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Kicking Up Sparks
by George Robinson - Special to The
Jewish Week
From The Jewish Week
Guitarist Tim Sparks has mastered both
Sephardic and Ashkenazic idioms, which are
a long way from his North Carolina
roots.
The sound is as hushed and natural as
breathing. It flows as easily as the air
going into a pair of healthy lungs,
swooping and gliding effortlessly.
Tim Sparks is
playing his steel-string 12-fret
guitar.
Sparks will bring
that formidable talent and the guitar with
which he practices it to the Center for
Jewish History on Saturday night, and he
will be surrounded by the cream of the
downtown Jewish music mob, such as
musicians Erik Friedlander and Mark Ribot.
The fact that the concert is co-sponsored
by the American Sephardic Foundation and
YIVO, respectively the heavyweight doyens
of Sephardi and Yiddish culture, give you
some idea of the wide swath that Sparks
cuts through the multiplicities of Jewish
music.
Which is sort of
an odd career path for a guy whose
grandmother played gospel piano.
"I played straight
ahead jazz in the 1980s," the 48-year-old
Sparks said in a telephone interview from
his home in Minneapolis last week. "I
traveled all over Europe and developed an
interest in the music I heard there,
particularly Eastern European music. I
started playing rhythm guitar with a lot
of different accordion players, and that
led me into klezmer groups. I got a lot of
schooling, playing weddings and bar
mitzvahs."
He also became an
integral part of the Voices of Sefarad, a
Twin Cities band led by David Harris,
which led Sparks into an intensive study
of Sephardic folk songs.
"Working with
David I picked up a lot," he said. "I
arranged four or five of Flory Jagoda's
tunes for him, listened to a lot of rare
field recordings that David had done,
stuff that isn't easily available on
record."
At this point,
John Zorn heard a recording Sparks had
done, "Guitar Bazaar," which the guitarist
describes as "a bunch of tunes in odd
meters, a Balkan jazz thing." Zorn, always
on the prowl for new ways of approaching
Jewish musical traditions got in touch
with Sparks and asked him to make a record
for the Radical Jewish Culture series on
the sax player's Tzadik label.
Now there are
three: "Neshamah," "Tanz" and Sparks's
newest CD, "At the Rebbe's Table." Each is
a seductive and sinuous exploration of
traditional Jewish tunes, ranging from
Naftule Brandwein standards like "Fun
Tashlikh" to a Judeo-Kurdish song, "Hila
Wasa."
All of this is a
far cry from where Sparks started. Born
and raised in North Carolina, he took up
the acoustic guitar as a child when he was
bed-ridden with encephalitis, playing
country blues and his grandma's gospel
favorites by ear. He must have been pretty
good even then because he won a
scholarship to the North Carolina School
of the Arts and at age 11 was studying
with one of Andres Segovia's
protégés.
Sparks observed
that the line from Segovia to the Jewish
music is actually a pretty straight one,
in no small part derived from the musical
cauldron that is the Mediterranean.
Of course, Sefarad
is the Hebrew word for Spain and most
musicologists now believe that flamenco
has its roots in Jewish and Gypsy music,
so the connection is not too
surprising.
"The guitar and
tunings that we know evolved in Spain for
precisely those scales that are the heart
of Jewish music. The "freygish" scale is
one of those very Jewish scales that this
instrument was designed for. So you can
take a klezmer tune where there isn't a
guitar tradition and it's amazing how well
it comes together on guitar."
Hence Sparks'
delight in playing Naftule Brandwein.
Perhaps not having
a Jewish background and coming to the
music after he had already mastered a
dazzling range of other idioms, worked to
Sparks' advantage.
"I have a
background in both Sephardic and
Ashkenazic music," he said. As a result,
he isn't tied too closely to one or the
other, giving him a flexibility that some
Jewish musicians have to work a lot harder
for. It also adds to the fun for
Sparks.
"This is a project
that's really satisfying to work on for a
lot of reasons," he said. "A lot of cool
things happen when you start working in
Jewish music. It makes for an interesting
program in tune with the whole idea of
doing world music. The guitar is an
instrument that is played everywhere in
some form Spain, the Middle East and all
over the Mediterranean and with the
different Jewish communities of the
diaspora you get a great diversity of
tunes, but they share a common
language."
A language that
Tim Sparks has mastered.
Tim Sparks will be performing at the
Center for Jewish History (15 W. 16th St.)
on Saturday, Dec. 7 at 8 p.m. Tickets are
$25. For information, phone (917)
606-8200. His three CDs of Jewish music
are available on the Tzadik label.
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