. The Classical Guitar Perfection of David Russell .

David Russell

David Russell is one of the most prolific — and acclaimed — classical guitarists performing today.

He records about an album a year and tours the world regularly.

He's received too many awards to mention.

He's even had a concert hall and a street named for him in Spain, where he lives.

For each one, he concentrates on one composer:

Bach, Giuliani, Rodrigo, Barrios — or one style:

Baroque, Renaissance, even a CD of Celtic music.

His latest, Sonidos Latinos, features guitar music from Latin America.

As with all of his other projects, Russell spent a year immersing himself in the music and culture of his chosen subject.

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Classical

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Indeed, part of Russell's "sound" is actually silence.

"The guitar can be a very noisy instrument," he says.

So Russell has perfected his technique, working tirelessly on fingerings that eliminate those squeaky sounds of fingers sliding over frets.

Russell got his Scottish accent and his love of the guitar from his parents.

He was born in Glasgow, but moved to Minorca in Spain as a child, when his artistic parents loaded up the van and headed for warmer climes.

His first lessons were from his father, an amateur guitarist and full-time painter.

Russell says that after a while, he realized he could play better than his dad, and that's when he decided "to become the guitarist in the family."

On tour in support of his new album, Sonidos Latinos, Russell dropped by the NPR Music offices to play a few classics of the guitar repertoire.

Listen to the exquisite rippled notes as they spin by in his first piece by Barrios, while in Couperin's "Les Silvains," two separate melodies intertwine like clockwork.

And then there's Russell's signature warm tone in Albeniz's "Granada," the classic which capped off the concert.

Tiny Desk Concert

Set List

Augustin Barrios: "Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios"

Francois Couperin: "Les Silvains"

Isaac Albeniz: "Granada"

Listen Tiny Desk Concert Here

. Pat Metheny, Christian Mc Bride ContreBasse, Antonio Sanchez Drums : Live in Marciac 2003 .

Pat Metheny

Pat Metheny Trio " Love theme from Cinema Paradiso"

Antonio Sanchez

















Christian Mc Bride

. Miles Davis : "Someday My Prince Will Come" & Kind of Blue .

Miles Hulton Archives

"Someday My Prince Will Come," from the 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, has been recorded by many, many great jazz artists.
(It can also be found on the Brubeck recording above.)


One of the best-known and loved versions is this one, performed by the all-star cast of
Miles Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane and Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums.

The musicians maintain some of the wistful feeling Snow White sang in the film version of the song, but the group's instrumental version exudes more depth and complexity.

Miles Davis 1959 Don Hunstein

Miles Davis Kind Of Blue

"E.S.P." is the title track from the eponymous 1965 LP.

The record is the first studio album to feature Miles Davis' so-called "second" great quintet, pairing the great trumpeter with the advanced harmonic and rhythmic ideas of a younger generation of musicians.

Featured are Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums).

Round Midnight

. Charles-Eric Charrier : The French multi-instrumentalist layers Jazz, Noise and Melody to make an intriguing Parfait of Sound .

Charles-Eric Charrier is a multi-instrumentalist who lives and works in Nantes, France, and says he's recorded nearly two dozen albums.

For his latest work, Silver, Charrier played most of what's on the record:

Bass, piano, trumpet, metallophone, charango and what he calls "breath." Longtime collaborators Ronan Benoit and Cyril Secq also sat in on the sessions: Benoit covered percussion while Secq handled guitar, organic synthesizer and additional metallophone and charango.

As far as how long the three have worked together, Charrier says, "[I] don't remember well, because I've got this fabulous impression to [have] known them since a very long time, maybe before Jurassic."

Perhaps that's why the album's recording process wrapped in just four sessions — that's one week total.

That sort of obsessive commitment and well-rounded instrumentation is what makes Silver resound.

It starts as a faint glow, growing in brightness with each sparse snare-drum strike.

Slow, Nancy Sinatra-esque guitar cuts through the psychedelic, seductive rhythms of the opening track.

Unfathomably, those same slap-backed strings assimilate into the wall of emotive sound.

Classic brush-drumming is paired with ambient samples in the following track, "12 From," catapulting the sound into space-jazz territory.

Charrier says he listened to a lot of African and Arabian records during the Silver sessions.

Those influences are evidenced in the subtle warbling of "9 Moving," with its strings rising wildly before coiling into an exhausted heap.

Listen "21 Echoes Short "

Filipek Zenfolio Charles-Eric Charrier

. Eric Clapton Part.1 : Sex, Drugs and Rock 'N' Roll: Clapton After 'Cocaine'

14th January 1973: British blues-rock singer and guitarist, Eric Clapton, in concert at the Rainbow Rooms. (Photo by Express/Express/Getty Images)

Eric Clapton released a version of the J.J. Cale song "Cocaine." At the time, Clapton was consuming copious amounts of cocaine — and alcohol — and had only recently kicked a heroin habit.

Now 62, the legendary guitarist looks back and wonders how he survived his decades of drug and alcohol addiction. Sober for 20 years, Clapton is the father of three young daughters, ages 6, 4 and 2.

Clapton writes about his many years of addiction in his new autobiography, Clapton. He calculates that he was spending the current equivalent of 8,000 pounds — about $16,000 — a week on heroin.

Drug-Filled Days, Nights

"Financially, it was ridiculous," Clapton tells Melissa Block in the second of a two-part interview.

"The thing about that kind of addiction that's pretty funny, on reflection, is that I always thought, 'I'm handling this. I can handle it. I can stop anytime. I just don't want to stop right now,'" he says.

During the three-year period that he was most deeply involved with heroin, Clapton says he stayed home a lot and did not perform live very often.

Later, when he had overcome his heroin addiction but was still battling alcohol abuse, he once performed lying down on the stage.

"It didn't seem that outlandish to me, and in fact, probably was all I was capable of. It was either that or just laying down somewhere else. The fact that I was laying down on stage means at least I showed up," Clapton says.

He characterizes the mid-1970s as a time that was "extremely casual and crazy … when anything was possible."

"I think in the book I did refer to the fact that there were people who were moving through that period with respect and dignity, and I just didn't run into them that often," he continues.

Music as Salvation

Even during these dark days, the music kept him going.

"The presence of music in my life has always been the salvation element of it. Not necessarily the playing, as much as just being conscious of it, listening to it, has kept me moving," Clapton says.

Clapton says he doesn't think his music suffered that much as a result of his addiction — he thinks if it had, it would have brought him to recovery earlier — and he expresses mixed emotions about his past.

"I don't know that I can honestly regret any of it safely, because it's brought me to where I am. My life would not be the same, and I would not have what I have today, were [it not] for the fact that I went through all this stuff," Clapton says.

"But I suppose if I do have any regrets, it is that musically I lost something there."

Life After Drugs

Sobriety brought its own challenges.

Making music without drugs and alcohol was very difficult initially — everything sounded so loud and rough to him — as was sex.

"It was funny because both [of] those things were things that I took for granted. And yet, without alcohol, both of them became very, very difficult and unmanageable," Clapton says.

He says that his earliest experiences with women were always fueled by alcohol.

"And so when you took it away, I just didn't know what to do and actually was, for quite a while, physically impotent. I was terrified. I would be paralyzed with fear. And I think, musically, it was the same," he says.

Despite his age, Clapton says he plans to continue touring ("It's something I will ways need"), although the days of huge tours are probably behind him.

"I don't think those big world tours are possible for me anymore, nor are they desirable, because there's somewhere else I'd rather be — with my kids and my wife. The home life has a lot of power for me now, and it's where I get most of my satisfaction," Clapton says.

. Eric Clapton : Life Part. 2 : Eric Clapton Looks Back at His Blues Roots .

Eric Clapton 1967 NYC Band Cream

Eric Clapton has been reinventing himself musically for more than 40 years. But the strong pulse of the blues has powered his guitar playing since the beginning: from the Yardbirds when he was 18, through his stints with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Derek and the Dominoes, to today.

Now 62, the legendary guitarist is the author of a new autobiography, Clapton.

In the first of a two-part interview, Clapton talks to Melissa Block about his musical influences as a young man.

'Uncle Mac' and the Blues

His first guitar, which he got when he was 13, was a steel-string Hoyer made in Germany. It was about as big as he was, Clapton recalls.

"It was a very cheap guitar. And most cheap guitars, as anyone will tell you who tries to play a cheap guitar … they hurt to play," Clapton tells Block.

"It sounded nice, but it was just such hard work, I gave up. So I started when I was 13 and gave up when I was 13 and a half," he says.

Clapton's introduction to the blues — the music that would forever influence his own work — came from an unlikely source: a children's radio show in the 1950s and '60s hosted by "Uncle Mac" (aka Derek McCulloch).

The show's usual fare was novelty children's music, such as "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"

But every now and then, Clapton says, Uncle Mac would slip in some blues.

"I don't know what this guy was on; I can't imagine how it would get snuck in, whether it was his taste or someone else's, his wife, who knows?" Clapton says.

I Got What They Were Trying to Do'

Clapton even remembers the first blues song he heard on the show: "Whoopin' the Blues" (full song audio) by harmonica player Sonny Terry and singer and guitarist Brownie McGhee.

"That's where it started for me," he says.

"It got to me on a level that nothing else did. I got what they were trying to do," Clapton says.

"I think the purity of what they were trying to do undercut everything else that you could hear on the radio. Aside from great classical music or great opera, there was a seriousness about it that none of this other music had."

Listening to, Learning from the Greats

Other guitarists that Clapton listened to — and learned from — in those early years include Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters.

Broonzy was "just an extremely good technician" and a "great player."

As he listens to a recording of Broonzy's "Hey Hey" (full song audio), Clapton notes the audible sound of the guitarist's foot tapping.

"His rhythm — it's absolutely perfect," Clapton marvels.

Waters' Playing Acted as 'Milestone'

Perhaps the blues guitarist who influenced Clapton the most is Muddy Waters.

"Muddy was there at a time when, really, the music was getting to me. I was really trying to grasp it and make something out of it," Clapton says.

Clapton says he would listen to a Waters' song such as "Honey Bee" (song clip audio) and try to emulate the guitar great's technique and the effect he created with his playing — in this instance, the chime-like sound of a bell.

"It was a hook to me. And I made this as a sort of milestone for me, for my learning capabilities," Clapton says.

"If I can get that, I'm one rung up the ladder. And I did, finally, manage to do it one day, and I thought, well, you know, I think I can probably do this."

A Mentor and Friend

The two guitarists played together later and became very close. In his book, Clapton describes Waters as "the father figure I never really had." Until his death in 1983, Waters was a part of Clapton's life.

Even so, Clapton says he was not comfortable enough — and perhaps too proud — to ask Waters technical questions about his playing.

"I wish I had," he says now.

But there was more than just professional pride at work.

"When I got to know Muddy, unfortunately, my drinking career was in full sway," Clapton says.

"He liked to drink, too, he wasn't really down on it or anything, but I was definitely not really there as much as I wish I had been."

Clapton Eric Norman Watson