David Russell played last week to a full house in the Arrayanes patio in the Alhambra.  If you know his playing and you have been to the Alhambra you can stop reading right now, you can imagine just how perfect the evening was.  Here is a photo and an article in from a Spanish newpaper.  Russell’s musicality was, as always, inspiring and his ease with the music and the audience rounded out the performance.  Some say he is the best player alive and that may well be true, I have lately been trying to encourage people in my circle of friends to go to guitar concerts and have not always been successful in getting a positive reaction but this was a great success.

I would like to publicly congratulate the director of the Granada International Festival of Music and Dance on his determination to give the guitar a place in the programming.  It has been years since we have seen guitarists of Russell’s calibre at this festival but this year we get the top classical player, the top flamenco player and the winner of the Andrés Segovia contest.

Now I hate to say anything negative about what might be the best guitar concert I have been to in Granada but I can’t help myself.  If I hadn’t seen David walk on stage with his guitar in hand I would have sworn that the guitar had a transducer pick-up under the saddle.  That was exactly the sound that it had!  I was not in the front row by any means so I was hearing the amplification mostly but I have never heard a guitar amplified through a microphone sound that way.   Another thing I noticed is that I heard that sound quality all the way through the concert.  I have been to guitar concerts where my first impression of the sound or volume of the guitar was not good but after 10 or 15 minutes you stop hearing the guitar or its defects.  This aural adjustment didn’t happen the other night and I don’t know why.   I am now curious to hear more of Damman’s guitars to see if they all sound like a guitar with a pick-up and how they sound without amplification.

Let me close by saying that the experience was excellent and that this concert proved what I often say (although it might not be very good for business), “The deciding factor for great guitar music is the player”, the qualities of the guitar may be important in the player’s inspiration and satisfaction but it is of little importance to the listener.

I used to drive every year to Cartagena to attend the guitar maker’s exhibition which was organized as part of the Semana de la Guitarra festival at the conservatory there.  It was an opportunity to show my guitars to students and teachers and to have them played on a stage and compared with other makers’ work.  When my son was born I stopped going although by that time I had a decent waiting list for my instruments and had stopped travelling to show my instruments.  I enjoyed those exhibitions and I heard some great music, learned a lot about my instruments and the players needs and met some wonderful people.  One of those was María Isabel López Gonzálvez, a young student of photography who was finishing her degree and had thought of a subject for her end of degree monograph.  She had been asking the guitar makers one by one if they would mind if she spent some time taking photos of their work.  She was very clear that she wanted to be a fly on the wall and not stage any shots.  Of course this meant that in order get photos of many different processes the project would have to be stretched out over quite a long period.  Perhaps you can imagine that the makers were not interested in something that would only interrupt their concentration and their work and would offer no benefits for themselves.

I think it was in 2002 that she approached me with this idea.  Her interest in guitar making was unusual for someone who neither played the guitar nor worked with wood and I was carried away by her enthusiasm.  María had to travel for three hours for each session and was still studying at the time and I had my limitations as well so it took a long time to get enough images to satisfy her.  The final project consisted of 100 images ranging from 30 X 45 cm up to 70 X 100 cm which she would then have to present to the committee which would evaluate her work.  In the end, although she did develop the images at full size the presentation was made in the form of a book which was put together just for the occasion.  She printed 10 copies, one for herself, one for each member of the jury, one for myself and one for my mother (María was 18 and just the sweetest person).

When I saw the book for the first time I immediately thought that it should be published and in time we got that done.  The current edition is actually the second try, the first one was larger and the binding started falling apart very soon.  This edition was finally presented at the Cartagena festival of 2006 along with some of the full-size photos and a few short pieces played by Daniel Vissi on one of my instruments.  The book is sold by Strings by Mail and also to a few shops in Spain and in Germany at Dick fine tools in their instrument making section.   Don’t let that give anyone the wrong idea, this is not a method for building a guitar.  It shows quite a few of the stages and I believe there are many photos which are interesting to builders but it is primarily a beautifully shot photographic essay and nothing more.  Each photograph is accompanied by a short caption in Spanish and English.

The full exhibition only appeared once and was organized by a bank and the town council where the María lives.  Get the book for a reduced price now at Strings by Mail

Here are some readers’ thoughts on this book:

review

(in spanish)

from a newsgroup