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| The man is a guitar (DVD) |
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| Uwe Kropinski (guitars) |
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C + P jazzwerkstatt, 2008 |
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MY WOODEN VOICE
It may sound strange, but a piece of wood with six strings really can occupy ones whole life.
I have been playing the guitar for fourty years now, and there was no chance of getting away from it anymore. So, I gave up trying! First I played Rock music, from age fourteen to twenty one. Later on I studied classical and jazz guitar, played a lot of free improvised music.
My first guitar was an acoustic, but in my early years I mostly played the electric. It had to be loud enough! You can play the electric guitar very loud with an amplifier, but it seems to me it’s only the electric energy that you hear and not the physical energy of the player. The electric guitar is the more intellectual one, the acoustic is more physical, it brings your musical ideas out more directly and – the acoustic has a lot more sounds to offer, but – you have to put all your energy into it, to get something out, no less than a hundred per cent are requested. For me, the electric is only half of an instrument. I always hated that situation: having the guitar, but no amplifier available and no chance to play with other musicians. So, over the years the pendulum went more and more into the acoustic direction and for the last five years the one electric guitar I kept was sadly hanging on the wall, waiting for better times.
But the other half of the truth is – in the majority of my concerts I am playing my acoustic – amplified. The reason for doing that is obvious. There are so many concert venues that really don’t fit for just sitting on a chair and playing acoustic. Amplification is a big help to uplift my wooden voice to the actual situation. In comparison to the electric, It takes a lot more effort to amplify an acoustic guitar in a proper way. I have been working on that problem for twenty years now and am happy to have very good amplification components nowadays – from mic, to pickup, to amp, to speaker.
Theo Scharpach – the great luthier from Holland (Europe) built my guitars. Actually I use one steel string and two nylon strings. My guitars have a bridge pickup and two mics inside. I often play percussion on the guitar body, the mics pick up everything I do on the instrument. The fingerboards have 39 frets, giving me almost twice as much working space as on a regular fingerboard. This gives me the chance to explore new chords and sounds, but – unfortunatly – it demands a lot more practicing! Fortunatly – I like practicing.
After all, If you put all these components together, take your wooden voice, get on stage, play your music, it may happen that one critic writes about you: ”Kropinski is not a guitar player – the man is a guitar”
What a liar!
1. FÜR PACO!
There’s a guitarist who must take part of the blame that I share my life with a guitar. His name’s Paco. Every time I hear him play, I think that guitar music isn’t actually that bad. I dedicate this song to him. But I dedicate it even more to all those Pacos that follow him, the people that don’t give up trying to squeeze something new out of those six strings.
"For Paco!"
2. VOM EFF ZUM EFF UND ZURÜCK
I wrote this song in 2007. It’s one of those pieces that make me feel that it wasn’t me who actually wrote it. It was written by music itself and I was just there to notice it. But what exactly did I notice? You take two tones (two Fs) so similar to each other as if they were just one F. Now you leave one F where it was and move the other F down step by step on the chromatic scale until it reaches the F one octave down; then you move it back up on the chromatic scale and the movement of those two tones will automatically create a chord sequence. We hear this even if we don’t want to. Everybody hears this (at least that’s what I imagine). Anyway… Take that chord sequence, add a melody and here’s your piece of music! See that writing music can be very easy sometimes? The title of this song comes naturally: "From F To F And Back".
Austrian word artist Ernst Jandl said it even better: "From From To To And Back".
3. RUNNING CHILDREN
Sometimes you’ve got a song that you just can’t find a title for. Maybe because sometimes words don’t come easy, or you won’t find them where you expect them to be. Then suddenly you come across an Irving Penn photograph titled "Running Children" – and there’s the solution. Two children run past the camera; they’re a bit too fast, so the picture comes out a little blurred and out of focus. That suits my song, I thought – a bit too fast and a little out of focus.
"Running Children"
4. SONNTAG
There’s one day every week when almost nothing happens. And that’s fine with me. I hope it stays that way. Quite suitably, this is a song where almost nothing happens. You sit and listen… nothing.
"Sunday"
5. TRIO FOR ONE GUITAR
I played my first solo gig in 1977. Now it's 2007 and unless I haven't made a mistake it's been 20 years. Long time. This piece of music was already on my first solo album, released in 1985. I wouldn’t listen to it for a long time, but on occasion of my anniversary I remembered this one and dug it out. It’s changed quite a bit since then in many ways, but the title remains.
"Trio For One Guitar"
6. FLAGEOLET DANCE
Overtones are frequencies that vibrate alongside any of our tones. Another way to put it: they are tones that we can't change. We can only take them as they come. We can make them audible as flageolet tones on a string instrument, and at best we use them to some effect. To ask you to dance, for starters.
"Flageolet Dance"
7. DIE FEIER DES AUGENBLICKS
In my concerts, I always include a piece that nobody knows, not even me. It's improvised from beginning to end. It's a piece that keeps its name but sounds different each time. There's also some music where it's the other way round: it gets a title each time though it sounds always the same. Anyway, here's something that sounds like it does for the first and the last time.
"Celebrating The Moment"
8. FATHERS SONG
Two years ago, my father was so ill that nobody believed he would recover. I woke up one morning, took an empty sheet of music and wrote down what I heard; it took about five minutes. Contrary to anybody’s expectations, my father did recover. Nobody looks back to ask why.
"Fathers Song"
9. JOY STÜCK
Anniversaries take time. You can only celebrate them after a certain period of time has elapsed. That means the older you get, the more celebrations you'll have to weather. To accomplish that, you need strength in the fist place. Second, you’ll have to learn how to party. You develop strategies that go beyond just staying in good shape. You want to control things, you look for a joystick. So it might just happen that you write something for yourself out of pure joy. This is such a song.
"Piece Of Joy"
Uwe Kropinski
Translation: Günther Feigel |
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