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An Interview with Tim
Sparks
Acoustic Guitar
Review
http://www.acousticguitarworkshop.com
The newsletter of The Acoustic Guitar
Workshop - home of acoustic blues tuition
online.
An Interview with Tim Sparks
by Steve Elliot
Right, now then, every once in a
while a guitarist comes along who steps
from the ruck and shines out with an
intense light that dazzles, delights and
leaves an indelible mark on anyone who
hears them. Blind Blake, Robert Johnson,
Django Reinhardt and Jimi Hendrix (among
others of course) were in that mold. I
believe that on acoustic guitar at least,
Tim Sparks is of that rare breed. He
certainly lit my fire. Not only is he an
exquisite guitarist, with a sure and pure
touch whether playing with muscular
intensity or delicate finesse, but he is
also an extremely clever arranger.
Anyone who
attempts to arrange The Nutcracker Suite
for acoustic guitar must be either a nut
or a genius! Sparks is the latter. And
there seems to be virtually no guitar
style that he hasn't brought his
considerable talent to bear upon. Jazz,
Blues, Rock, Classical, Tim Sparks can do
them all. In recent years he has focused
much of his attention on the music of the
Balkans and Middle East. His latest album
"Neshamah" pays eloquent homage to the
quixotic beauty of Jewish music. Being a
bit of a flibberdi-gibbet, I rarely listen
to an album all the way through, but
Neshamah had me pinned in my seat from the
first note to the last. You can listen to
a Real Audio track from this album, and
one from his other just as tasty recent
album,"One String Leads To Another" on our
site at http://www.acousticguitarworkshop.com/previews.htm
In short, Tim
Sparks transmits something very special
through his fingertips.
AGR: What and/or who was your
earliest musical influence?
TS: I was self taught with a little
help from my older brother Bill who showed
me the Travis pattern and my Uncle Bobby,
who "learned me" things like '"When the
Saints Go Marching In" and Earnest Tubb's
"Filipino Baby." My Grandma played gospel
piano and strange pop tunes from the turn
of the century. She also played
fingerstyle guitar in a kind of a rolling
pattern, a bit like banjo, very different
from Travis style.
Arthur "Guitar
Boogie" Smith was an early influence. He
had a regional musical variety show that
was televised in North Carolina. Another
TV favorite when I was a lad was Flatt and
Scruggs' Martha White Biscuit Hour. Both
shows featured guests like Chet Atkins and
Doc Watson. Doc Watson was a real big
early influence. I remember listening to
Doc and Merle in an impromptu session late
one night in the parking lot of the Union
Grove Fiddler's Convention. There were
only a half dozen people standing around,
very cool.
When I was 14, I
got into the North Carolina School of the
Arts on a scholarship and studied with
Jesus Silva. Silva was a protege of
Segovia and Manuel Ponce and I was able to
attend a few Segovia master classes. I was
really into classical guitar when I met
Duck Baker, who promptly exploded all
conventions about nylon strings, guitar
and music in general. Duck's arrangements
of Jelly Roll Morton were a
revelation.
After graduation,
I banged around for a while, wound up in a
funk band that played a club circuit
around Chicago and the upper midwest...I
settled in Minneapolis in the mid 70's and
eventually got back into solo guitar,
playing a lot of ragtime. I met Pat
Donahue and we always liked to trade ideas
and try to impress each other. Pat hipped
me to Lenny Breau and Ted Greene. I also
listened a lot to Ed Bikert. I had a jazz
vocal group, Rio Nido, from about 76 to
86. We did lots of vintage jazz, from the
Boswell Sisters and Cat's and the Fiddle
to Lambert Hendricks and Ross. It was a
popular band that worked 5-6 night a week
gigs for years. I learned a lot of harmony
and comping. There was no piano, just
guitar....
AGR: Other guitarists?
TS: Lenny Breau was and is the
shit. I remember a live LP from Shelly's
Mannhole in LA. My fave recording of Lenny
is "5 O'clock Bells." He plays this
incredibly cool solo for a few minutes and
then pauses and the engineers says "are
you ready to do a take"? The thing that I
dig about Lenny Breau is his blending of
different guitar genres into one fabric,
like his deconstruction of Wildwood
Flower, playing Bach with Buddy
Emmons...especially his appropriation of
flamenco licks. In that regard he was way
ahead of his time. Rafael Robello was
another great fingerstylist who used this
approach. I have definitely taken a cue
from both of them on Neshamah, which
turned out to be a great project in purely
guitaristic terms because Jewish music
connects to so many musical
vocabularies.
I met Leo Kottke
about 12 years ago. Leo saw me playing on
some cable TV thing and called me because
he wanted to learn some jazz voicings. He
had a cassette of this scratchy LP by
Carla Bley and Jimmy Guiffre with a
version of Bley's "Jesus Maria" which he
had wanted to figure out since he was 14
and playing trombone. He asked if I could
arrange it, which I at first thought would
be simple. But as I got into it, I
realized that the bridge modulated up a
tritone. I wanted to put the tune in a
good acoustic key for Leo like E or A
which meant either the head or the bridge
would be in E flat or B flat, making for a
rather gnarly left hand configuration. I
was stuck until the solution arrived via a
version of Jesus Maria by Gary Burton.
When Burton went to the bridge he used an
inversion with the seventh in the bass.
That voicing was real natural for guitar,
sounded great and solved the problem.
The great thing I
learned from Leo was the way he works the
middle voicings and low register, building
counterpoints. I also have been influenced
by touring in Europe with a number of
guitarists on Peter Finger's Acoustic
Music Records. Franco Morone, Peppino
D'Agostino, Jaques Stotzem, Sandor Szabo,
Jamie Findley, Tomaz Gaworek, Isato
Nakagawa, Woody Mann, and Peter Finger, of
course...I steal from 'em all!
AGR: You first started playing as a
youngster while convalescing from a
serious illness. Tell us about this.
TS: I had spinal meningitis and
encephalitis when I was 9. The fever was
so high it kind of fried my brain and left
a scar. This left me with epilepsy for a
number of years. I couldn't play sports
'cause I was brain damaged so I took up
the guitar.
AGR: Can you remember the first
tune you learned?
TS: I think the first cool tune
that was a real guitar instrumental was
Maybell Carter's Victory Rag. I learned
blues from Brownie Mcgee and Lighten
Hopkins. I really loved Mississippi John
Hurt and fashioned a slide to mimic his
style. I liked Charlie Patton.
AGR: Early on you played in a
rhythm & blues band and worked as a
session guitarist. How did these
experiences help (or hinder)! your
development as an acoustic guitarist?
TS: Playing rhythm and blues was
some of the most fun I've ever had. After
high school, I went on the road with a
club band, Yesterday's Children, they
played the Midwest and a lot around
Chicago. That was in the early 70's, what
I call the pre-Disco era. It was a cool
repertoire: Tower of Power, Buddy Miles,
The Isley Brothers, Curtis Mayfield,
Marvin Gaye...we played a lot of tunes
from Stevie Wonder's Talking Book Album.
Playing rhythm on that stuff aquatinted me
with II-V-I progressions and also the
variety and interchangeability of Major 7,
Minor 9 and Dominant Sus voicings and
scales
Years later I had
a wonderful regular gig at the "Spruce
Club" a black Masonic Lodge in South
Minneapolis. It was kind of a bar inside
of a house, if you know what I mean. The
band was Danny McGhee on tenor, Billy
Holliman on B-3 Organ, Donald Thomas on
drums and vocals. They played the entire
black musical tradition- Duke Ellington,
Bebop, R&B, Blues, James Brown,
Funk...right up to Whitney Houston. The
place was packed. It really was a scene!
Brother Jack McDuff would always turn up
and play a set. All kinds of locals or
musicians coming through town would sit
in. The audience taught me a lot. It's
definitely not what you play but what you
say...how you play it.
I was rehearsing
with Jack McDuff once and took an overly
be-boppish solo on "Tobacco Road". McDuff
stopped everything, looked me dead in the
eyes and said, "Son, do you know the
difference between chicken salad and
chicken shit?" He would get on people's
case about their playing, like a Ninja
Master of Jazz. I learned a lot from it
though. In order to play a guitar solo
over a big fat B-3 sound, you have develop
strong ideas and deliver them with
authority. In other words, play straight
ahead with good tone. It takes a big sound
to cut through the wall of overtones
coming out of that Leslie Cabinet. Even
though I was using electric guitar with a
plectrum or thumbing a la Wes Montgomery,
this was a valuable lesson to distill into
my solo guitar, even though it's a
different genre.
AGR: Do you play much electric
guitar these days?
TS: I have a well traveled 1948
Epiphone which I love to play, but my
focus for the last few years has been solo
fingerstyle acoustic music.
AGR: You are at home in a
bewildering variety of styles - jazz,
blues, classical, bebop, etc., and these
have all gone into the melting pot to
create your style. Was this a conscious
decision, a method, if you like of
creating a unique sound and style of your
own?
TS: I think it's a product of
making a living as a journeyman guitarist
in many different genres and settings. I
always pull these experiences back into
solo guitar vocabulary. I think of music
as architecture and mix and match
different elements in a scheme I heard
from Joe Pass, which is basically: every
melodic and harmonic situation can be
identified in one or more of three
categories: Major 7, Minor 7 or Dominant
7. I've found that very helpful. I have
also long admired and emulated Dean
Magraw's genre-bending approach.
AGR: You won the 1993 National
Fingerstyle Guitar Championship with your
arrangement of The Nutcracker Suite. This
sounds like an awesome undertaking. How
did you go about it and how long did it
take you? It must have driven you nuts at
times.
TS: I saturated myself by listening
to the dances over and over again. Then, I
worked from a tape and a piano score. The
whole process took a few months. I made a
demo, then eventually got bored and
dropped it. A few years later, Peter
Finger called and asked me to record it.
He had got hold of that original demo by
way of Duck Baker and John Renbourn. I
worked it back up to make the recording
and added a number of voicing and
fingering improvements.
AGR: You have arranged a great deal
of Balkan and Middle Eastern music for the
guitar. What draws you to this music and
what technical difficulties does it
present for the guitar in terms of tunings
and such like?
TS: My first disc for Acoustic
Music Records included both "The
Nutcracker Suite" and "Balkan Dreams." To
tell the truth, I had just about forgotten
the Nutcracker when I had a call from
Peter Finger. It was his idea to pair the
Nutcracker with the Balkan suite.
This project led
to a tour in Europe with Peter Finger,
Jacques Stotzem and Dean Magraw, all
incredible composer/performers of the
guitar. That tour prompted me to switch
from nylon to steel strings. I began to
think "outside the box", composing with
complicated rhythms while mixing things up
in a more playful spirit. The compositions
on Guitar
Bazaar are the fruit of a hectic
period in the early 1990's when I worked
simultaneously in Jewish, Greek,
Brazilian, and Middle Eastern ensembles
along with the regular weekend gig at The
Spruce Club. It wasn't unusual to play six
or seven gigs on a weekend. I recall going
from a jazz club to a belly dance show to
a Jewish wedding to a bar full of Greeks
smashing plates on the floor to a Persian
Winter Solstice celebration and so on.
Eventually this
melange began to percolate through my
brain. In the resulting solo guitar
compositions, eclectic harmonic and
melodic ideas merged with asymmetrical
dance steps from the Balkans and
Middle-East to create a hybrid. My desire
has always been to create new work of
lasting value for the guitar repertoire. I
try to avoid reinventing the wheel or
recording the umpteenth version of
something that's been done to death.
The process
whereby these elements have been
appropriated and combined is covered in
detail in the Guitar
Bazaar Workshop Video. Every song from
Guitar Bazaar is written in a so-called
"odd" meter. It's amazing that Peter
Finger went out on a limb and let me
record such a crazy collection! Irregular
dance rhythms from the Balkans and Middle
East are like a lopsided samba or a waltz
with an extra half beat. Being an American
accustomed to 2/4, 4/4, 3/4, etc., these
exotic meters really messed with my mind.
They make for intriguing fingerpicking
arpeggios.
The method I used
to learn the meters comes from Bela
Bartok, who recorded and notated a large
collection of folk tunes from Eastern
Europe and Turkey at the beginning of this
century. For example, Bartok would write
5/8 as 3+2/8. You can grasp the rhythmic
architecture better by breaking these odd
meters down into groupings of two or three
notes. My advice is to try counting it out
loud. For example, 5/8 would go
one-two-three, one-two, one-two-three,
one-two, etc. The key to playing and
improvising in these meters is to hear how
each one has a special lilt and to get
that "feel" under your belt. (Before
composing and jamming on these patterns, I
logged many, many hours playing oud and
guitar with assorted ethnic combos).
AGR: How much do you practice? At
your level of playing it must be very hard
to make improvements. How do you see your
playing evolving in the next few
years?
TS: I've been living on a small
farm and remodeling the house with lot's
of work outside. Sometimes I do a lot of
composing in my head and grab the guitar
for small snatches. Sometimes, I wake up
in the morning and the outline of a song
is there in my head, full blown. If I can
hum it, I can play it. Other times it's a
lot of tinkering and chipping away and in
the end you find it's just not gonna fly
so you collect whatever bits and pieces
might be useful for something else and
move on.
AGR: What guitars do you use and
what setup, amps, effects, etc., do you
favor for live playing?
TS: I use a 1954 Martin 00-17 a
Sunrise Electromagnetic Pickup. I run it
through a Boss pre-amp with reverb and
chorus effects. I believe it's a Boss
AD-3? That and a good external mike.
AGR: Do you have any advice for
guitarists trying to master the difficult
art of fingerstyle?
TS: Not really...if you're good,
you don't need my advice and if you're
not, all the advice in the world won't
help. I know of a great Gypsy guitarist
who tells the story of when he got his
first guitar. He was about 4 or 5? very
young, and his father, a famous gypsy
performer in Granada, gave him the guitar
and his first lesson. A week later, the
youngster came back for lesson 2 but it
became apparent he'd forgotten most of
lesson number 1. Seeing this, his father
took the child's new guitar, smashed it
into pieces and told the kid he would
never be a guitar player and to forget it!
Of course, this kid went on to become a
virtuoso.
He's known as
"Chuscales" and whether the story is true
or not, it makes a good point don''t you
think? If, on the other hand, you want to
enjoy fingerstyle guitar, I do think in
this day and age one has so much more to
learn from in the way of published music
which wasn't available 10-20 years ago.
It's quite a fluorescence don't you think?
I mean, guys my age, had to "wear the
grooves off the vinyl" to glean these
mysteries, it's much easier to learn now.
In practical terms, I think playing in
ensembles of different styles makes one a
much better and well-rounded solo player.
Especially in one's sense of time, which
improves by working with bass and
percussion. Also, as I mentioned before,
soloing over an ensemble gives one a sense
of poise and attitude. Your sound aquires
a certain definition. It's true that some
of the most notable and successful
fingerstylists, like Leo Kottke and
Michael Hedges, were principally soloists,
on the other hand, Chet Atkins, Paco De
Lucia...all the flamenco cats, Lenny
Breau, Charlie Byrd, Joe Pass....some of
my favorite players like Dean Magraw,
Woody Mann...lot's of the great soloists
have honed their "mastery" as
accompanists.
AGR: I know that you have the odd
guitar lesson or two up on truefire.com,
but is there any other Tim Sparks tuition
material available and if so where is it?
Acoustic Music Records has some of your
guitar transcriptions ("Guitar Bazaar" and
"The Nutcracker Suite" ), but frankly this
material is going to be beyond all but
advanced fingerstyle guitarists. As Leo
Kottke says, it's difficult stuff, made to
sound easy.
TS: I have published a number of
lessons in Guitar Player Magazine, they
are listed on my web page along with
books, videos etc. The address is:
www.timsparks.com
AGR: What recording and other
musical projects have you got on at the
moment and what's planned for the
future?
TS: I have spent the winter getting
together another project for Tzadik,
tentatively scheduled to record in New
York in June. I'm also halfway through
tabbing out all the Neshamah material and
hope to have published with Mel Bay in the
next year or so. I've been working with
Bruce Muckala who is editing the rough
drafts and also maintains my web page.
AGR: Tim, many thanks for being so
generous with your time and | giving such
fulsome and interesting answers to our
questions.
Used by permission. Copyright 2000
Acoustic
Guitar Review
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