Alex de Grassi talks about his debut album on Windham Hill 💫

 

Alex De Grassi on Turning: Turning Back, his debut album, and the fourth album released on Windham Hill 

Hear Alex perform live and hear more insights at the Windham Hill 50th Anniversary Live event in Berkeley, California on November 1st. 

"By the time I got around to writing my first solo guitar pieces, which were probably in the mid-'70s, I had played in bands, I'd been in college for a couple of years and dropped out, and done a lot of things, and continued to play guitar all through that. I started to write some solo pieces, and that very first recording I made, Turning: Turning Back, was recorded in '77. I think it was just a strange mixture of all these things I had been interested in, which included everything from a little bit of rock and roll and blues, but also a lot of the British Isles folk guitar, and even a little bit of classical guitar in there. I like to think I kind of found a voice about that time for what I do now.

One of the other key elements in all that was I always felt like I was trying to narrate or tell a story, or describe what I was seeing around me. Not necessarily the way a songwriter would, where they're telling a story: this is who fell in love with who, and this is how this person came to an end. More just describing the elements. So a lot of my early pieces have titles of places I went, like Klamath, which is in Northern California and Southern Oregon, a Native American wilderness area, or "Causeway," which is taking a train across the Great Salt Lake Causeway. A lot of those pieces had that sense of place, and I think that became one of my trademarks: trying to describe, through my own experiences, the places I'd been and the way I perceived sound happening.

If you asked where that came from, I'd have to say John Fahey and Leo Kottke were big influences for me as well in those early years. But I remember thinking about this once, when I was about that age: what I really like is all the idioms of folk guitar, the hammer-ons, the pull-offs, the ringing open steel strings, those things you heard a lot in folk and country blues. But I also like the more adventurous possibilities you could find with jazz and classical harmony. So I was always trying to put those things together. It was the kitchen-sink approach, and hopefully I've been able to do that in a way that has a voice, or a style that has a coherence to it as well."