Episode 165 Alex de Grassi
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Welcome back to Classical Guitar Insider. This is your host, Brett Williams, and today on the show it's Alex Degrassi. Alex Degrassi is a steel string finger style guitarist who had a profound effect on me that I'm just coming to realize was there after reviewing his catalog in preparation for the interview.

I grew up listening to them. My whole family loved them. My family loved the Wyndham Hill albums and some of the ones that came after that. And it has been a joy diving back into that very deep well that is the work of this great musician. And it's a fascinating interview, I think, in a lot of ways, because it sort of makes us reckon with why we feel the need to separate classical guitar from the other genres.

genres or styles or whatever it is. It's, it's something that came up on the Jason Dobney episode. We were talking about the Met museum and about his collection and how he's trying to expand it beyond just Western European traditional instruments. And, and, and, and I think we're, he's doing that, you know, with the, the Peter, Paul and Mary guitars and stuff like that. So I think it's, this episode really takes a look at like, what is a classical composition? What is a classical guitar? And, and,

I mean, if you listen to Alex, there's the crossover is, is there, it's, it's almost sort of a, a not issue. And for a lot of great artists, that seems to be the case, isn't it? Um, that they don't really care about the way everybody else is doing things or doing things their way. And they are also super open-minded about everything and just taking it all in.

He is a special musician. He's a thinking musician, and he is someone who is endlessly curious, and it is an honor that he took the time to talk to us. The show is sponsored, as always, by SavageClassical.com, S-A-V-A-G-E Classical.com. Richard is over there. Richard Sage is the guy at SavageClassical.com, and he will hook you up with

the guitar of your dreams. Take a gander at one of the best collections of guitars on the East Coast. That's savageclassical.com. Tell him that I sent you. We are also sponsored by Simon Powis. That's right. The boy is back. He's back with his new book, Progressive Sight Reading for Classical Guitar. It came out in August. We're finally talking about it. And if you want to do what Simon's done, what Rupert's done, what a bunch of other guitarists are doing,

You can support the show by talking about your project, right? And I can interview you like I'm going to do with Simon. In this case, Simon is an extremely close friend. Extreme is an extreme word, but he's a close friend. And I mean that. And he has been going through some terrible things health-wise. And he's not the only one. Chris Gotzenberg is out there. I gave him a call. So it's...

This one goes on beyond the paid ad spot of three to five minutes. Simon and I talked for about 10 minutes. And it's going to be... That's what the intro is going to be today. He went through some health stuff. He got diagnosed with cancer. And he had to...

It was very scary and it took a long time to get rid of it. So if you've been wondering what's going on with our guy, that's what's going on. I had a conversation with him in the park, you know, at the beginning of the summer, he was visiting New York. He's now in Australia and it's, it's, it's, it was important for him to talk about it because it's important for him that you guys out there know that

About the kind of cancer that he got which is very important that you're you know checking yourself and the other reason it's important is that And that's sort of a big part of the show is that you don't feel so alone. You don't feel like the only person that's sick or the only person that's trying to play guitar while you have a kid or the only person that has to teach beginner guitarists for a living and you know, it seems like everybody else is just

You know, doing real well, that's just not the case. And that's what the show is all about, is bringing us all together. Outstanding guitarists from different genres, like Alex Degrassi, guitarists who are recovering from an illness like Simon, and everybody else out there. It's a genre of people who struggle.

And it is a hard instrument to play. And it's a hard thing to keep going. And it blows my mind that Simon would get out and start immediately doing what he does really well, which is be one of the best and most prolific educators when it comes to classical guitar, especially online. I think exclusively online. He's one of the pioneers, I think, of

the way that information is disseminated when it comes to our instruments. So Simon Powis, the book Progressive Sight Reading for the Classical Guitar is available on Amazon.com and it is also available at classicalguitarcorner.com That's right. Simon's old website where he's created a community of like-minded guitarists and learners. That's classicalguitarcorner.com It is the other great podcast.

So make sure you visit that. Make sure you take a look at progressive sight reading for the classical guitar. It is a textbook that will help you sight read better. And we talk about it. Let's talk to Simon Powis right now. I'm not shy about talking about the last few years. In fact, I wrote, I did an entire podcast. I haven't released because I thought, you know what? People probably didn't sign up for this. If they click on, Oh, here's a classical guitar podcast. And then you hear someone talk about their experience with cancer for the

for 40 minutes. I recorded the whole thing, I laid it all out on the table, I just sort of balked at it because I thought, hmm, maybe not, maybe you'd be, I think it'd be better if you asked me questions about it somewhere down the track. But I have no shyness about it. In fact, I'm kind of, you know, wanting the world to know, because I had testicular cancer

And that affects men 18 to 38. And it's kind of a group, an age group that doesn't think anything like that's going to happen to them. And it's one of the most treatable cancers in the world. Mine was left too long. And so it went all throughout my body. That's why it was so dramatic. But it's the easiest thing to catch. You just check yourself.

You know, you just check yourself for bumps and lumps and then obviously don't freak out because there's other reasons for weirdness in your testes. But, you know, and then just go see a doctor if there's something wrong. It's that easy as opposed to other ones which are much more insidious and in the body and you can't tell it there for a long, long time. So I'm very happy to talk about it if it ever affects a single person in a slightly positive way, helps them deal with something a bit earlier than they would have then. At this point, I have a number of friends who have had cancer.

I've had three close ones that have gone through chemotherapy, and you're one of them. And it is awful under any circumstances. But when you told me what you went through, I have never heard of anything like that. It was so... They put you... You were in a room by yourself for four months. Is that okay to talk about? Yeah. Look, it went over two years, and there was... It came back...

twice. So I sort of had three attempts at treating him. Major surgeries, they opened me up in the abdomen, I had this massive scar down my belly,

chemotherapy twice, radiation once, another surgery. It was just, it was full on and they were just trying so hard to get rid of this. What is actually a curable cancer? You can't be said for a lot of cancers. And so they were going tooth and nail at this and I got blasted at the end with something called high dose chemotherapy, which is just, they just... Because you're young. Basically... Because you're young, they think you can take it. Well, no, well, yeah, they cater it to the individual, of course, but...

It was more because it was curable. Like there was, there was one period, I think I told you about where I actually lost my mind because one of the chemicals affected my brain. And for five days I was delirious and hallucinating and completely out of it. And they said, well, normally we would back off at this point, but because it's curable, we don't, we're going to keep pushing forward and just knock it, knock it. So, um, that informed decisions. And of course, you know, at any point in time, the patient can put their hand up and say, let's stop. But, um,

Once you start getting past what's called salvage chemotherapy, your survival rate goes down the hill. So yeah, it's about risks and rewards, right? Your first thing is to go back and re-examine a doctoral thesis. Is it still about sight reading?

Well, the reason I did is I love it. I love teaching. I love thinking about how best to communicate concepts. And I like the idea that hopefully I can add a little nugget here or there that contributes to the pedagogy of our community. So, yes, it was a topic of my doctoral thesis. I thought the thesis was pretty terrible.

People have asked me via email. They said, hey, can you send me your thesis? And I often decline politely. I just don't think it's very good. I think it's kind of armchair psychology loosely based in studies. Like I took the guitar department for six months at Yale. Ben gave me access to the rest of my colleagues at the time. And we ran all this sort of like

tests and studies where I worked on their chord knowledge theory fingerboard knowledge all like timed them and it was very unscientific it's like it's a musician it's a musician trying to be a scientist which is which is what we do it's but a classical it's what we do because we're part of like this you're going to Yale you know you're surrounded with these these with empirical study you know where people are just like looking at things and looking at the way they actually are and they have all these different things to back them up and

When it comes down to it, we're just not as objective as that. We're artists. There's no right or wrong way to really play the guitar. But we all are tempted to that because we're like, well, I'm going to college. So what do we do in college? Yeah, I always try and catch myself. I try and catch myself when...

As teachers, we sometimes get into the world of neuroscience. We talk about myelin and muscle memory. All the time. Alexander Technique is our favorite thing because it's like this thing we can quantify. But also, I will say this. Between you and me, Simon, I don't know of a single doctoral thesis written by a classical guitarist that I give two shits about.

I've never heard anybody talk about one. I've never seen it published. Maybe I don't read enough Soundboard magazine. I don't know. What do you think? Well, I feel like some of them... I think some of them follow... I know what you mean because the theses themselves are usually pretty dry.

But I think a lot of them get transformed into articles or books. Like Thomas Heck, I believe his PhD was on the Giuliani, and that was a huge contribution to the research on Giuliani. Sure, yeah, that'd be cool. That's just one example. And so my book is really very much not a thesis at all. It's just a practical tool. So the big change in my research came when I interviewed John Williams.

Ben knows John well and did me the solid of setting up a phone interview because John is a very good sight reader. And I presented my idea, my armchair scientist idea. Oh, well, we can compartmentalize this and then you learn how to do chords and then you learn how to do it. And he just sort of stopped me and he said, no, that's totally wrong. And what you need to do is you need to read often and read.

You read a lot and read often, basically. And it just sort of crumbled my entire very convoluted thesis down to, no, you just need to read and read often. And over the last 15 years, I've basically come around to agree with it.

And so that's what the book is. It is structured and it is progressive. I mean, it's just a practical tool. There are other good ones out there. There's Robert Benedict. There's William Leavitt. I haven't seen it, but just through looking around, I think Brian Johansson has something called Semester at Sight. And the thing about sight reading is you can never have enough material. It's just because you also go through it kind of quickly. Perhaps one thing that differentiates mine from others in a bit is I...

define sight reading slightly differently than a lot of other people do in that some people conflate sight reading with just reading music and so they think oh sorry you're gonna teach me where the note lives on the staff and what rhythm means what but sight reading actually for me is more of the skill to just make music and the priority is the pulse rather than pitch and

So instead of stopping if you make a mistake and going back, you just keep going, keep going. Mistakes, fine. Bad fingering, fine. Now the skill actually is not to stop and drop out notes if you need to, rejoin when you can. You know, that's great in an ensemble setting, in a guitar orchestra, what have you.

So that's a little bit of a different approach. And so I'm constantly reinforcing the habits of scanning the score, obviously looking ahead, but not stopping dropping out if you need to thinning out harmonies, thinning out textures so that the pulse is protected. You keep going and you get a sense of the music because we're not trying to make it perfect.

We're just trying to either assess, do we like this piece of music? We're going to play it. Could this be arranged? I want to sit down with some friends and play some music. Let's go. You know, all those, that's what sight reading is all about for me. And so the ability to read and start at different points gives you more fluency and learning better adaptability. Let's say someone wants to try a different fingering that you've been practicing the last two weeks.

So let's try it up in the fifth position. Oh, I can't do that. Give me, I'll practice it and come back next week. All of that kind of ability, that's fingerboard knowledge, fluency in teaching, communication, adaptability and learning. If you're in an ensemble, you can actually listen to your ensemble members rather than just being completely focused on your own part, holding them for dear life, you know? So, and it's just unlocking a wider musical community because it's a language that we share, right?

And, you know, often people say, is guitar harder than other instruments? And the answer is yes. You get multiple places to play the same note and it's compounded by harmony and polyphony. So that adds a level of difficulty that just doesn't exist on a lot of instruments. You could argue keyboard instruments have a lot of density with their textures. Organ music uses their feet differently.

But there is only one place for them to play those notes. So every instrument is going to have its challenge. Violin music might be playing in 30 seconds or jazz music might have much more interesting rhythms and diverse rhythms. But guitar in general does have that level of complexity that doesn't exist on other instruments. So it is a harder instrument, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't do more of it. We shouldn't do it. We should do more of it. There's a great quote at the beginning of the book from the John Williams conversation.

where he basically ends by saying, yes, it is harder, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. We should do more of it. Again, that's progressive sight reading for classical guitar grades one through eight available at amazon.com or classical guitar corner.com amazon.com for progressive sight reading for the classical guitar or classical guitar corner.com.

Make sure you go to brettwilliamsmusic.com/support. That's B-R-E-T Williams music.com/support to support the show and make sure you go to savageclassical.com to get yourself a guitar. All right, let's get on with the show. Let's talk to maestro Alex Degrassi. - Produced an album for the Real Ceras and they're kind of a folk Americana vocal duo. They do play instruments, but they're more singers. They sing beautifully together. They have this beautiful folk harmony thing.

and I played guitar and ukulele a lot on it, which I call soprano guitar, just to make it kind of elevated a little bit, to keep it in my guitar audience. And yeah, that's been really fun. It's kind of been going back to the kind of music I played as a street musician in London in 1973.

Wow, is that where you were? Were you in London in the 70s? I was just there for a summer as a street musician and did a little playing in France and southern Germany too with my childhood friend, Nick Braun, who we learned how to play guitar together when we were 12 years old. When you were playing street music, I mean, that's before your first solo album that I have is 1979, so that's quite a ways before that.

Right. But one of the things that, you know, you really hear, especially in the in the first album and some of your earlier stuff, your pre Windham Hill stuff is, is the influence of Northern Europe on your playing? Is that something? Yeah, so but there is a Northern European influence, particularly in the

When I got in my teens and 20s, when I was a teenager, I spent a lot of late nights learning off of record the old-fashioned way how to play...

guitar music by Bert Jansch and Davy Graham and John Renmore and all that whole folk revival you know British Isles folk and blues and um that and of course Leo Kottke and John Fahey and Robbie Basho the American uh you know equivalent of that solo guitar you know pioneers and as well as of course all the old blues guys like Mississippi John Hurt so I learned a lot by ear I mean I had

I had learned how to read music and play in an orchestra, but when I picked up the guitar for the first few years it was 40 years or so it was all by ear and occasionally I'd pick up something like Maria Magdalena's notebook and learn some of those relatively easy Bach pieces and You know, so that's how I got started. So when we were playing a street musicians 73 I was 21 and

what my friend nick and i wrote a lot of songs um we also uh we played dylan simon and garfunkel stevie would stevie wonder uh some old blues you know and and for the people passing through

To get a dollar in the hat. We were like, wow, it's American musicians, you know, playing all this great folk and blues and roots music. So anyway, yeah, that was kind of, and then on the side, I was always kind of trying to write some solo guitar music inspired by some of those instrumental people I mentioned. And, you know, then I eventually recorded my first album for Wyndham Hill in 77, and it came out actually in 78, Turning, Turning Back.

And I was one of those people who took, you know, eight years to go through college and changed majors a couple times and worked in between and was a street musician. So by the time I, it was just about the time I was graduating from college with a degree from UC Berkeley with a degree in economic geography that, thinking of going to graduate school and that, that my album came out. And to my surprise, it was the very early days of the Wyndham Hill Records album.

It kind of took off. I got a lot of good reviews in press and the next thing I knew I was gigging. And then I got an agent a few years later, so I haven't really looked back. What is economic geography? You know, it's a degree that people would get who are going into planning or urban design or, you know, if you're a total academic, just, you know, scholarly urban history.

I don't know how I got there. I wanted to go to architecture school and it was full. And so I did that. And I did take a lot of the music program, by the way. I sort of minored in music and took a lot of art classes. So I was kind of all over the place. I wasn't

I played a lot of guitar, but it was kind of separate from my academic studies for the most part. I remember a big sigh of relief after, I think it was just towards the end of my first year taking music theory, and somebody in the class asked a question, and the professor said, well, you know, if all this rules about four-part harmony, for example, would not apply if you were playing music

playing Indian music in East India, you know, which is another very specific. And I went, aha. So maybe I can work my way around. There's an option here. Maybe there's something legitimate about what I'm doing. And, uh,

I didn't really get back to that. I met a guy in the early 80s. I went to play at a little guitar festival up in northern Idaho. There was a guy there you might have run across, Leon Atkinson. And Leon Atkinson was a refugee from New York, African-American man pioneering in the woods of northern Idaho. And he...

He had this festival invited another guitarist named Philip Roesiger who you may have heard of and Philip had I believe won the study was Segovia in Spain and won the Santiago de Compostela prize When he was quite young and had a very prominent promising career, which ultimately didn't pan out so well for him, but

i we became friends for a while and we would talk late night on the phone and i'd say phil

"Philip, explain to me how you do that classical tremolo." He'd say, "Well, do this and this and this." And I bought a classical guitar even though I was a steel string player and started playing a lot. I went through a period of a number of years where I played three or four hours through all the classical guitar repertoire. And he just said, "Yeah, just play it. Get the music and play it and call me when you have questions."

So that was my classical guitar training. Well, it seems-- I mean, you make a really good point, is when you listen to the Indian ragas and stuff like that, there's minimalism in your-- not only-- we talked about the influence of the British Isles on anybody who does fingerstyle guitar on a steel string. But when you're talking about--

Yeah, this sort of you go, you understand that these ragas and Ravi Shankar and stuff, what they're doing is very freeing. And it doesn't require you to apply counterpoint every time you do anything. Right. Well, at the same time, you're not shying away or running away or dismissing.

uh the the classical tradition you're you're practicing the notebook of anna magdalena bach and you're you know you're you're calling up this guy for questions uh you know you're you're still engaging with it well at the same time uh at a relatively early age you were 21 and 73 so i'm assuming you know everything's happening before the age of 25 when you're sort of defining

There's no defining what you are as a player. That's ridiculous, because your first five albums are just a series of experimenting with other musicians and then coming back and having a solo album that sort of represents-- or it seems to sort of incorporate some of the stuff that you did with all the other musicians when you did ensemble albums. Right. But I can really identify with your feeling of, oh, I'm on to something.

when it comes to just getting in there and writing the music and expressing yourself in a theoretical, in a way that's less theoretical and more just almost technical. I mean, you were allowing yourself to express yourself with what you had at that time. So I can understand that. - Yeah, and I do think I applied a lot of what I learned in my brief

you know, academic music career, I mean studies, you know, at school at UC Berkeley. And, you know, I did come from a family. My grandfather was a violinist with the San Francisco Symphony. My father was a trained classical pianist who won the California Chopin Contest when he was 17. I didn't, my father lived most of his life in Japan and I didn't know him very well. Long story, I won't go there, but

So I didn't have that direct connection with my father, but a little bit with my grandfather. And, you know, he used to say, you know, 20th century is for scientists, not for musicians, you know. If you're going to be good, you're going to have to learn to strum a few more chords, more than a few chords on the guitar, you know. Boy, was he wrong. Boy, was he wrong. Yeah.

He couldn't have been more wrong about the direction music was going in. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, he, that I,

I did take to heart the whole thing of like, you know, harmony and how voices move and so forth. And while I may not have applied that in the strict way that it was taught to me in my brief stint as a music student, but I think I took a lot of that to heart and in some manner and internalized that. And, you know, I I.

Once I got started with a career, I did take it seriously. Like I said, I spent a lot of time going back and studying classical guitar. And then I studied composition privately with...

And I took jazz, piano, I took voice, I took a little flamenco guitar even. I don't really play, but, you know, because I wanted to kind of, you know, I could see that if I'm going to have a career doing this,

I need some more input, you know, I need to learn more about the breadth and the possibilities of playing and composing for guitar. So I think, you know, I did pursue that pretty actively once I got had a couple albums out. But, you know, I think I had when I was a student, I remember having some moments where I would

Look at a scene or something would impress me and I just had this idea that musically I could

tell a story and and I spent a lot of time on those pieces working out the details and I somehow I got on to this whole thing of you know what I now call orchestrating for solo guitar and you know when you know if you listen to someone like the LA Guitar Quartet they're they're taking

different assigning different parts to different players or any string quartet and then But when you're playing solo, you've got to bring all those elements in so I was very aware that here's a bass line Here's a melody. Here's a counter melody. Here's a rhythmic part. Here's a figure that's and you know guitar is such a wonderful instrument because

a lot of times a single note in a good solo guitar arrangement could function as more than one voice it can have more than one function and i think i realized that you know pretty early on and and made good use of that so well you didn't and one of the other things is do you do you use open tuning at all yeah you do a lot right yeah okay and that's interesting because your your particular way of

using open tunings is different. It's more advanced. It almost is more compositional in a sense, because most people who use open tuning, like, you know, like you, John Fahey and stuff, they kind of stick within, you know, the same sonority, but you are rapid modulations and development sessions between, you know, there's all sorts of things that you're doing that are very compositionally complex. And it's pretty wild that you're doing that

in an open tuning setting i think it really sets aside your style from almost anybody else

Because when they're doing that, they are doing Indian style raga, sort of playing where it's open and you have all the droning strings and your melody is very fluid and stuff like that. But you're not the biggest-- you're a harmony guy, I'd say. Is that fair to say? Like you-- and I'm a harmony composer too, I think, more than a melodic composer. But the fact that you're able to move so quickly between tonalities

in those modulatory sections with open tuning. What's your process with that? How do you do that?

Well, I think what you were starting out saying was a lot of people who... No, just to kind of bring a little background. Yes. I think a lot of people who do use open tunings use it primarily in a diatonic way. Yes. You know, like people listen to a lot of Celtic music. I mean, the tuning dadgad is very popular with guitar players from that tradition. And, you know, there's some wonderful musicians, but a lot of them tend to stick...

kind of within one mode or one scale. And what I realized kind of early on is I wanted to

mix modes, A, and B, I wanted to somehow see if I could, and this was sort of semi-consciously when I say this, I mean, I did it very instinctively, but when I stopped and analyzed it, I sort of, oh yeah, that's what I'm doing, was trying to mix this modal or multimodal way of playing with some chromaticism.

And in fact, I coined a term. It sounds funny. I say it sort of jokingly, but I call it chromodal. So there's some chromatic moves within the modal thing. So if you have, for example, you have a tonic or what I would kind of call a pivotal note, you can play just about any harmony around that single note. And I'm sure there's a...

Some way to explain that from a more traditional harmony point but that to me mixes some of the elements for example And I'm not that well versed in Indian raga, but I know something about it it where they'll They have a mode and then they start playing with the mode a little bit and playing with you know sometimes microtones and approach to the note sounds and so that it

And so I came up with this thing I call Crow Modal as a way of explaining kind of my harmonic process. And because I love modal music, I love folk music. I love, you know, I got really into I remember when the.

those, the Bulgarian choir recording started circulating. I was on tour in Germany and I picked, somebody turned me on to them there and I brought some back and I tried to convince Will Ackerman to start a world music label that, but he said,

I really don't like it. And so I found an independent distributor who ordered a few hundred of them. And then shortly after that, the whole thing broke. Who was it? Somebody was...

Was it George Harrison or one of the big English rock stars said, you got to check this out. And then everybody was on it. And it was this big thing. But if you listen to what the composers are doing for that. So there's modern composers taking that folk tradition and then, you know, elaborating on it.

That to me, I think that's kind of how I fit in. Not that I'm doing Eastern European music, but I love that tradition because I love the way there's a certain, there's a mode and then there's some chromaticism mixed in with it. - You nailed it when you said Eastern European. - Yeah, and I just love that. - That's exactly right because the closest thing I can think of to what you're talking about, and what you're talking about is actually

generally speaking, you're playing an arpeggio. It is modal. It is diatonic. And then there's these sections, these bursts of modulation.

And so a modular chromaticism or whatever you were, a crow modular, chromatical, chromatical, chromatical is good. But there was a, this is getting, I'm getting a little, you know, we're really deep inside baseball now, but that's good. There's going to be people who are listening. You don't want to hear that. Sticking to this Eastern Europeans, because I think about, uh,

I think the closest thing that I learned about it in college was probably Bartok. There's a guy named Anna Kollitz who was responsible for sort of codifying. They couldn't figure out what he did theoretically. And then they found out that there was something, I think they called it Axial.

So the idea is that there's an axis, and that axis would essentially be one note or tonic, and then it would spin around that. Yeah. Centrifugially. And so it made sense once you started relating everything back to that one note with the understanding that in a sort of Indian style, you are just...

pulling at the edge of that tonality in sometimes a very strenuous fashion. But it's really cool. One of the things that you said during your emails with me was you were like, well, I'm not really a classical guitarist.

You know, I was just talking to somebody at the Met the other day who's responsible for their collection, and he's trying to expand their collection to include music from all genres. So he's got something by Peter, Paul, and Mary. Then he's got Segovia's guitars. He's got a Stradivarius violin.

He's trying to make it less just about Stradivarius and the world's first harpsichord and make it be more about everything, which is, you know, inclusivity, inclusivity. And when I, I'm 46 now, when I started studying, it was a big no, no, it was a naughty no, no, to be a tonal composer. And now that's not the case. Now the colleges are starting to be, and as guitarists,

You know, my personal compositions are tonal. They have been heavily influenced by you and people like you because we are now starting to come back to working with tonal composers and thinking about the guitar in that way. And no one represents that than you and your contemporaries because you guys sort of defined

finger style guitar in the way that we heard it for four decades, especially the 70s and 80s, which is, you know, when I was formative. So I think that what you're doing has always been important, but I think what you're doing is the effects of your work, of your body of work are being felt in academia in a way that I don't think that they were 20 years ago. Well, you know, it's interesting because

I do know, I'm familiar enough, you know, with the 12-tone. I mean, I haven't composed using the 12-tone system, but I've listened to the music and I know something about, you know, how it was evolved and why and, you know, what the rules are and so forth. But I think a lot of people kind of burned out on that. Yeah, we did. And, you know, then you had the rise of minimalism and people like Steve Reich and, you know,

you know, Philip Glass and all that. And, and, you know, to me that, I mean, it is tonal, but the structure is so different, you know, the whole approach, the whole attitude, it's, it's creating these, you know, shifting, uh,

Textures and patterns and stuff that you know, just very different approach to music entirely So it's not that it's not modern and I think that when I go back and when the times that I go listen to, you know Schoenberger or you know Berg or something like that, you know great music, but it's it's it's

It's stuck. It's in the the context of you know this trying to burst out of the late romantic thing So it's still not a lot of them a lot of the moves that they made, you know, I mean I listen to You know, for example, if you listen to violin music, you know back in the 19th century and early 20th century Yeah, I mean

They'll just vibrato it to death. It's like opera, you know, and I'll be honest with you. I'm not a huge opera fan. And I have a real specific reason, which is I love the story. I love the music. I love the productions. You know, the few times that I've actually gone to opera, I've enjoyed it.

But when I listen to it, I go, why do they have to just constantly have that LFO thing going on, that low frequency oscillation that goes, you know, just that constant vibrato? To me, I actually find it annoying. That's my friend Tony says. He actually writes, when he writes for vocals, he'll write and he'll say, do not use vibrato. Yeah.

Yeah, and to me that is just, and I think part of the origin of that is back in the day when there were before microphones, you really had to crank it out, and that was a way to increase the amplification of your voice. Or just sustain your voice for long periods of time. It was a way to not constantly just have your throat give out. Yeah.

So, you know, I just, there's a few opera singers that keep that kind of more to a minimum that, you know, I prefer if my wife loves opera. So, you know. So she sets you straight. Can you play the Kiri Te Kanawa? You know, I can handle that one, you know. But anyway, you know, and I think there are things like that that,

You know coming from myself coming more from a folk and blues initial origin of rock and roll and then jazz and then you know getting into eventually into classical guitar You know, I think I look at that stuff and go that's just that's Whether it's opera or Schoenberg. It's just it's

it looks like vintage and it looks like antique stuff to me a lot of time. It feels like that. Yeah, it does because it was responding to something that we're not responding to anymore. It doesn't make it less important. It just means it's, it's not of the mode, you know? Yeah. So sometimes I have a hard time with that. Um, you know, I love, I love Steve Reich. I think, you know, his music's brilliant. And, you know, I think that, you know, I think, uh,

That's been a big influence. That's been somewhat of an influence for me. You were mentioning that you thought a lot of what I do revolves around the harmony. I've had people say, oh, your playing is very melodic. And then I always tell people, I say, you know, I always work...

From the harmony. Yeah. No, I work from the rhythm. Oh, yeah, right out of the gate. Yeah. Very minimalist. I get a rhythmic idea, and then kind of everything goes from that. A lot of times the melody is – I don't sit and write melodies. And the harmony is kind of part and parcel of the rhythmic development. Somewhere in there, a melody comes up. But I work – and if you listen to this –

zero gravity piece that I recorded with Andrew York. Andrew York.

you'll hear the harmony gets pretty stretched in that, you know? And Andy was going like, well, okay. Yeah, because he's a very tonal composer as well. But it's constantly shifting time signatures and, you know, it was a challenging piece to record, but it does have some melody in it as well. But there's definitely a lot of repetition in that, you know,

kind of slowly evolving repetition a little bit like some of the minimalist composers might do. So there's definitely that in there. Yeah, I mean, you definitely have minimalism in what you do. It's almost like you approach all these different genres and then you go, I'll take that, but not that. So like with the minimalism, you know, like a,

I love Steve Reich is an easy win for me. I mean, that's an easy check on the list. I love him. But with like a Philip Glass, sometimes there are things where I'm like, well, it's, I don't know. Sometimes I think minimalism is like, is writing music without that pesky composition stuff you have to do. You know? Like you just make these things that sound good, but it's like, well, what about, anyway.

Moving away from that and a complete understanding and admission that I do love minimalist music, generally speaking, but you're taking something from everything. And I think not only you do that, but you know, Wyndham Hill, the label to which you're most strongly associated, I would say. Is that fair? Do you feel that way? Well, yeah, probably because I started your career. I started there and kind of, you know, got my career going and made a name for myself. And

for better or worse. No, no, I don't think, I don't think it's for better for worse because I think Wyndham Hill, the problem is the term new age, right? It's been thrown around. It's been dragged through the mud. It's, and then you guys were all sort of associated with

So it's not fair because they also think Yanni and Kenny G are new age and that has nothing to do with you guys Wyndham Hill is classic in classical are both instrumental. They're completely dependent on the sonorities being represented They're not dependent on the persona of the performer and in the 80s and 90s in the new age scene that that for me and for my father and for my family was refreshing and

yeah i felt like decent highly skilled people were just going to work and doing their job and their job was making beautiful music with effortless virtuosity and you know and it wasn't about the people that was what was so cool about it was just called wyndham hill and you'd be listening and i know that those collections uh i can imagine that there would be uh personally for you and for other for other people you might be like well i kind of wish people knew that i was the guy

playing that guitar piece in that compilation. You know, they had to like open it up and look at like the list of musicians, but it really was a thing. It really was special. There's something Northern California about it. It's this combination of reconciling nature with technology. And that's sort of what you feel. You feel this direct connection to, to nature and to spirituality, but it's also, it's,

not afraid to use electronic instruments, to use flange or anything like that on a steel string guitar, all these cool things that you were doing back then. It was really special. Well, I think... And it was outside of the club scene, which was where some of that stuff was. In New York and in Japan, a lot of that New Age music was sort of... It was about dancing. It was about, you know, in the back of the club. And you guys were not about that.

Well, I think, you know, a couple of things. One is, you know, I think we tend what we probably resent if if I can use that word. Yeah. Was that we got all kind of lumped together. I know when I first started recording.

Playing you know and I I think I was the first Wyndham Hill artist to get an agent and kind of get out on my own and and you know in those early days I didn't really think about it and then the label started getting known more and more and I got kind of you know It became kind of a generic name, you know, and that was that was frustrating for some of the artists I think we just want hey, we're just doing our thing, you know, we're not doing we're not consciously trying to create a

something you know like the Tower Records had a section so you yeah they're going in there and you wouldn't be able to be like a like your own you'd be so there's a oh there you go put Alex in the Wyndham Hill section well I'll tell you a funny story I'll tell you before that before that happened yeah and I had some success with my first two records in 78 and 79 Tower

Tower Records in San Francisco, I went in there one day to do an in-store or something like that, meet the managers of the store and maybe sign a few CDs or something, records.

So I said, well, where are you putting my, where do you put them? And he said, well, we don't know where to put them. So we're putting them in the folk section,

the classical guitar section and the bluegrass section. I like that. That sounds cool. And I said, well, I definitely don't play bluegrass. The other two, maybe, you know, but that, and that, that was how it was. And then they, you know, eventually created a Wyndham Hill thing and then new age thing became this huge thing. But, but the very first ad that Wyndham Hill ever took out was really fascinating because it,

Will Ackerman was very clever about this. I have to say I think in Billboard magazine They and in Tower Towers magazine They took out an ad with the Windham Hill logo at the top and then they had a list of all these genres crossed out, you know like

folk crossed out, jazz crossed out, classical crossed out, blues, rock, everything crossed out. In other words, it was defined more by what it wasn't at the beginning

then you know what you know it was saying it's genre-less it's just it's something different you know we don't know what it is either that's that was kind of yeah that's what you get and and then but you know people and their incessant need to label stuff yeah uh so that they can sell it um is sort of what I mean that yeah I can imagine that that caused all sorts of trouble but back

to you know did you leave Wyndham Hill or you were still recording with them for a long time right oh it's a long story um but I jumped ship in 86 to do an album for RCA Novus which was

a little sub label from RCA which very shortly after became BMG and now it's Sony and um but it it there was a guy there named Steve backer in New York who was executive producer for a lot of jazz albums and Wyndham Hill had developed a jazz

Label with him, you know, they had a jazz arm and they did some pretty adventurous records but they so he he wanted to start this thing with with RCA and

And so he created RCA Novus. And it was kind of a crossover thing. There were some more straight-ahead jazz thing, but the idea was, is something between jazz and something else. And I did my record Altiplano. Yeah, I was going to say, that must be what you're talking about, because that's exactly, that's your jazz album. And it wasn't a huge success, and after a few years, it kind of became evident that

That whole thing was not going to stick around for a long time. And, you know, BMG had bought it and things had changed as they do shuffle around in the big labels.

and i know that those that that big 2007 bmg purchase by sony kind of knocked a lot of people around and so and so i went back and did um two more records for wyndham hill and then in 93 or four after my last the last one i did for them they uh

BMG exercised its option to buy the second half of Wyndham Hill, which they'd already bought half of it from Will and his ex-wife owned the other half with BMG. So they came in and said, "Okay, we're exercising our option. We're buying you out completely." And after that, the writing was kind of on the wall.

It was just, it looked, it just smelled like it was going somewhere. So a lot of people bailed, jumped ship. And I did...

You know, that was around '94, '95, I can't remember exactly. And I did a little world music collection of lullabies from around the world for a little label called Earthbeat Records. And then in '98, we started our own label like a lot of people were doing, you know? Yes. And I still had the contacts and people to help with marketing and all that stuff. And we put out the Water Garden label.

That's a beautiful album. Which was nominated for a Grammy. And we thought, wow, first record on our own label nominated for a Grammy. This is going to be fun. And then we kept putting records out, and we realized, oh, this takes a lot of work. Like the constant story, yeah. I mean, especially with what you're doing, yeah. Yeah, we pretty much put out. I did one for Narada Jazz, a collection of records.

my solo arrangements jazz standards called Bolivian Blues Bar and then uh but mostly we've stayed with our Tropo label and I went through a big hiatus between about 2000 2006 and then putting out this uh the the bridge in 2020 so um

you know, I had some downtime there when I wasn't really active recording. But I mean, but my goodness, it's like what you were doing, you know, around 2000 in and around 2000. You're talking about the Bolivian blues album. Yeah. The folk song album.

And then Tata Monk, which is starts. I mean, that's just a sort of a, it's a world music album, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got, we got a lot of press from, from both. Surprisingly, we got a lot of press from the, the, the jazz media. They, we got a lot of play. We got some great reviews from some of the jazz magazines and stuff. So, and I thought it was more of a world music thing, you know, world music with jazz and stuff that I'm such a jazz or, but jazz musician, but you know, I, I,

Have played some and yeah, we hired some young guys who were really young talented young jazz musicians to to round out the band so that was a fun project I mean, it's pretty it's it's it's Interesting because like you're saying it's it's tough. It's still still to this day. It's time to sort of figure out What you are?

Yeah, I've been trying to figure that out myself. If you come up with the answer, let me know. I don't think I can. I think most people going into this have probably heard an album or two that they like. And even on the albums themselves,

they move around. One album starts out with a seven-man ensemble, and then all of a sudden the next song is like three people, and then there's a solo piece, and then there's a piece which is the bassist. You're talking about the jazz album. That's the thing that is going on with you, man, is all this stuff.

All these influences, all this stuff happening. And with that open-mindedness that I think really was part of the geography of the area that you were coming up in.

Well, you know, I think I just say this might sound a little corny. Sure. But I think as early as when I was like 18 or 19, I said kind of in my head that if I sat and I looked at a scene, you know, or, you know, I kind of thought about somewhere that I'd been or anything that I could capture the essence of that with my guitar. And, you know, I,

when I started writing those pieces, I think because I hear this from people all the time and you've even referenced it is people, you know, at its best people say, I listened to that and it transports me somewhere. I get a story, I get an image. I, you know, it just feels so connected to something. And I always joke and say, well, you know, you, you,

You might get you know connected to a time and a place by listening music That's completely different than the image somebody else, you know Somebody's hearing water and somebody else is remembering the time there was a you know a racket on

Fifth Avenue in Manhattan or something. But, you know, the point is that, and I believe this to this day, and I think that's what composition is about, regardless of when and where and by who, it's being able to

take a sensation or a feeling, a movement, some image, whatever it is, and somehow internalize that and express it musically. You know, and it's, it's, it, that's music is when without lyrics is a very abstract art. And, um, when it's,

When it connects with people on that level, I think, and I think if I've achieved anything, that's perhaps what I've been able to do. Oh, absolutely. Your music has a sense of place. Yeah. One thing I want to mention too is, you know, I mean, today,

There are so many fingerstyle young players that are using extended techniques on the guitar. There's tapping and people are screaming in their lap and playing them like a piano practically with both hands on the fingerboard. I think that's great.

I kind of predated that and you know, I watched Michael Hedges career take off and you know, Michael was a brilliant performer, you know, he brought a little rock star quality to the whole fingerstyle guitar thing and and also brought a lot of the electric guitar tapping techniques and things like that. Really very innovative technically. But I think what what's what I find really interesting with the guitar is it's such a

It's capable of so many different sounds, you know, whether it's even just an acoustic guitar unamplified or no effects or anything like that. I mean, you know, we can get so many sounds and I think I've, I've,

Always tried to use different sounds in in my music as a way to kind of again to orchestrate, you know the and you know, I have a book out the Alex Degrassi fingerstyle guitar method which is you know pretty thick book and in the

last couple chapters I get into the composition and I talk about this idea of orchestration and in that I

you know, talk about different figures and how it functions as both this and that, you know, maybe a rhythmic figure, but it's also creating a harmonic movement and so forth. And then, but then I talk about these different sounds that you make, whether, you know, I won't catalog them, but, you know, many of them are already in the tradition. Some are maybe a little bit innovative. And those things make such a difference. And when I hear people play,

That along with dynamics. It's just, you know, you have to bring that in. You got to almost like hear it in 3D, you know, you have to. And when I explain to people, like I use that 3D image as well, you know, if you're

If you're going to tell a story, if you're going to describe something with your music, you have to have different levels or layers to the music. And, you know, certain notes have to be soft, certain loud, some in between. You have this whole, you know, scale. And the same thing with the actual tone color. It has to just constantly, it doesn't have to be constantly in motion, but when you use that tone,

Over time in motion you're creating a sense of time and you're also creating a sense of depth in the three dimensionality and wow That is that's so important and I think you know You can get you can enhance that a little bit with recording and obviously you can enhance it with effects But I mean you can just sit down and play the guitar and do that and I tell people when they're learning when I do workshops or master classes of people learning my pieces and

And I say, well, you got all the notes in the right place. Your time's good.

But you're not getting that three-dimensional quality and I say, you know like play these two notes here softer and a lot of times their notes that are adjacent to each other, you know, I'm getting technical here because I'm assuming there are you know, you have a somewhat You know, you have a guitar playing audience here. Yeah. Yeah, I have a guitar playing on it so so You know you played you play let's say you play 12 notes maybe

Two of them are melody and some of the others are functioning both harmonically and rhythmically but if each one of those notes this is sort of theoretical has a different volume or You some and some of them also have their played in a different position or you do something with your your finger or nail to create a little different tone color

Suddenly you're creating that three-dimensional thing because you're putting notes in the background the foreground the middle ground and all these things It's kind of like a depth of field and photography and I think that's another thing that people hear in my music and they're not necessarily aware of it when they're listening conscious of it, but it has an effect and I

And I think when I'm teaching in a master class or something, I'll say, no, play these notes soft. And they'll play them a little bit softer. I say, no, no, really soft. And they'll play them soft. No, no, no. Like they're barely there, you know? And if you listen to a lot of my solo guitar work, you'll hear that. And you go like, was there a note there or was it just kind of a shadow of a note? And it's that being able to vary that stuff, I guess,

you know, comes under the general heading of touch. You know, people say, well, you've got a nice touch on the guitar or your instrument and so forth. But it's ability to do that because solo guitar composition, for me anyway, is about creating a microcosm of something much bigger. Yeah. I mean, you really, you're nailing it because, you know, when it comes down to it, you're saying make decisions about everything you do, you know? And also the idea of having a through line, right?

with not just the notes that are being presented, but the dynamic, the tone color, all those different things, the voicings, everything is approached with intention and with an idea of where it's going and where it's been. And that is a three dimensionality. If someone is experiencing that, and they're not only experiencing it with the placement of the note,

right on the staff but they're also experiencing experiencing it with uh the volume of the note yeah the tone of the note and it's all done in a context of a larger scale approach yeah they're definitely going to experience something that's really unique they're going to experience something akin to what you're doing yeah it makes sense I mean it's not it's not too theoretical I had I had um

I had some early reviews in which people, you know, sometimes use the term neo-impressionism. And, you know, I think what they were, I think, referring more to the visual art movement, you know, the impressionism that was around at the end of the 19th, early 20th century. And, you know, they use the term pointillism. Some people said to me, well, you're listening to your stuff like pointillism. You know, there's like...

all these different sized little dots, you know, like a An array, you know a matrix, you know, and it's it's just sort of like you've seen those

artwork where people put pins in something and they're all different depths and it creates a different, you know, this very intricate shadow thing. So it's kind of like that. And I think that that's really kind of it, you know. I think so too, yeah. Pointillism is probably... It's almost like pixelated, I guess you could say, yeah. Well, it's the idea that you're taking a look at everything and you're an artisan. So you're kind of like, you know, you're...

You're craft working. Not just blanket-- I mean, expressing yourself in a way that we talked about at the beginning of the program is sort of the key. But then the actual-- if you take a look at your incredibly large catalog, you're going to see that there's definitely some craft that goes into it. Whether you're dealing with other musicians, comps, it's pretty impressive.

But yeah, I mean, as far as the new album, you know, cause we do have to wrap it up here in a second, which I knew I was going to go over with you. I just knew it, but because there's so much, but you've got the album bridge and I had another interview where you were talking about how this is, how that album represents. It's your last sort of full album feature length release, whatever. Yeah. I'm at a loss for words, but you've got a, you've, you've,

You said that it's a representation of everything. And I do think that that goes through your career, especially the first several albums that I was, that I'm more, more familiar with than the latter ones. Yeah. You tend to quote your previous album a little bit in your next album. They always build on one another.

ah interesting yeah in in my opinion so like you'll have like a sitar in your second album and there are some sort of and then that'll reappear later on down the line in another album or you'll have you'll play a samba and then another album two albums oh no samba so like there's sort of like this yeah building on your influences how is and then you come out with this album which is

it's a solo album. Yeah, mostly you and all me. Yeah, it's all me. Why do you think that this that the album bridges is a representative of, of your canon so far? Well, I think, okay, so I have a cup, I have a few covers. They call as people say now, on the album, so I have a re recorded Gershwin that ain't necessarily so.

from Porgy and Bess, which was always kind of a crowd pleaser when I played it in concert. And then I also recorded the Hendrix tune Angel on my

18 string guitar, which is a sympathetic string guitar. And I heard that I didn't even pick that up. I love that song, but I did not pick up that that was the same song. In the background is the sympathetic strings, you know? Um, so, uh, and then I also did, um, a really simple arrangement of Shabig Shamora, which is a classic Celtic, you know, uh,

folk song. And so, you know, I had those covers and then I had, you know, the opening track, Mr. B Takes a Walk and Raises, my tribute to James Brown. And it's a piece I wrote and I was thinking of James Brown. I always joke, I say, you know,

if you can imagine the movie singing in the rain and it's in, and instead it's James Brown in the movie. And it's a really funky piece, you know, and people go, you know, it's very uptempo and kind of in your face. And, and so it's just a, and then I have some, some other pieces on that, like the deep, which sounds to me, uh,

pretty as close to classical as i get you know i think even angel i think the whole album is classical yeah it has a very harmon it has a lot of harmonic movement it even has exactly my own kind of steel string guitar version of tremolo going on in parts of it so yeah it has a very classical sound so so in that sense it's it's i've tried to try to reach a broad variety of every the things that i've done within the uh

classical tradition. And then I also have that piece I did on my baritone guitar called Eulogy in a Low Voice, which is totally a jazz ballad. You know, I mean, it's just, you know, it's

it's just you know if you break it down and go oh he's playing all these jazz chords in there but hopefully i'm i'm doing it in the context of something that sounds original so it is original and it's also like i said before even on the same album there's so much going on but it does have it's it is tied together it is it is not like you can listen to the album it's not like a you know back and forth and all sorts of different things well well the

they're the title track the bridge is a piece that i wrote and you know uh we were out on the coast here in california northern california and there's an old bridge wooden bridge called the albion bridge that we can see from the house and i would watch the cars go by overnight and that's how i got the idea for that piece but um the tie i used the title of the bridge as well because

It also has the meaning of me trying to bridge various genres that I've explored over the years. Yeah, they can see a little disparate. It's like, well, Shenandoah done in an Indian fashion. The traditional, you know, folk tune Shenandoah done in

in what i would i in a modular sort of indian treatment yeah and that also i did that's wild i also did that with my simpitar which was uh has the sympathetic strings and so that's what that sound is yeah that's what the sound is yeah it sounds like a sitar but it's called a simpitar

Sympa tar yeah the strings run under the top and and through graphite channels in the field Beneath the fingerboard so you don't touch them. You just tune them and they vibrate sympathetically There's 12 of them the super fine strings, you know, like 0.05 gauge or something like that. So my agent effect Yeah, I tuned them generally to a mode and double some of the pitches up and and that that

That works well. I've tried playing with it tuned chromatically and it just kind of turns to mud. I think it's better to highlight some of the pitches in what you're playing rather than try to have all the notes do that. I would say you're right about that. Otherwise it's mud.

Yeah, it can turn to mud and you know, you want the trigger. Those notes get triggered, they kind of come in behind the note. So once you kind of get the feel for it, depending on the volume or just a slight manipulation of the pitch on the fingerboard with your finger, you know, a slight pitch bend or modulation, pitch modulation,

you will control how that sympathetic string vibrates. So it's fun to play, but it doesn't work for everything. But I thought for Hendrix, Angel, it made a lot of sense. And also for the Shannon Doe to give it kind of an Eastern quality. And yeah. I mean, you've done everything. I mean, there's no limit. I mean, we could spend an entire two more episodes just talking about all the different things that you've done to your guitar.

it is your guitar like i said it still is a steel string acoustic guitar whether it's prepared as it is i think in some pieces right do you ever play with the prepared with the you know i did one album i've been there i think i heard once in a while yeah i've done it a couple times live in concert uh pretty cool sounding sounds like a steel drum yeah i yeah i did a um i did a really obscure album for a little italian label

in Milan with G.E. Stinson, who was the guitar player for Shadowfax. And after he left Shadowfax, he went totally off the, you know, into the

more experimental end of playing and he does he would so we did an album together we did it in a couple days in his bedroom very low-tech and we did all that stuff we you know put bills bit you know dollar bills between the strings we like with paintbrushes on the strings electric

toothbrushes, you know, and just did all a bunch of weird stuff. And I mean, to this day, very few people know that record, I think, but...

Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And actually, I think it came out really well, but it's not for everyone. No, but that's not what you can't always do everything for everyone. And you've done a lot for everyone. You've done an amazing, you know, like everything you've been talking about today. People should remember you did on the guitar. You did for the guitar. You are a guitarist. You are one of the greats, one of the all time best guitarists. And we, you know, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Alex. It means a lot. Yeah.

All right, Brett. Well, it's been a pleasure talking with you. That does it for the show. Thanks very much to Alex Degrassi for coming on. And thank you for listening. Make sure you go to brettwilliamsmusic.com slash support. That's B-R-E-T williamsmusic.com slash support to support the show. Take a look at Simon's new book at Classical Guitar Corner and amazon.com. That's Simon Powis, Dr. Simon Powis and

As always, savageclassical.com for all your guitar needs. I will see you guys next time. Enjoy the fall. Wally says hi.