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A
N I N T E R V I E W
W
I T H T I M S P A R K S
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
Don't forget you can listen
to some of his stuff at http://www.acousticguitarworkshop.com/previews.htm
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