Andrew McKenna Lee, Gravity and Air
Would you like a little John Fahey with your Segovia?
Classical guitar never reaches too far beyond its devoted niche audience — to the majority of classical-music listeners, the term brings to mind the dulcet murmuring of Andres Segovia and little else. Part of the problem is a lack of repertory warhorses — try as they might, classical guitarists cannot seem to rescue a "Beethoven of the guitar" from posterity, and their efforts to do so usually end up placing undue focus on pleasant non-entities. A shame, really, since the acoustic guitar is as full of thrilling sonic possibilities — for polyphony, for percussive textures, for delicate beauty — as any stringed instrument in the world.
The inventive and exciting guitarist/composer Andrew McKenna Lee solves both of these problems in one fell swoop. First of all, he is an astoundingly virtuosic guitar player. Second, and far more importantly, he is a thoughtful and original composer, one who is continually finding new ways to work the guitar's rougher, more sensual textures into classical frameworks. His colorful artist bio — "Imagine John Fahey, Jimi Hendrix and Domenico Scarlatti sitting down for a whiskey and a smoke" — might just sound like the usual empty artist's-bio name-dropping, but you can actually hear all these mavericks turn up in Lee's playing.
His latest disc, Gravity and Air, on the New Amsterdam label, is a fine showcase for Lee's aesthetic. It opens with a radical, solo deconstruction-and-variations based on a Bach prelude, and Lee's interpretation both honors Bach's elegant wheels-within-wheels counterpoint and finds plenty of room to pound, scrape, and scratch at the work's edges. His other solo works balance the guitar's delicate and rough-hewn sides with similar flair. On "the Dark out of Nighttime," he threads steely, twanging low notes and gossamer finger-picking through a mercurial haze of strings and harp, and he finds so much common ground between the upper registers of the guitar and the harp that it becomes hard to discern which twinkling is emanating from which instrument. The title track, "Gravity and Air," is an aptly titled see-saw between a bottom-heavy bass line and lighter-than-air filigree. The sound is close-miked, warm, and intimate, and as Lee tosses of brilliant clusters of notes on "Dizzying Array," you can almost feel you're eavesdropping on his thoughts. A singular modern voice for an instrument sorely in need of one.
