International Guitar Night features diverse talents, styles

Since its launch two dozen years ago, International Guitar Night has grown from performances in a handful of venues to encompass more than 80 shows in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Brian Gore, a Portland-based singer-songwriter, created International Guitar Night as a way to showcase the solo guitar musicians from around the world he finds and brings together to perform on a single stage. Gore recently has a new album of his own. He joins us along with two of the musicians, guitarist Thu Le from Vietnam and Luca Stricagnoli from Italy. Le and Stricagnoli tell us more about their love of their instrument and play a few pieces ahead of their shows this week in Bend and Beaverton.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Twenty-seven years ago, the Portland based singer-songwriter Brian Gore put together a show with some other guitarists for a handful of venues. That has grown into an annual tour called International Guitar Night that now includes more than 80 shows a year in the US, Canada and Europe. The Oregon shows are going to be tomorrow at the Tower Theater in Bend and Wednesday at The Reser in Beaverton. I’m joined now by International Guitar Night founder Brian Gore and two of the musicians who are part of this year’s show. Thu Le is originally from Vietnam. Luca Stricagnoli comes from Italy. Welcome to all three of you.

All: Hello.

Miller: Hello. Brian, how did this start?

Brian Gore: It started in an underground music venue in Berkeley, California. Back then, people were saying that there wasn’t much interest in guitar, and we started noticing that folks were coming in droves. And it’s basically just built from there.

Miller: When you say there wasn’t much interest in guitar - I mean, I think that the guitar is maybe one of the most popular instruments worldwide and at least guitar-like things, they’re everywhere. They’re in so much popular music in the US and other places. There wasn’t any interest in the guitar?

Gore: Well, absolutely. And the attraction of guitar simply as an item to hold and be connected to through your heart is, next to human voice, one of the most popular ways to connect to music.

Miller: But you saw not enough interest in them, despite that.

Gore: At that time, I just put out my first album and people were saying that it was really tough to get audiences for acoustic guitar. Of course, International Guitar Night, over time, has helped to change that. But there have been some other factors too.

Miller: How has the show evolved over the years?

Gore: Well, it started out, first, people just playing solo. And also at that time, everything was sort of segmented. So there were the bluegrass fans, and there were the classical fans. We had to get people to understand that there’s an underlying commonality between all the different styles and there’s an affinity between the players for each other’s styles. We kind of broke through that and then we started getting…

Miller: Was there pushback at first? I mean, you’d have a classical guitarist and fans of classical guitar who said, “I don’t want to hear bluegrass?”

Gore: I definitely had people saying that you would never get an audience to come with a classical guitar player and a bluegrass guitar player. Absolutely.

Miller: And you said, let me show you I can?

Gore:  I showed them that we can. And then of course, they said this was still in underground venues, and they said, “Well, you’re never going to be able to get it into theaters.” And we got it into our first theater up in Duncan, British Columbia, and sold the sucker out. So there!

[Laughter]

Miller: Thu Le, how did you start playing guitar?

Thu Le: I started when I was like, below four years old, with my father. He was my first teacher.

Miller: Just a tiny guitar at that time?

Le: Yes, I had a quarter-size guitar. I don’t even remember how I started to learn.

Miller: It was in your family.

Le: I remember when I grew up, knowing how to play guitar, it’s like how to brush your teeth, you know. You just know.

Miller: For as long as you have memories, it’s included playing guitar. What would you have played when you were a kid?

Le: I started already as a classical guitar player. So as long as I remember, I practiced a lot of scales and a lot of etudes for nylon string guitar.

Miller: So you don’t remember falling in love with it then. It’s just something that’s always been a part of your life?

Le: It was always there. And my first memory was the first performance when I was five years old, in a theater in Hanoi with my father and some of his friends. So that was one of my earliest memory about the guitar.

Miller: So at the age of five, you were taken out there and put on the stage.

Le: Yes.

Miller: There’s the stories of Mozart, when his dad would take him around and he’d play violin for princes and kings.

Le:  I was fearless. I was fearless. I was not scared of anything.

Miller: Are you scared, now, of anything - performance-wise?

Le: Actually, I remember the first time that I felt a bit nervous in front of an audience was when I was a teenager, but before that, you just didn’t care about anything.

Miller: What do you think makes the guitar special? I mean, Brian’s idea here is that there’s something to celebrate just about this instrument. What is it for you that makes you love the guitar?

Le:  I think the guitar is so, how to say, vital of the function you can play. Of course, people know of the guitar mostly as a way to play rock music or blues, and pop or acoustic style, but also as a classical style. So I think that you can do so much with guitar, you can also strum and sing, you can play nice melody songs.

And for me, like Brian said, I love the guitar also, even the position of holding it. It is close to your body, near your heart, you support with the two legs and when you play, even the body language, the movement also affect a lot the tone, the sound. So you can physically control fully, completely of the instrument.

Miller: Luca, what about you? What drew you to the guitar?

Luca Stricagnoli: I think I just saw somebody playing guitar in the street. I was around maybe 10 years old, and I just loved it.

Miller: This was in Italy?

Stricagnoli: I was in Italy, yeah. Then I asked my parents to buy me a guitar and I just got obsessed. I would just bring it with me in the bed even when I was falling asleep. And after knocking it out of the bed a few times, I noticed that was a bad idea.

Miller: You have a very unusual looking instrument in front of you. It has three necks. Can you describe what you have?

Stricagnoli: I play it very often with like a regular guitar. But this is one of my inventions. Throughout the years, I started going into a different direction with my playing. So basically, I’m a little bit inspired by piano players, where one hand does something, and the other hand does something completely different. And I figured, OK, let’s do this on guitar, right?

So, these three necks on this guitar, they all have different functions. There is one neck with six strings. First of all, this guitar, by the way, was built in Italy by my friend Davide Serracini. So I just made a little drawing and then he turned it into reality.

So we’ve got the first neck that has six strings, and just to let the listener hear - I can play this, for example, with one hand like this:

[Guitar string sounds]

This is just my left hand playing right now, and with the right hand, I can do anything else.

[Guitar string sounds]

Miller: So for people can’t see, which is everybody but me, I’m lucky here. You’re putting your left hand between the frets where normally people would put their fingers, and then they would strum, or pluck. But when you just press your fingers down, we hear the sounds.

Stricagnoli: This is a result that is achieved by not having any friends and social life. And then slowly the left hand can do such things, right?

[Laughter]

Miller: Can you do that on any guitar, because you have spent so much time not being with friends?

Stricagnoli: Yes. You can do it on any guitar.

Miller: If you just push hard enough?

Stricagnoli: Yes. It does help to have the strings a little bit closer to the neck. So sometimes if you would give me a 50-bucks guitar that is not set up, it would be harder because we need to press more. But yeah, you can do it on any guitar.

Miller: OK, so that’s the first neck.

Stricagnoli: Yes. And then the second neck is thought to be played mostly with just the right hand. Essentially, I do melodies. So the strings are tuned like this:

[Guitar string sounds]

Kind of like a scale. So when I play with just one hand I can do this, I put now the left and the right together.

[Guitar music]

Miller: So, that middle neck, it’s tuned in a very special way. So depending on the key, you can play a melody without doing any fingerings. You just pluck the strings that fit in with the harmonics.

Stricagnoli: One hundred percent, that’s right. And then I can also add percussion to this. So I’ll still be the right end. So I’m going to do like this:

[Guitar music and percussion]

Miller: Now, hitting the wood of the guitar with your thumb in that case, or the meat of your palm.

Stricagnoli: That’s right. So we got like one, two, and three voices, and then there is like the third neck. By the way, the central neck has seven strings, all high pitched. And then there is the third neck, which is actually the strangest of them all. It is the very first reverse neck on an acoustic guitar.

Reverse means, for people who listen, normally, when you play guitar as a right-handed player, your left hand is playing, let’s say the chords. It starts like here: fret one, then two, three, four, five.

[Guitar string sounds]

It grows, it gets higher and higher going towards my right side. But this third neck that I have, it goes from right to left. So the lowest note is on the right like this:

[Guitar string sounds]

And then it raises…

[Guitar string sounds]

So it’s kind of like the Uno reverse card, just to understand each other. And so on this one, you can basically play some bass lines like this…

[Bass line plays]

…with just one hand. But the cool thing is that since the frets are close to the guitar body, you can also have percussion with the elbow. So now I can do it with just one hand like this...

[Guitar riff plays]

...or you can play chords like…

[Guitar chord plays]

...and…

Miller: You’re strumming just with your fingers and the percussions coming from your elbow hitting the body of the guitar.

Stricagnoli: Yeah.

Miller: All right. Luca, I want to hear an actual song from your three-neck guitar. But Thu, let’s go back to you. Can we hear a song from you? What are we going to hear?

Le: Yeah, I will play for you a piece in the, I would say, a modern classical style called “Tango in Sky” by the French composer Roland Dyens:

[Guitar music]

Miller: That was Thu Le. Why did you choose that song? That lovely song?

Le: This song, I would say when I perform in public, people love it so much. And myself, I love it because you can use so much of the ability of the guitar. And of course, it’s showing off a lot of technique and speed. And also, I love the rhythm, tango. I always love so much to play rhythm, make music on the classical guitar. And of course, you need to practice a lot for all of this technique and still have to keep the notes smooth and clear, but at the same time to keep the rhythm going.

This is still in the classical style, because normally people confuse. They think classical guitar is only to play classical music of 200 to 300 years ago. But in fact, classical is a style that we still have composers of nowadays. But they compose in the classical style. So classical, as you see, the difference with Luca is, we have only one neck and we have only six strings, and the strings are nylon to have a different kind of sound quality. And we play mostly just fingers and no banging or percussion.

Miller: None of this newfangled stuff. Brian, it was really fun watching you watch and listen to Thu – what goes to your mind when you hear guitars like this right in front of you?

Gore:  I think that Thu is one of a cadre of players that have made a commitment to not only play the classic material, but also put modern composers on the forefront of what they do. And I think Thu is an incredibly original player. That takes a lot of courage in the world of classical guitar.

The other thing that I think about is the unity that exists between different styles of playing because it’s really about keeping that tone and having all the voices come together. So there’s a kind of similarity, I think, between what Thu is doing and also what Luca is doing, in that they’re putting multiple voices together at once in the service of evoking a set of emotions and feelings through sound.

Miller: Luca, can we hear a piece on your three-neck guitar? What are we gonna hear?

Stricagnoli: Yeah, for sure. I’m gonna play an arrangement I made of the song “Feel Good Inc” by Gorillaz.

[Guitar music]

Miller: That is Luca Stricagnoli playing the Gorillaz’ song, “Feel Good Inc.”

You grew up in Northern Italy but I understand you recently moved to Nashville, one of the centers of American music. What’s it like there for you?

Stricagnoli: Oh, wow. That’s quite different compared to Italy and also compared to Germany. My wife is from Germany, and we just decided to start this adventure. And, you know, to be honest, we tour so much that we’re still putting furniture in and it’s been a year. [Laughter]

Miller: Oh, so you barely live there even though you’ve sort of moved.

Stricagnoli: That’s right. It was like February last year, but I haven’t spent much time at home, but so far, we love it. We love the people over there.

Miller: Why Nashville?

Stricagnoli: Well, have you seen the movie, by any chance, the one like, “Coming to America”?

Miller: The Eddie Murphy movie from the mid-80′s.

Stricagnoli: When he’s looking for his queen, like, “Okay, let’s move to Queens.” So we just look at the map of the USA and it’s like, oh, this one is Music City, let’s go there.

Miller: Literally?

Stricagnoli: I mean, a little bit. But the interesting thing is that I had never been to Nashville before actually moving there, right? But my wife had been there for a few years. She’s a singer-songwriter and she was working with Universal and Sony, and she went there for some photoshoots and she loved the city.

Miller: Brian, how do you put together these shows? There are a lot of guitarists in the world. You choose what, in general, four, to go on tours?

Gore: What I really look for is people who can make the instrument sing. For example, if you listen to Luca, you can hear all the voices, right? And a kind of intentionality. And perhaps more importantly, I’m looking for people who can really convey feeling and emotion through what they’re doing on the guitar. So it ends up being, really, the best players from around the world because I think no matter what your subgenre is, if you’re able to connect intuitively through the instrument in and convey, that’s going to help awaken audiences to guitar.

Miller: Luca and Thu, I understand that the two of you have a duet that you play on one guitar. I am very eager to hear and see this. What are you going to play for us?

Stricagnoli: We’re gonna play a typical traditional Italian piece. It’s called the “Tarantella Napoletana.” So it’s a tarantella from the city of Naples.

Miller: From the south, even though you’re from the north?

Stricagnoli: That’s right. Yes. You know, we were undecided what to play together, and one day this song came to our mind, and we decided, OK, let’s do it.

Miller: All right. And you’re gonna do it. Two people on one guitar?

Stricagnoli: Yes.

Le: And we do it on my guitar, which I made a very big sacrifice…

Miller: …to let somebody else play it.

Le: ...to let Luca play on my guitar.

[Laughter]

Stricagnoli: Thu only had one request. She said no percussions.

Miller: Don’t hit my beautiful guitar.

Le: Yeah. But then you see the surprise, that’s why I say I never trust Italians.

[Guitar music]

Miller: That was Thu Le on the higher notes, except the very highest notes which were brought to you by Luca Stricagnoli, as well as the lowest notes.

Brian Gore, before we say goodbye, [for] folks in Bend tomorrow night and at The Reser in Beaverton on Wednesday night, what can they expect?

Gore: They can expect the finest guitarists in the world playing their own beautiful solo music along with all original collaborations. And it will be a wonderful way for people to celebrate the love within themselves and with each other.

Miller: Brian Gore, Thu Le and Luca Stricagnoli, thanks very much.

All:  Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Miller: Brian Gore is a founder and organizer of International Guitar Night. He’s also a singer and songwriter in his own right. His new album is called “Seek the Love You’re Yearning.” We also heard Thu Le and Luca Stricagnoli

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