|
String Being
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Globe-trotting Minnesota guitarist Tim
Sparks releases two divergent solo CDs
by John Bream
Published Friday, November 19, 1999
Sparks' acoustic guitar fits in any
setting 'round the world
What was acoustic guitar ace TimSparks
doing the other night on KQRS Radio,
bastion of classic rock? After DJ Mei
Young called him a "super bad-ass guitar
player," he told a story about how, on a
recent tour in Amsterdam, he'd mistakenly
eaten a drug-laced "space cake" (he'd
asked for spice cake), inspiring a tune
called "The Amsterdam Cakewalk." That tale
brought yuks all around the KQ studio
during the weekly local-music program
"Homegrown." Then, without missing a beat,
the Minnesota guitarist plucked a quiet
but mesmerizing instrumental.
Sparks manages to
make his guitar fit in just about any
setting. He recently recorded an album of
traditional Jewish music in a
video-editing studio in Detroit Lakes,
Minn. Then he went to Germany to record an
album of twangy blues songs written in
Mexico. And last month he went to Japan to
perform tunes from both CDs.
Saturday, he will
celebrate the release of the two discs --
"Neshamah" and "One String Leads to
Another" -- with a concert at the Cedar
Cultural Centre in Minneapolis.
"There's a
connection between the two albums, but
they're different; that's why I can tout
them at the same time," Sparks said.
There's certainly
a link in his spiritual approach and
soulful performance. But on a more literal
level, it's what Sparks calls the "blue
notes" -- the way he bends the steel
strings on his guitar. Two years ago, he
rediscovered those blue notes on a 1954
Martin guitar that had been tucked away in
the attic because it needed repairs. While
packing to move, he decided to fix the
guitar, which he had used extensively in
the late 1970s and '80s with the popular
Twin Cities jazz group Rio Nido. The
instrument turned out to be the ideal
lightweight companion for a trip to
Mexico.
After immersing
himself for several years in the music of
Eastern Europe and the Middle East (check
out 1993's "Balkan Dreams" and 1995's
"Guitar Bazaar"), Sparks found himself
exploring the "American sounds" of his
native North Carolina during his month in
Mexico. But he cross-pollinated them with
sounds from around the world, winding up
with tunes such as "Cornbread and
Baklava."
"I digest music,
but I also digest cultural things," Sparks
said over drinks. "Once I was taking a
lesson from a Persian musician and I
asked, 'How do I learn to play Persian
music?' -- which at the time was very
mysterious to me. He said, 'Look at
carpets.' Culture has an architecture in
it, and you get it in the food or the
music or the language."
A MUSICAL JOURNEY
The globe-trotting Sparks, 45, who
lives in Frazee in northern Minnesota, is
full of tales of cultural encounters in
Japan, where he performed nine concerts
last month with Isato Nakagawa ("the Leo
Kottke of Japan," whom he'd met at a
guitar festival in Germany) and Peter
Finger (the German guitarist for whose
label Sparks records). He talked about
eating sushi (the "hot dog of Japan"),
riding with white-gloved taxi drivers and
marveling at the nighttime neon
cityscapes. The audiences were receptive
to his music, buying CDs at $30 apiece and
receiving his autograph rendered with
Japanese characters.
The "Neshamah"
disc (it means "soul") was Sparks'
realization of an old concept he'd
originally envisioned as "A Boat from
Persia," in which he'd start musically in
the Middle East and move on to Northern
Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and,
eventually, the United States. New York
avant-garde composer John Zorn heard
"Guitar Bazaar" and asked Sparks to
contribute to a series of Jewish-focused
discs on Zorn's label, Tzadik. The
Minnesotan used Jewish music as a motif,
tracing it through Eastern Europe,
Northern Africa and the Americas. He'd
known many of the tunes from playing in
Twin Cities Jewish groups, including
Voices of Sepharad and Mark Stillman's
wedding band.
What would Sparks
call this music he's created?
"It's kind of an
orphan genre. It's not jazz, and it's not
classical. It's kind of a new thing. It's
got a sophistication that I think is as
sophisticated as classical guitar, but a
lot of classical guitarists won't listen
to it because it's steel-string [not
nylon] guitar, and I bend notes. In
Japan, that's really terrible, apparently.
The classical guitarists don't even want
to know about you."
Still, the orphan
found a home in Japan -- and
elsewhere.
© Copyright 1999 Star Tribune. All
rights reserved.
|
|
|
