PIERRE BENSUSAN at Trinity St. Paul’s Church (427 Bloor West), Sunday (July 8), 8 pm. $25. RT, SB, SS, TB. See listing.
Lately, when French-Algerian guitarist Pierre Bensusan performs, as he will at Trinity St. Paul’s Church on the final night of the third leg of his North American tour, it’s just him and his acoustic guitar.
“Eight strings altogether,” he says over the phone from Piermont, New York.
“Eight?” I ask, imagining a wide-necked guitar.
“The six on my guitar and my two vocal cords.”
The master guitarist’s seventh album, Vividly (DADGAD Music), might keep the instrumentation stripped down, but the music – romantic jazz and world music textures with occasional scatting and singing overtop – is more complex than ever. You’d be forgiven for assuming that his one guitar is two or three.
“Acoustically speaking, it’s so rich what the guitar can do,” says Bensusan. “Like a lot of instruments, when you really deepen [your relationship to it], it can take you to amazing places.”
There was a time when Bensusan wasn’t so single-minded. In the 80s and 90s, he dove deep into the world of electronics and effects, which he had to lug around on tour and which required extensive sound checks to ensure everything worked with a room’s acoustics.
“One day I looked at my stack of rigs and thought, ‘If I cannot make music with only one guitar and nothing more, I want to do something else. And I left all my rigs at home and went on the road with my guitar and a bag of personal belongings. Not even a jack-to-jack cord. Nothing. I needed to prove to myself that I could make music differently.”
In the process, his chops improved.
“Having one guitar and nothing else obliges you to go into the actual organic structure of the guitar to find out how to touch it, how to make it ring, how to get nuance, how to do a nice vibrato, how to play chords, how to make it sound like several guitars at once. Because of that, I think I have become a better player.”
He’s quick to praise his old approach, however, explaining that the electronic explorations helped form his sound. Plus, he appreciates how digitization has given more musicians the ability to easily record.
He himself has a digital recording studio in his home about an hour outside Paris, and recently purchased a mixer that will allow him to record his concerts straight into his computer. His next album, tentatively set for early winter, is a live one.
While some virtuosos seem more interested in technical flash than musicality, Bensusan isn’t one of them.
“For me, the goal is the music, and the technique is the means to achieve it. Technique is something you learn in order to acquire mastery so that you can express your ideas – the idea being that your technique is transparent. No one pays attention to it. Or if they do, it’s not distracting, not in the way of the emotion of the music.
“When I hear the pieces in my head, they are not complicated at all,” he laughs. “Totally clear, fluid, transparent, logical, effortless. I hear it and I grow with it. For me, music is independent from the instrument. You have to go beyond technique and start imagining the world the way you’d like it to be. The music is the soundtrack of that world. And in this imagination, there is no technique. It’s totally direct communication. That’s what I try to observe and respect.”
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