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?I?m an arranger by nature. I want to arrange things and make them bigger,? Jesse Cook says.
Photograph by: Hovsep Kevorkian , Courtesy of Coach House Music
MONTREAL ? Jesse Cook?s original plan had nothing to do with playing guitar.
After studying the instrument at Toronto?s Eli Kassner Guitar Academy for seven years, he dropped out at the age of 13 when he began to suspect the school?s rigorous practice expectations would interfere with his real career hopes. ?I just wanted to be playing basketball,? he said during a recent telephone interview. ?My goal at that point was to be a Harlem Globetrotter.?
Fortunately for his many fans, Cook didn?t quite have what it takes to excel on the court. So Plan B became Plan ?A.
It was pretty much foreshadowed. His mother, Heather ? a director and producer who worked on CBC?s The Nature of Things and A Planet For the Taking ? has told him stories about how he reacted excitedly to the flamenco records by Manitas de Plata that were played around the house when he was a child. The 3-year-old Jesse, apparently, would reach for his toy guitar and try to keep up.
?(De Plata) really had this very visceral, raw sound and lightning speed,? said Cook, who is now 47. ?Flamenco is the blues of the Gypsies of Europe. There?s a very raw and passionate quality about that type of music. It?s rhythmic, and it?s either profoundly sad or extremely happy. There?s nothing grey about flamenco. That?s what I connected to.?
Having spent his first few years in France and Spain, Cook and his sister moved to Toronto with their mother, a native of Montreal, when he was 4. After Heather Cook had been told by one guitar teacher to wait until her son was 12 to call about lessons, she met Eli Kassner at a party. Kassner said to start the boy as soon as he was interested.
Cook began studying the instrument at Kassner?s academy when he was 6. After learning basic pieces and simple flamenco forms, he moved into classical guitar as he improved.
His father, John, who died in 2001, was a photographer and filmmaker who played a key role in Austrian New Wave cinema in the 1970s. The elder Cook had moved to Europe when he was 19 and never came back. He retired to Arles in the south of France when Jesse was about 15. With his mother also keeping a residence in the same part of the country. Jesse?s summer vacations, he said, were all about France.
In Arles, Cook was exposed to sounds he wasn?t learning in the academy. His father?s neighbour was Gipsy Kings vocalist Nicolas Reyes. The band had yet to become an international success, but Cook was soaking in their music. He was also enthralled by the sounds of ?Gypsy kids walking down the street, strumming their guitars, playing in caf?s for money, hanging outside trying to play for tourists. Seeing how they played the guitar and treated it more like a percussion instrument than a melodic one ? that was really exciting for me as a guitarist,? he said.
Cook said he sometimes jokes about having had to ?unlearn? 17 years of musical education by immersing himself in the traditions handed down orally. ?But the reality is, they?re all part of this big thing called music,? he said.
?People often think that an oral musical tradition means you don?t have ?training.? But many of the greatest musicians we?ve ever known grew up in an oral tradition, like Paco de Lucia,? Cook said. ?When you grow up surrounded by all these amazing musicians who can sit down and teach you, knee to knee, about chord progressions and how to hold your hand, and all that stuff, that?s much more useful than sitting in a room by yourself in front of some sheet music, trying to learn on your own for a week until your next half-hour lesson. At the end of the day, you?re still learning music.?
By the time he was 19, Cook was combining theory and technique with what he learned in his travels. He was practicing 10 ? you read right ? hours a day. ?It?s a big commitment. Anybody who?s really serious about it ends up having to do that,? he said.
Cook said constant studying and practicing can take away some of the mystery and magic of music. ?I?ve noticed all these people, who were making quite beautiful music before they arrived at music school, learn all this theory and suddenly, they?re just cramming all these complicated chords into every song they write, and it starts to sound more like math,? he said. ?For me, music is about communicating a human emotion. And everything else has got to be subordinate to that one function.?
The formal training, however, was crucial to Cook?s career in at least one important way, he said: it taught him how to take the simple musical form of rumba flamenco ? which is one of his stylistic calling cards ? and embellish or arrange it. At different points in his career, he said, he fancied himself the Phil Spector of world music.
?I would try to create a wall of sound,? he said. ?Instead of just having four guitars strumming, I?d (add) a Brazilian percussion ensemble and strings. I can?t afford (Beatles producer) George Martin, so I?d just have to do it myself.?
Having been influenced by Peter Gabriel?s restless experimentation with bringing traditional world artists onto modern albums like Security, Cook was also bowled over at a young age by the lightning-speed improvisation and technique of De Lucia, John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola, as heard on the seminal 1981 live recording Friday Night In San Francisco.
But with his most recent disc, The Blue Guitar Sessions, Cook has taken a break from that kind of playing, he said. ?I?m trying to move away from that much speed and virtuosity, because there?s a point where you?re just playing so many notes ? and are you really saying anything? In a live setting, that can be really fun, but when I?m sitting at home, listening to a record, after a while, it becomes a little bit numbing. It?s really all about context.?
The Blue Guitar Sessions, Cook said, is the embodiment of that search for context. The disc is the type of ?unabashedly moody? album he has been wanting to make for a number of years, he said. It is a search for the spaces between the notes ? the notes you don?t play, he said.
The new compositions came about while he was starting to write another album, one that would have been more in line with the ?loud and bombastic rumba tunes and world music stew? his listeners might expect. The Blue Guitar tracks were written on the side, one a day, while he and his family were on vacation.
Soon they became the new album.
Intrigued by both the stripped-down arrangements on Adele?s hugely successful 21 album and the minimalist, yet expansive sound of Miles Davis classics from the 1950s like ?Round About Midnight and Kind of Blue, Cook went on an intensive search for vintage mics to capture and convey the fullness of the performance and the space of the studio, finally tracking down a couple of Neumann tube mics.
When the sessions were behind him, Cook still had to fight the Spector instinct. ?I?m an arranger by nature. I want to arrange things and make them bigger,? he said.
Those precious spaces in the compositions began to fill up. ?I would invite this friend of mine, a Brazilian percussionist. I?d say ?Come on over. I just want you to add a couple of little parts, like a triangle, maybe a little shaker. The next thing you know, we couldn?t stop ourselves. The surdos are coming out, and the repiniques and the layering of tracks starts,? he said, laughing. ?And he goes away, and I?m listening to it, and I realize ?Oh my God, I?ve done it again. I?ve killed the track.?
The extra sounds were jettisoned and Cook emerged with a disc that might puzzle long-time followers, but hits the spot with him.
?I feel the role of an artist is to constantly break the rules,? Cook said, citing some earlier globe-trotting fusion projects, like his 2003 album Nomad. ?I keep asking ?What is my sound? And how do I want to express this?? I don?t want it to sound like Al di Meola or Paco de Lucia. I don?t want it to sound just like Vincente Amigo or something. Or even Peter Gabriel. You keep trying to find something that?s going to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. At the end of the day, when I?m making a record, that?s all I?m searching for.?
Jesse Cook performs Nov.?29 at 8 p.m.at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $44 to $74. Phone 514-842-2112 or go to pda.qc.ca.
bperusse@montrealgazette.com
Twitter: @bernieperusse
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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