.

Successfully navigating the challenges of the stress and meeting the deadline have resulted in a feeling of confidence and capability.

All of a sudden, I feel relaxed and excited about the upcoming tour.

It’s like matching the speed of an oncoming wave, getting on top of it, and riding it.

I am now using the stress, rather than being used (up) by it.

Here is my stress model:

Stress is a form of energy.

You, and it, are dynamic.

As you change in order to deal with it,
it changes into something that moves you forward.

It’s energy conversion.

How do you see your stress?

Do you avoid it, or do you make it work for you?

I see it as a blessing disguised as a curse.

Moving forward requires making decisions

I am writing a tune at the moment. I have reached a point in the development of this tune where a decision must be made about what the tune is, what it is saying, and where it is going.

I really like the initial idea of the tune. It’s funky, bluesy, percussive and fun. It is not quite like anything I’ve written before. It is strong enough to stand on its own as a tune.

Do I keep it as a relatively simple, fun, funky tune?

Or should I take it further, develop it into a more involved, and perhaps more rewarding, musical story? I have some ideas for this that I am exploring.

Both directions will probably work. Which one do I choose?

If I leave it as a simple, fun tune, I will never know how the story turns out.

If I develop it into a longer piece of music with multiple sections, I could be giving up the simple effectiveness of the original idea.

This decision is not easy to make, but it must be made. Otherwise the tune will just hang in limbo.

Since I am not ready yet to make this decision about the tune, I am going to make an interim decision instead: I will work for the rest of this week on development ideas. If by the end of the week I am not really excited by the direction of the writing, I will choose the simple option.