Alex, thanks for joining us for a Guitar Sessions interview.

You’re releasing a new DVD on Mel Bay Records – Alex de Grassi in Concert. What can you tell us about this project?
Well, this project was recorded in the fall of 2006 in a studio in Nashville. It was a project that I got hooked up with through Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine. This was actually a live performance, but for a small studio audience. In fact, many of the people in the audience were Nashville session players, so it upped the ante a little bit. I had some pretty serious guitar players in the audience. Basically the material is a combination of original compositions of mine as well as some arrangements of folk songs and a couple of jazz standards. It spans pieces that I’ve performed and recorded on CDs for many years, in fact almost 30 year- so it covers some ground.

How difficult was it to pare down the set list?
I’ve done a couple of other DVDs in the past, and I didn’t want to repeat previous material, so that pared it down a little bit for me. Beyond that, I really wanted to sort of reflect what would be a typical concert. I had just come off the road from playing for a few weeks in Europe, so I had kind of a set list that I’d been working from on that tour, so I wanted the DVD to reflect pretty much what you’d expect to hear if you went and heard me in concert.

Was it helpful to have the audience in the studio?
Oh yeah! In fact, we talked about that in advance. I wanted to have a live audience because sometimes when you’re just playing for the cameras you get a little focused on how you look (laughs), if the camera’s at the right angle and all that kind of stuff. But with a live audience you start focusing more on the audience and just having that connection that you’re used to as a performer. And I think it comes off a little more relaxed and a little bit more natural that way.

Tell us about some of your favorite performance venues.
One that comes to mind right away is the Barn at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia, outside of D.C. It’s a beautiful old barn that they reconstructed on the Wolf Trap park site and then sort of built a modern facility around it. I think it has about 400 seats, and it’s just one of those places that has kind of a magic sound to it. You come in with your guitar, you throw a microphone up, don’t amplify it very much, and it just sounds great. I don’t use monitors when I perform, typically, so you just hear the room, and you hear that something about it. It feels like it was made for a solo guitar concert.

I played a little concert up in the southern part of Connecticut a couple of years back, an arts center, the name will come to me in a minute. It was about a 225-seat venue; it was actually an art gallery, and it was in an old wooden building. They hadn’t done a lot of types of music, mostly classical music. So we got there and I looked at the sound system and we decided maybe it wasn’t the best P.A. system. So we decided not to use it. And I played in there and it sounded so live, it sounded amplified, but it sounded so great. It didn’t sound echo-y or anything like that. So I think when you find a place like that, it feels so good to play that you want to come back and play again.

Then of course there’s the Ryman in Nashville. I played there once. That’s a wonderful sounding room.

When I tour in Europe I’ve had the good fortune to play, especially in Italy, in some of the old opera houses that are small, you know, there are 300 or 400 seats. And they’re sort of those wedding cake opera houses where you have the main floor that maybe seats 150 or 200 people and then sort of these tiers going around in a circle that go up maybe four floors. And a lot of those just sound so good. They sound great. And of course you can only imagine, if they’ve been around for 250 years, what kind of music happened in there over the years.

Have you played many house concerts?
I’ve played a few. I hadn’t really done house concerts until maybe five or six years ago, and since then I’ve done a half dozen, maybe ten of them. I think it’s great. First of all, it makes it very intimate- the fact that you’re in somebody’s house puts you physically very close to the audience. In those situations I often play without any amplification. I tore the pickups out of my guitar a few years ago, so when I’m playing in a concert venue I’ll use a microphone, but in a house concert I just don’t play with anything at all. And I think people really appreciate hearing that. I’m not a purist by any stretch of the imagination. These are all tools we use – pickups, mikes, nothing, whatever – to get a sound that we want. But I do think a lot of people don’t get an opportunity to just hear a naked steel-string guitar played in concert very often, and I think people really appreciate that when they hear it.

How do you break out of creative dry spells?
I certainly go through dry spells or periods when I’m either not playing a lot or I’m not writing or arranging as I’m feeling a little stuck. Sometimes actually taking a break for a couple of weeks can be a good thing. You come back and everything’s fresh. So that’s one way. The other one is when I’m not being very productive with writing or arranging music; I usually find that’s a good time for me to look at some music I’d like to play, like looking at somebody else’s music, for example.

I spend a fair amount of time reading through classical guitar pieces and maybe learning more jazz standards or taking a look at some other types of music. This morning I cracked open the complete Beatles score, just to look at some songs that I know but see how they’re actually played. Normally I don’t listen or play a lot of other people’s guitar music. So when I’m going through a dry spell, it’s good for me to take a look at it.

You’ve also studied other instruments. You started out playing trumpet and switched to guitar in your early teens.
Yeah, I think I had just turned 13 when I first picked up the guitar.

You’ve also studied jazz piano.
I did, but much later. When I was a kid I played trumpet in school bands and orchestras so I learned the basics of reading music and had a little experience playing in a group – [with a] band leader or conductor, that kind of thing. But when I picked up guitar, it was very much of a solitary experience, one where I played by ear and starting picking stuff up off of records. You know, the old needle-drop thing – keep putting that needle back down on the vinyl and listening to a riff and trying to recreate it. But when I went off to university, I took some jazz guitar lessons. And then long after I’d started recording and touring, I decided I wanted to get more insight into both keyboard skills and also into jazz harmony. And when I came back and started jazz a second time on the piano, it really helped me understand a lot better the whole concept of jazz harmony. Because it’s very different on the guitar than it is on the piano. You’re dealing with the same harmonies, but I think in some ways you get a little bigger perspective when you’re learning on keyboard.

And you didn’t major in music.
It’s funny, you know. My grandfather was a professional musician – he played violin with the San Francisco Symphony and had his own string quartet. He grew up in Northern Italy and started going to the conservatory when he was like five or six years old - this is the late 19th Century, in the late 1880s. So it was kind of a different time and era and way of life. And that’s all he ever did. And when I was a teenager and started to play guitar, and he was a very old man and I’d visit him up in San Francisco. He’d say “Well, you know, playing music is more than learning just how to strum a few chords.” (Laughs)

For me, playing guitar was such a by-ear experience. And whenever I sat down to read music, I got kind of turned off. In some ways I regret that, because while I read and write music, I don’t have the kind of sight-reading skills that you would need to play in an orchestra or be a session player in LA or Nashville or something like that. But, you know, I think that perhaps instead I developed something else. I still remember when I was going to the University of California at Berkeley, I took some of the undergraduate courses in music theory and such. And I remember sitting there night after night writing out these four-part harmonies according to the rules of classical harmony. And I would do that, and then when I was done, I’d pick up my guitar, tune it into some alternative tuning, and I’d play for an hour or two. And at that time I couldn’t see any connection between the two things. I might as well have been doing two completely different activities.

After many, many years of playing, and eventually after I got out and started recording and touring, I did come back and study more. I studied jazz piano, I studied classical guitar, and I studied composition a bit. And over time I’ve been able to sort of put the two things together so I can read some music or write something and kind of have some sense of what I’m doing relative to the tradition of music theory and harmony and so forth. It helps to be able to bridge those two worlds.

In addition to your solo work, you’ve been involved in some impressive collaborations. For instance, you’ve worked with the percussionist Zakir Hussein. What can you tell us about that project?
I should say he was kind enough to work with me on one project. I was doing a recording in 1986 for RCA Novus, which became one of BMG’s many labels. I was lucky enough to get Zakir Hussein to come and play on one of my pieces. I had written a piece that I wanted to play with guitar, tabla, and dumbek, which is another drum that is played in the Middle East. So I lined up Zakir and I lined up Vince Delgado, who’s a wonderful dumbek player who lives in the Bay Area who works with Zakir.

I spent the whole day preparing this chart – about three or four pages of music, very meticulously writing out the time-signature changes, some notes about the rhythm and all this sort of thing. And then he showed up and sat down and said “OK, let’s take a look at the piece”, and I pulled out the chart and he said “No, I don’t need the chart.” And I thought, that’s fine, I knew most Indian musicians play by ear. So we sat down to play it, we ran through it, about six or seven minutes of music, got to the end, and he said “Let’s try it again, but watch your time.” And he’s such a master that I said, “OK, of course, I’ll take my cue from you.”

We got about three quarters of the way through the piece and all of a sudden he stopped. He said “You changed something.” And we were in measure 238 or something like that, and he’d only heard it once, and he didn’t have a chart. And I had. I’d added one measure of something in there. So I was just astounded. I knew I was dealing with a master, because he’s one of the world’s most amazing musicians. But the fact that he could track that stuff, on the second pass through made me realize that I’d made some very minor little change, and what an amazing mind he has.

What advice can you offer aspiring musicians?
In the last five or ten years I’ve done a lot more teaching. I rarely teach a private lesson, but I teach more and more workshops and master classes when I’m traveling in conjunction with concerts. I meet a lot of really great young players, some who came up from playing fingerstyle by ear, or some who have a classical or jazz background and are interested in playing steel-string. And I always tell them, “Keep your interests broad.”

If you want to be a performer, you’ll benefit from keeping an open mind to all kinds of music. Every kind of music has something to offer. If you play rock and roll, you can put a lot of energy into your music. If you learn how to play classical guitar, you’ll learn a lot about technique and precision and some of the intricacies. And if you play fingerstyle and the open tunings and so forth, you’ll experiment with a lot of different sonorities and textures that you might not discover otherwise. And if you get to be a good jazz player, you can improvise and kind of jam along with anything. So I always tell people, “Keep your ears open and your mind open, and keep a broad perspective of music.

The other thing that I suggest to people is that they listen to a lot of music that is not guitar music. I know in my musical experience, I’ve been influenced just as much, if not more by listening to music that’s not guitar music, because the guitar is such a versatile instrument that you can listen to saxophone or you can listen to percussion or you can listen to chorale music and try to bring some elements of that music into your way of playing. It enriches the experience of playing guitar.

What are you working on currently?
Well, the latest project besides the Mel Bay DVD is the Demania Trio, which consists of Michael Manring on bass and Chris Garcia on tabla and percussion. We’ll be out this fall doing some touring.

Another project I’ve wanted to do for a long time is a recording with guitar, some kind of percussion, and a chorale group. I love the sustain and the power of voices and the ability to do some very interesting things harmonically with it. As the guitar is essentially a percussion instrument, especially the acoustic guitar, the sound decays quickly. But that fast attack sounds really great against long sustained notes that you can get with a voice, especially if you can put it in a rich harmonic context.