Guitar Lessons Chapter 10: Remembering Barney Kessel
An excerpt from a novel in progress
Hi folks. I’m here today with something different — a new chapter from a book I’m toying with, a novel about a spiritual teacher whose practice is to master the guitar. The first nine chapters are posted here, in a dormant Substack.
I loved The Podium, a music store in Minneapolis and surely one of the best guitar shops in the country. It was an urban oasis, a sanctuary of deep wood tones with whole rooms full of handcrafted instruments, including one dedicated solely to acoustic Martin guitars.
Walking in the front door of The Podium, you opened your eyes wide, took a deep breath, and instinctively slowed your movements. You entered a sacred space, a church of ancient file cabinets and walls of bookshelves packed with musical instruction manuals for every instrument. There was no discernible system of organization to these uncountable riches, unless you took random piling as a system. I imagine that normal people found it chaotic, but for me it was a garden of Earthly delights and a portal to other dimensions — a storehouse of secret knowledge that would surely change my life if only I could uncover it.
I bought many books at the Podium, more than I could afford. One was a thick collection of Bach transcriptions for classical guitar, issued by a German publisher and lovingly imported by the Podium’s obsessed, chain-smoking owner. Another was a flamenco guitar manual, all the text in Spanish and no English translation because you spoke the native language, right?
One day I entered the Podium, walked right up to a bookshelf, closed my eyes, and removed one volume at random. It was a large hardcover book and one of the most beautiful objects I’d ever seen — The Guitar by Barney Kessel, the great jazz musician and legendary studio musician.
I paged through The Guitar and found a chapter with Barney’s autobiography. He wrote that when he started playing music, his goal was to become a good guitar player. Eventually his goal changed: It was to become a good musician. After many more years of playing, it changed yet again. It was, simply, to become a good person.
This idea stunned me: Play well, live well. It had never occurred to me that the two realms existed in contrast, or that they could be connected.
I had a friend who’d taken lessons from Mick Goodrick, the esteemed guitar teacher at Berklee College of Music in Boston. “Music is like life on a small scale,” Mick said. “Life is like music on a large scale.” He was an armchair Buddhist and this was his koan.
It was the same thing that Barney said.
Here was a major insight. Yet I had a hard time bringing it into sharp focus. Could becoming a better musician actually make me a better person? How, exactly, do these worlds connect? What could this connection possibly mean to a guitar player on the bandstand at midnight on Wednesday night in a smoky bar with a handful of drunk patrons, none of them listening?
Answering these questions opened me to a whole new realm of knowledge, a musical psychology. I was called to understand more about people — why they listen to music, why they play it, and how music meshes with the rest of their lives. And even though I had no answers, this whole matter of the connection between music and life soon became my obsession. It was an inquiry, nerdy and extreme, that soon possessed me.
I didn’t want to get too abstract, though. I wanted to stay grounded.
After all, we’re talking about the guitar, right? This is a material object — pieces of wood and plastic glued together. It has tuning pegs and metal frets and six strings attached. The instrument exists firmly in the material world, occupying physical space and existing in three dimensions. Even when playing the guitar, even in moments of disembodied bliss, we remain firmly rooted in a fourth dimension — time — which can also be measured.
And yet there’s much more to consider. What is our reason for picking up the guitar and playing music in the first place? Surely it’s not just about gaining technique.
My guitar gods — Clapton, Hendix, Beck — possessed gobs of technique, every one of them. They dashed off frenetic riffs that made my jaw drop. They knew all the tunes and played all the right notes. They had the sound.
But musical technique is pointless unless you come into contact with something behind and between the notes — an unspoken quality, a living presence, something that connects with listeners in the invisible world.
B. B. King knew this, maybe more than anyone else. He played solos that made me cry, even though my guitar gods could play rings around him.
B. B. gracefully and serenely contacted something that cannot be expressed in words, only in music. And what is that, exactly? My answers were all clichés, all abstractions: Spirit. Passion. Heart. Soul. Who knew?
I had no idea about how to go deeper into this inquiry. I needed extraordinary instruction from a master of music and master of life, a Zen guitar guru. I needed someone to point me in a fruitful direction and place my feet on the path. I needed to learn more about how to breathe, how to pay attention, and how to make music in the service of something bigger than myself.
I would have to ask Teacher about all this.
BB King was one of the artists I got to meet while working at the MN State Fair. His performance there was ethereal. An energetic…I am curious if Teacher can teach this.