7/4

He didn't. I asked him to, but he couldn't commit.

whew... anyway...you're in the right place for the music! Stick around...

Cusp of Magic (Nonesuch) John L Waters Friday February 22, 2008 The Guardian This project by pipa player Wu Man and the untiringly eclectic string quartet Kronos continues a collaboration that began more than a decade ago, when they recorded Tan Dun's Ghost Opera. Long-time Kronos associate and minimalist pioneer Terry Riley has composed a six-part work that pits the sparkling, sparky pipa (a kind of lute) against the astringent, urgent ensemble sound that Kronos applies to everything from Africa to India. Extra drums, synths and vocals appear from time to time, and the somewhat creepy fifth movement, Emily and Alice, incorporates musical toys. Yet it is the straightforward partnership of pipa and string quartet that is most arresting and satisfying: witness the folky opening to Buddha's Bedroom (which evolves into a lullaby sung by Wu Man) and the closing Prayer Circle. The latter, like the atmospheric title track, is fuelled by what the fanciful liner notes call the "good medicine" of Native American peyote rituals.

Kronos Quartet's Flair for the Dramatic By Anne Midgette Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 19, 2008; C05 In its 35 years, the Kronos Quartet has reimagined the string quartet, created a new model for contemporary ensembles and demonstrated that audiences can love new music. Their performance with soloist Wu Man at the Clarice Smith Center on Sunday night, partway through their 18-month residency at the University of Maryland, shed light on how they have developed such an enthusiastic following. It is not just unusual music, or the theatricality of their presentation -- which involved, on Sunday, dramatic lighting and a lot of walking around the stage in Tan Dun's "Ghost Opera." It is that their concerts aspire to be about something. Both "Ghost Opera" and Terry Riley's "The Cusp of Magic," the two pieces on Sunday's program, whatever their merits or failings, are rich in layers of meaning and allusion. Riley's piece touches on relationships and childhood; Tan's on our relationship to our past, and art's to its ancestors. And both pieces are about the power of ritual and the creation of spiritual spaces -- of prayer, meditation, or art -- in our daily lives. Of course, absolute music -- the standard classical repertory -- is about something, too. But extra-musical meaning at Kronos concerts is generally presented on a more literal, accessible level, like a pop concert. In fact, those who value absolute music may have more trouble appreciating this group, which has historically tended to place less emphasis on the quality of its playing than on the experimental nature of its work. The New Age-y facility of some of its repertory is not to everyone's taste. But on Sunday, the more New Age of the two pieces, "The Cusp of Magic," which invokes the spirit of peyote rituals and whose last movement is dedicated to world peace, was animated by a greater rigor and vitality than its companion. Riley, tagged as "the father of minimalism" since writing the seminal "In C" in 1964, is a master of the repeating musical patterns that are a defining feature of this mislabeled genre. Intricate and offbeat, these patterns drive the music forward from the start of this piece's first, eponymous movement, in which the juxtaposition of string quartet, pipa (Wu's lute-like stringed instrument), and synthesizer is framed by the constant shake of a rattle and the startling but carefully patterned thwacks of a drum. David Harrington, Kronos's founder and first violinist, took over percussion duties here and in later movements, two of which called on him to play children's toys (including a miniature toy violin) against a recorded backdrop, creating the effect of a nursery suffused with passing street noise, innocence contrasted with the bustle of the real world around it. "Ghost Opera," written in 1994, is more focused and dramatic than some of Tan's subsequent works. There is more animation in the first 15 minutes of this piece than in the whole first act of "The First Emperor," premiered in 2006 at the Metropolitan Opera. The piece also introduces elements that were to become trademarks, notably the large, illuminated and amplified bowls of water, merging the functions of instruments and ritual objects, featured in a number of later works (including "Water Passion After Saint Matthew"). "Ghost Opera" is also a ritual, invoking the ghosts of the past, East and West (represented by a Chinese folk song and a Bach prelude), taking one step farther to the invocation of the past represented by most standard classical-music concerts. (It occasionally spoofs Western concert rituals: the tuning of the instruments or the exaggerated gestures of the conductor, mimed by Harrington.) But its material seems driven more by emotion than by compositional organization. As Kronos performed it, there was a lot of anger in this piece, thrusting to the surface in tense short roars of rage as the players roamed the stage playing their instruments, seeking, or unanchored. There was a lot to engage the ear: the jangle of Wu's pipa or the pure amber of her singing voice; the buzz and rattle of paper, rustled and blown; the rich tones of the quartet, suddenly offering a scrap of Western music before dispersing to the winds. But the piece had exhausted its ideas before it was actually finished. Whereas Riley's final movement, a circle of music ascending upward through the instruments, its patterns spiraling together to culminate in a shower of notes, ended a piece that seemed to have gone on exactly long enough.

February 20, 2008 Riley Shows His Range Renowned composer Terry Riley uses the sound of children's toys and the spirit of Native American rituals in his latest work The Cusp of Magic. Ironically it is one of his most accessible works to date. By Charlie Richards Composer Terry Riley is a bit of a living legend. As one of the foremost leaders of the minimalist school, he's interacted and associated with many of the major names of modern classical and avant-garde music, including La Monte Young and South Asian Kirana master Pandit Pran Nath. At 72, his music is enjoying a renaissance among young listeners. Reissues of some of his earlier works, such as Poppy Nogood and Les Yeux Fermes (both available on Elysian Fields) are now available on CD, and his latest work The Cusp of Magic hit record stores on February 5. The Cusp of Magic was written for and recorded by Riley’s long-time collaborators the Kronos Quartet (who also have a certain legendary status among the cutting edge crowd) and the distinguished pipa virtuoso Wu Man. The pipa, a lute-like Chinese instrument, features prominently throughout, making Cusp unique among Western works. The Cusp of Magic, which astrologically is the week between Gemini and Cancer, patterns itself after the Native American peyote ritual in which each musician makes an individual contribution to the ceremony. The first two movements constitute about half of the Cusp's length. Like much of Riley’s music, they rely on patterns established by minimalism and Indian influence. The first movement begins with an insistent and constant percussive beat from drum and rattle that remains throughout its ten minutes. The quartet soon introduces itself with short, staccato chords (for which minimalism is known), followed by the entry of the pipa. Within a few measures, the pipa comes more into the foreground, creating an almost improvisatory experience. Toward the end of the movement, the music grows more fluid, allowing for greater virtuosity from the players, and culminating in a very brash, electronic, thrash-like conclusion. ''Buddha’s Bedroom,'' the second movement, is a fine contrast, with the string soloists plucking their instruments pizzicato in imitation of the pipa. The overall feeling is light and jazzy with a real swing. This atmosphere changes during the movement’s central section, a haunting lullaby with a text written by Wu Man and sung beautifully by Elisabeth Commanday. The Quartet starts the third movement, ''In the Nursery,'' playing a soft chorale-like melody under busier solo pipa passages and electronically sampled nursery sounds. A radical change occurs in the fourth movement, ''Royal Wedding.'' It opens with a grand Neoromantic theme, full of energy and optimism, but ends on a somber note that leads into the most eccentric--and riskiest--part of the work. At its base ''Emily & Alice'' is a collage of children’s toy sounds (from a collection amassed by the Kronos Quartet during their travels) combined with the whimsical theme to a Russian cartoon series called ''Cherburashka.'' While the use of all these elements might have made for a cacophony of disparate sounds, it blends instead--though it does draw attention away from the soloists. In the final movement, ''Prayer Circle,'' The Cusp of Magic draws to a satisfying conclusion. While the toy sounds may have provided an unusual ground bass in the previous movement, Riley now turns to a more conventional one: Flamenco music. It casts an odd Spanish tone to the piece’s final bars, which end abruptly and without resolution. The Cusp of Magic is certainly one of Riley’s most optimistic, light-hearted, and easily accessible works to date. Brevity is the soul of wit here, and nothing is tedious or long-winded, a common criticism of minimalist work by those with less talent than Riley. And despite Riley's years, The Cusp of Magic has a fresh and youthful feel that is lacking in the music of many of Riley’s younger colleagues. Those who already love Riley will most likely adore it, and even those who don't may find themselves charmed by it. It is hard to imagine a performance of the piece being given with as much care, love, clarity and tough-edged musicianship than the one exhibited here by Kronos and Wu Man, and, as usual with Nonesuch, the engineering is faultless. Recommended to those who love new music—and even to those who have shied away from it in the past. http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid52206.asp

Yes. Market Street in Elmwood Park Small world, I was at that place once. And I thought you were joking when you asked if it was in Jersey.

I've been sticking with XP, I have no time for experiments. I got a new PC at Thanksgiving and one for my Dad last week, both XP.

February 24, 2008 A Big Year for a Full-Service Composer By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH, NYTimes AS an applicant to the composition program at the Paris Conservatoire in 1960, the Seattle native William Bolcom churned out his regulation fugue and sonata movement on cue. But asked to present what he was working on, he offered "One Little Bomb and Boom!," a jaunty waltz from his cabaret opera "Dynamite Tonight," modeled on novelty numbers from the time of World War I. The lyric was by the New York poet Arnold Weinstein, who blended classical learning and jive with wicked panache. "This is when everyone's talking about Boulez and Stockhausen and the total chromatic," Mr. Bolcom said recently from home in Ann Arbor, Mich., "and here's this popsy little number extolling the virtue of bombs. It was so different. It was popular theater. Messiaen was there. I'll never forget the bemused look on his face." Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen: composers and teachers of towering intellect, grandest of the panjandrums of a new music for the 20th century. Mr. Bolcom took in their gospel with eager ears, but he was no disciple. A far more kindred spirit was a composer Mr. Bolcom had worked with in the United States, Darius Milhaud, by then an elder statesman of the avant-garde. Milhaud wore his learning lightly, wrote with ease in styles both popular and arcane and was never above blending jazz, saudades or other exotic flavors into his spicy brew. In 1965, when Mr. Bolcom submitted his String Quartet No. 8 for the composition prize at the conservatoire, it placed second. He later learned, he said, that only a sort of spiritual tune in the finale had cost him the top honor. But Mr. Bolcom's voice, like Milhaud's, is most his own when he is speaking in tongues. His setting of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" — for a symphony orchestra of Mahlerian proportions, a slew of soloists and massed choruses — is encyclopedic in its embrace of styles, from the mandarin modernism of his student years to barroom ballads and reggae and other vernacular modes. The great American maverick Charles Ives comes to mind, having intimated immortality in collisions of hymns, parlor songs, military marches and arias. But Ives left his "Universe Symphony" a shambles. Mr. Bolcom managed to complete his maximum opus to huge acclaim. The much-decorated American composer John Corigliano, Mr. Bolcom's friend and contemporary, regards his fluency with a kind of awe. "I envy Bill's chops," Mr. Corigliano said recently in New York. "He's got such skills, such great compositional techniques. Music flows out of him the way it flowed from Mozart." Mr. Bolcom demurs a little. "Does it matter how long music takes coming out?" he asked. "I just work a lot. Pieces germinate in my mind a long time, and then they come out rather quickly." (The three-hour Blake cantata, which took shape over nearly 30 years, was the exception.) In May, Mr. Bolcom turns 70, and the many performances in his honor this year include what might seem an almost boastful number of premieres. The Guarneri Quartet and the Johannes Quartet joined forces this month for his new half-hour Octet: Double Quartet. Next month the New York Festival of Song introduces "Lucrezia," based on the sex farce "Mandragora" ("Mandrake Root") by Machiavelli, better known as the author of "The Prince." "A zarzuela as imagined by the Marx brothers," Mr. Bolcom called "Lucrezia," referring to the popular Spanish variety of light opera. He had the action transposed from Florence, around 1500, to a "contemporary cuckoo-land Argentina that allowed me to write fandangos and tangos." On a grander canvas is his Symphony No. 8, nearly 40 minutes long, a choral setting of prophetic texts of Blake, which scholars study like the kabbalah. James Levine conducts the premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus at Symphony Hall on Thursday and the New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on March 3. "The passages I've chosen are the clearest and least burdened with cosmology that I could find," Mr. Bolcom said. "I've been looking at these texts since I fell in love with them at 17. I thought that maybe they would make more sense sung than spoken. Singing spreads them out. When I read these poems aloud, they make a weird kind of sense. But people have gotten all 'aw, shucks' about reading poetry aloud today. It's like listening to a bank draft. T. S. Eliot was like that. Blake is kind of a gloss on Handel. His prophecies are the arias of their time." For decades, Mr. Bolcom has been a full-service composer, turning out some 300 symphonic works, chamber pieces and songs. Other larger pieces include the musical "Casino Paradise," a compulsively hummable latter-day "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," and three full-fledged operas, all commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago and shot through with the spirit of American popular song. The expressionist shocker "McTeague" (from the same Frank Norris novel that inspired Erich von Stroheim's silent film epic "Greed") might be Mr. Bolcom's "Wozzeck"; "A View From the Bridge" (after Arthur Miller's tragedy of a common man), his "Cavalleria Rusticana"; "A Wedding" (after the Robert Altman film), his "Nozze di Figaro." All three have been revived by Indiana University Opera and Ballet, in Bloomington; "A Wedding" was heard earlier this month. A glory of that score is the instrumental writing, which magically evokes bird song, reflections in a mirror and the hazy consciousness of a morphine addict. (A recurrent score marking is "fairy-light.") Social dances of all kinds weave through as infectiously as the waltzes of "Der Rosenkavalier." The cast of characters is large, yet each principal is etched sharply: among them, the physician who made his fortune buying and selling art by Pollock, de Kooning and Kline, whose names become his witty refrain. (Miller and Altman helped adapt their scripts, but the principal credit for all three librettos goes to Weinstein, also the lyricist for "Casino Paradise.") Mr. Bolcom's Symphony No. 9 is on the way, commissioned by 11 university concert bands. And his pace may soon accelerate, this being his final semester teaching composition at the University of Michigan, where he has worked since 1973. Throughout his career, Mr. Bolcom has been an academic, and few labels scare listeners off as effectively as that one. Previous university affiliations had been neither happy nor productive for him. "In a world where the draft didn't exist, I might happily have gone freelance in New York as a theater composer," Mr. Bolcom said, "but when the Selective Service hounds came after me, academic jobs saved me from having to kill Vietnamese (or help kill them). Michigan, where being a complete musician involves keeping up your performing abilities, was healthful in a way many places have not been in my estimation for young composers. Despite academic pressures, we have to remain musicians first and foremost, not verbal apologists for a particular aesthetic." Mr. Bolcom's vocal writing is catnip to singers of many persuasions, from his third wife, Joan Morris, a cabaret mezzo-soprano, to the veteran tenor Plácido Domingo, who gave the first performance of Mr. Bolcom's song cycle "Canciones de Lorca" in 2006. "Not only is Bill's music wonderfully colorful," Mr. Domingo said recently. "It is also completely logical because his melodic invention is based on the cadence of the sentence. Like the great song composers of the past, Bill is guided by the words. From personal experience, I can say that singing Bolcom's music is a joy." As a performer, Mr. Bolcom has proved similarly inspirational. A demon at the keyboard, he made his name during the ragtime revival of the late 1960s with his nimble hands and sparkling improvisations. In the mid-1970s, the concert and recording team of Bolcom and Morris began exploring American popular song, ranging forward and back from the vaudeville period. Combining archival research and oral history, Mr. Bolcom and Ms. Morris's scholarship is impeccable, but what audiences take away from their performances is their contagious delight in discovery. Steven Blier, of the New York Festival of Song, said recently that Mr. Bolcom and Ms. Morris's example changed his life. "My ethos about what it means to be onstage in front of people, to give people something with intelligence and heart and culture and depth, that really comes from Bill and Joan," Mr. Blier said. "Their performances were always so free. The spigot was just open. You could see what the song meant when it was new, what it means now and what it just meant." Mr. Bolcom's catholicity of taste set an example too. "Music doesn't have to be thorny or academic or frankly unpleasant to be worthy," Mr. Blier said. "Bill has always encouraged me not to feel guilty about loving all kinds of music but simply to follow my own loves to discover things and share them with people, which is what I think he did. He's been a beacon." In the worldview of Isaiah Berlin, Mr. Bolcom knows just where he stands. "I'm the ultimate fox," he said, "not a hedgehog. I can't help it. I don't know one big thing. I know lots of little things."

February 24, 2008 Out on Highway 61 By DAVE MARSH, NYTimes IN SEARCH OF THE BLUES By Marybeth Hamilton. Illustrated. 309 pp. Basic Books. $24.95. "In Search of the Blues" is not about the blues, or the people who made the blues. It's about people who made the dark side of blues music into what popular mythology calls "the Delta blues." Those people aren't singers or players but folk song scholars and record collectors. So Marybeth Hamilton believes. She organizes her book around the personal stories of five people or groups of people. The first three — Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, and John and Alan Lomax — are scholars. The last two groups — Frederic Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith and William Russell, followed by James McKune and the acolytes called the Blues Mafia — are collectors. Most of the scholars are older. The collectors are more obsessed. Hamilton's position is that these scholars and collectors — all of them white, all of them educated, all of them middle-class — are the people who determined our understanding of the Delta blues (a k a country blues). That is, the musical similarities and differences among Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf — all of them black, none of them educated, all of them poor — can be excluded from such a discussion, except in the way they affected the thinking of the scholars and collectors. "Here our view of the singer is obscured by the presence of the narrator," Hamilton writes. But as she tells the story, the singer is obliterated. Hamilton, who teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is the author of a book about Mae West, ignores the lineage of heavy beats and a common pool of lyrical imagery. She does not even bother to state and then dismiss the notion that there is something in the content of the music that led to its image as profound and unsettling. Instead, she describes the blues as an idea that developed as the result of a search for a pure aesthetic expressed by primitive African-Americans untainted by the modern world. The seekers, some in the service of white supremacy, some operating under the banner of Popular Front proletarianism, some in the thrall of art for art's sake, hoped to locate the one true voice of the Negro in the deepest, darkest South. The map of this multigenerational pursuit doesn't show Highways 61, 55 and 49; it's a more mythic path revealed only to a studious elite. The Delta blues survive not because of the talent and emotional depth of the music makers, but because of the image of them that was constructed by the scholars and collectors. In that light, let's tell a familiar story: Eric Clapton was spurred to an obsession by a bootleg tape of Robert Johnson, on which he thought he heard an amazingly creative guitarist with a haunting voice and strikingly original ways of framing blues imagery. But the sounds were merely the foundation on which a concept had been established by the Blues Mafia and its predecessors. Hamilton's neatest trick, perhaps, is simply to write out of the story any alternate routes to what Clapton and others wound up experiencing. She does this not only by displaying an aversion to any extended discussion of music and musicians, but also by omitting incidents that portray a different trajectory. Consider Robert Johnson. He became famous in the North because he was the missing performer at the 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert, missing because he had died. Hamilton does not mention Spirituals to Swing, although she does several times mention the show's promoter, John Hammond. Hamilton writes that Hammond, like the blues fanatics Ramsey and Smith, believed that "a distinctly black, defiantly proletarian art form" needed to be nurtured "in an era when ... jazz had been tamed, sweetened and commodified, with white performers like Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman praised as its consummate practitioners." Not only did the real John Hammond feature Benny Goodman's band in Spirituals to Swing, the whole purpose of the night's program was to show that jazz had grown from solid roots in Negro culture, that its modern incarnations were vital in part because they came directly from those roots, and that its power spoke to and could be interpreted by all kinds of people, not just black ones. That's the best competing argument of how the blues aesthetic has been transmitted: through the evolution of a specific culture — segregated from the American mainstream not by choice but by law and custom — that time and again, from spirituals to hip-hop, goes off like a bomb when it's been more widely exposed. One of the distinguishing characteristics of "In Search of the Blues" is that virtually no black voice is heard. (The page-and-a-half exception is a characteristically vituperative letter written by Zora Neale Hurston to John Lomax.) John Work III is not a figure in this tale, even though as a second-generation black musicologist, he was Alan Lomax's partner and guide in a project to record blues in the Delta in the early 1940s. Lomax never credited Work, but recent research has established him as at least Lomax's equal in the study. Hamilton gives him but two passing mentions, neither of which even alludes to Lomax's dishonesty. At least Work is mentioned. Some important black writers, including Clyde Woods and Amiri Baraka, are not recognized at all. Those writers are not concerned with purity and primitivism in the blues — unsurprisingly, since they know the demeaning light in which such terms cast black culture. "In Search of the Blues" is at best frustrating and sometimes infuriating. It may seem to come out of left field, but it's actually one of the clearest examples of the revival of interest in writing about folk music spurred by the "Old, Weird America" chapter in Greil Marcus's "Invisible Republic." Marcus told the story of the collector Harry Smith in a book mostly concerned with music. Smith got all the attention. His "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952) has now been succeeded, in various forms, by what amounts to a continuing Harry Smith Project. "In Search of the Blues" brings the process to its culmination by making the music invisible and all but irrelevant. Hamilton spends pages on John Lomax's twitchings as he tried to avoid making his white-supremacist ideas congruent with the conditions endured by black prisoners in the South. Here Hamilton takes sides, using a few quotations from the writer and song collector John Henry Faulk to dismiss the significance of Lomax's racial attitudes. Later, she terms Lomax's lie that he never saw a black chain gang "muted ... criticism." To the perspective of Leadbelly, Lomax's discovery and near chattel, she devotes one paragraph. The book's final two pages describe James McKune's descent into living on skid row among "junkies, hookers and derelicts," without ever mentioning mental illness as a possible cause. In conclusion, Hamilton compares McKune's demise — murdered in a hotel room by what the police assumed must have been a sex partner — with the death of Robert Johnson, reputedly poisoned by a jealous husband. But she is apparently thinking not just of their similar manner of death but of what she believes was a similar manner of life, each of them an "alienated drifter, scorning the pull of the marketplace, uncorrupted to the very end." A writer who finds a bohemian version of a fairy-tale ending in such circumstances is a rare thing, and for good reason. Dave Marsh is writing a book about why "American Idol" is evil.

Teo Macero Using the studio as instrument

anything for you david! Thanks!

No, but I should. I'll add it to the wish list! Coryell has done a bunch of duos and trios. Thanks.

Man, I'm really enjoying this one. There just aren't enough guitar duet albums.

Maybe you could change the title of the thread to Jerry Bergonzi? New album with him on it.

Nuttree Quartet - Standards 2008 March 18 Release. A modern supergroup of some of the hottest jazz players around releases their debut album led by the legendary John Abercrombie on Guitar with Gary Versace - Hammond B3 organ, Jerry Bergonzi - Tenor Sax and Adam Nussbaum - Drums. They are friends who have all played together before, but never all at once in the same group. Tracks are: Our Love Is Here To Stay, Come Sunday, Footprints, Sometime Ago, Witchcraft, Israel, Eronel, All Or Nothing At All, 12 Bars To Go and the Coltrane classic Naima.

Great pictures, 7/4. I don't remember snow like that for over a decade! Credit goes to the NYTimes! The old Tower Records at E4th and Broadway is a long block away to the South.

An Odd Couple, in Character and in Harmony Enrico Rava on Thursday night at Birdland, where he performed a jazz program with the pianist Stefano Bollani By BEN RATLIFF, NYTimes There are no casting directors in jazz, but sometimes you see a pair of musicians who could have been brought together by one: for example, Enrico Rava and Stefano Bollani, the Italian trumpeter and pianist. Late on Thursday night at Birdland, they performed a few songs by themselves to open a set, and their notes and even their rests had character. Mr. Bollani kept a steady, impatient motor in his right hand, giving the songs their rhythm and dynamics; Mr. Rava draped warm melody over them, giving his individual notes a glow or a bitterness. But even in a language beyond music, that of gestures and body language, they embodied basic character opposites. They formed an odd couple we might see in movies: Mr. Bollani, 35 — who in fact has a sideline career in Italy as a comedian — played fidgety compulsion; Mr. Rava, 68, played a silvery hippie, all sageness and whispers. A couple of Mr. Rava's pieces had explicit connections to film. One was written to suggest Fellini; another, "In Search of Titina," was dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, and in its jerky, stop-and-start, staccato motions Mr. Bollani really showed his skill, as well as his sense of history. Hands working in frenetic coordination, he seemed to be connecting very old and very recent languages of jazz, from Fats Waller to Don Pullen to Brad Mehldau. (The song can be found on a duo album by the two musicians, "The Third Man," just released by ECM.) But even three songs in, when the duo became a quartet with an American rhythm section — the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Paul Motian — the Italians kept a semblance of their dramatic characters within the group, without being restricted by them. They played older songs of Mr. Rava's, with sweet and witty melodies: he is a true songwriter, and this band demonstrated an earthy, elegant, funny kind of jazz, without intending to be difficult. In "Secrets," a ballad, Mr. Rava began a solo, the rhythm section went into double time, and his aggression came forward: he played loud, short, pointed phrases, and Mr. Bollani and Mr. Motian locked into a groove. Another excellent piece, "Algir Dalbughi," was a kind of lampoon boogie-woogie pinned together by Mr. Grenadier's walking bass line; the band almost took it apart, with Mr. Bollani's drifting chords and Mr. Motian's freer and freer sketching of four-to-the-bar rhythm. They closed with a song called "Happiness Is to Win a Big Prize in Cash," an orderly 32-bar waltz, and it was Mr. Motian's moment. He played a loose, one-chorus solo on the drums and cymbals that observed the curve of the theme, from beginning to end. He treated the song as a song, and he was disarmingly simple about it.

Please save the intimate conversations for a pm Bucky. That seems bit tough - it's not that personal! One minute it a discussion about cookies, the next it's "do you come here often?"...so, uh...Kenny, what's your favorite color?

Please save the intimate conversations for a pm Bucky.

There's others? Of course there are others, but he just has probably the best tone and approach that I've heard from a jazz violinist in quite some time. Name another jazz violinist who's well known and performing now.

The Tao of Esteban Confounding all his critics, an aging Scottsdale lounge guitarist transforms himself into the heartthrob of TV's Home Shopping Network By Gilbert Garcia Published: September 21, 2000 The immensely popular Tempe-based flamenco guitarist usually spends about three months recording an album, but, for reasons that have more to do with marketing than art, he's given himself only a week to cut an ambitious double CD, called At Home With Esteban. It's a Friday afternoon, day five of recording, but the days and hours have begun to blur at the Sound Lab, a state-of-the-art studio nestled behind an allergy lab in south Tempe. All week, Esteban has followed the same grueling schedule: get to the studio at 10 a.m., lay down tracks for 16 hours, go home at 2 a.m. Recording should have been completed by now, but Esteban has decided to cut one final tune, a solo version of an old Russian folk song that, in English form, provided Mary Hopkin with the 1968 hit "Those Were the Days." Normally, he has sheet music to work from, but since this song is a late addition, he's having to rely on a skeletal chord chart -- and his own memory. If one of his many devoted fans walked into the Sound Lab today, they probably wouldn't recognize him. Seeing him in street clothes is a bit like catching KISS' Gene Simmons without his platform boots and makeup.Onstage, Esteban is the personification of the dark, mysterious Latin lover. He dresses in all-black Zorro ensembles, with a bolero hat and impenetrable shades. Whenever he tilts his head down in deep concentration, it's easy to imagine that he's younger than his 52 years. His right hand sports long, acrylic fingernails that dance across his guitar strings with dramatic tremolo flourishes. In the minds of his fans, he's Rudolf Valentino and Antonio Banderas rolled into one, and wrapped in Ricardo Montalban's rich Corinthian leather. But the guitarist sitting in the recording booth at the Sound Lab with his foot propped on two Yellow Pages books is not Esteban the stage persona. He's Stephen Paul, the blue-collar gringo kid from Pittsburgh with hippie affectations. He wears a gray tee shirt, navy blue shorts and white athletic socks, but no shoes. His long blond hair is bundled in a ponytail. He refers to everyone he meets as "bro." Periodically, he lifts his shades to look at his chart, squinting like an old man trying to decipher a road sign. He makes a few practice passes at "Those Were the Days," then decides he's ready. "I'll probably screw it up, but let's try it," he softly grumbles to house engineer B Gerdes. Sure enough, he struggles through seven or eight takes, botching a few performances by scraping his nails across the strings. Finally, with a note of exasperation that's rare for this placid man, he blurts out, to no one in particular: "What am I doing?" The answer is simple. Esteban is punishing himself with this breakneck schedule because, after nearly half a century of devoting himself to the guitar, his career is suddenly accelerating beyond his wildest dreams, and he doesn't dare slam on the brakes. Last November, Esteban made his first national television appearance on QVC, pitching his musical wares alongside the Miracle Mop, the Marie Osmond fine porcelain doll collections and the gaudy pink pendants that are the lifeblood of the home-shopping industry. He wasn't the first musician to market his product on TV. People like Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie had already experienced moderate success with it. But Rogers and Richie were already established names. Esteban was a nobody, a star only to the devoted cult that repeatedly returned to the lobby bar of Scottsdale's Hyatt Regency, where he'd slowly built a worshipful following over the last decade. To the astonishment of many in the home-shopping biz, Esteban was an immediate sensation at QVC, quickly selling more than 100,000 CDs. He's since moved on to the Home Shopping Network, and two months ago, after a rapturously received debut appearance on the network, he sold 56,000 CDs in one week, simultaneously placing two of his albums in the Top 54 of the Billboard 200 album chart. Incredibly, a middle-aged instrumental artist with no record-label support, minimal radio airplay and negligible press interest had outsold Limp Bizkit and Celine Dion. The Esteban phenomenon is also a business coup for his self-created local label, Daystar Productions. Only folk-punk troubadour Ani DiFranco, with her Righteous Babe imprint, can rival his success at moving product without relying on the muscle of the record industry. But DiFranco built her following with the help of stacks of glowing reviews and positive buzz from her peers. When Esteban is not being ignored by other musicians, he's generally being ridiculed, accused of taking classical guitar techniques and dragging them through the mire of cheesy song selections ("Don't Cry for Me Argentina," "Happy Trails") and bland new-age arrangements. "I'd put him in the category of a John Tesh: easy-listening music without harmonic or rhythmic complexity," says Eric Bart, a local jazz guitarist. "And something that's very, very heavily marketed." Bart is one of several local musicians who cringe at the mention of Esteban's name, and they're all quick to emphasize that it's neither sour grapes nor their considerable dislike of his music that fuels their animosity. What really gets up their noses is the way Esteban has spent the last decade milking his murky 1970s association with the late, legendary classical-guitar master Andrés Segovia. Although the only evidence of his studies with Segovia is a photograph and a brief, autographed note that Segovia wrote to him, Esteban has rarely missed an opportunity to invoke the name of his beloved "maestro." He's repeatedly claimed to be one of only 14 guitarists in the world endorsed by Segovia, a number unsupported by any factual evidence, and even says that he began using the name Esteban (Spanish for "Stephen") because that's what Segovia called him. Cynics are quick to note that this appropriation of Segovia's reputation didn't begin until after the Spanish classical-guitar virtuoso died in 1987, and therefore could no longer speak for himself. "It's disrespectful. It's like pissing on his grave," Bart says. Frank Koonce, music professor and director of guitar studies at Arizona State University, agrees with Bart. "Segovia dedicated his life to elevating the guitar to the stature of a serious concert instrument, and he had a disdain for popular and commercial music," Koonce says. "With regard to Esteban, I think it is fine that he has found a formula for success with his brand of popular music. However, I think it is inappropriate for him to use Segovia's name as though it is an endorsement of what he is doing." If it's hard to imagine Segovia embracing Esteban's Latin-lite sound, at the very least, Esteban does share his hero's all-consuming work ethic. He's scrambling to ready his next album for the holiday season, because HSN is already preparing a big campaign to coincide with its release. He must finish mixing the disc on a Monday night, because on Tuesday morning he's flying to New York for two weeks to talk business with several major record labels who are awed by his power to reach the housewives of middle America. As soon as he gets back to the Valley, he must prepare for another round of HSN showcases, a performance at the Arizona Biltmore and a concert at Scottsdale Center for the Arts. "I don't have any furniture, I don't have a girlfriend, I don't have time for anything but music," he says, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. "I'm a weird guy. I don't have any of the normal things." Esteban's contention that he owns no furniture is slightly exaggerated, but the interior of his pink stucco, two-story Tempe home does have a slapdash quality about it. Books are scattered all over the floor, and his living room has little room for anything but instruments, amplifiers and a Harley-Davidson pinball machine. His upstairs office is more like a storage room, where CDs, press packets and sheet music are stacked on tables. It's Saturday, the day after Esteban completed recording his album. Because another band booked the Sound Lab for the day, he'll have to wait until tomorrow to begin mixing the tracks. So he has a rare day off. He tries to unwind. "Where's my Mozart? I always have Mozart playing," he mumbles as he walks into the study. The moment you enter the room, it hits you. Up on the wall is a mammoth framed photo of Esteban with Segovia, taken sometime in the mid-'70s. The two men are sitting on a couch. Esteban has long black hair, parted down the middle in a manner that makes him look like '70s teen idol Shaun Cassidy. He's holding a guitar in his left hand, and he's got a giddy smile on his face. Segovia, well into his 80s, looks old and frail. He's leaning back on the couch like he's about to fall asleep. His face is a blank page. The picture dwarfs everything in the house, and not just physically. After all, the spirit of Segovia has dwarfed everything in Esteban's life since he was a child. Esteban was born Stephen Paul, the first of four children, to a Pittsburgh steel-mill worker and his wife. "It was a blue-collar atmosphere and there wasn't a lot of culture," he recalls. "The only thing that was good was when I went to visit my uncle George. He was always playing music. He was a great clarinet player. He loved Benny Goodman and all the '40s swing stuff. "He always put on Segovia or flamenco guitarists like Vicente Gomez. I always heard these songs and liked the feeling and the sound of the guitar and the big old stereo he had with a 15-inch speaker. It was the coolest thing and it sounded so great." It was Esteban's uncle who bought him his first guitar, a nylon-stringed Goya ("the same one they used in The Sound of Music"), at the age of eight and a half. "That cost my uncle a couple hundred bucks, and that was a lot of money back then. A lot of times kids get guitars and they're hard to play, so they give up. But that was a dream to play." He says that he taught himself to play well enough to win talent shows at his parochial school. By the time he started taking lessons, at the age of 12, he was already teaching other kids how to play, charging $3 for a half-hour. The only interest that could compete with music was baseball. He says he was a promising pitcher, but at the age of 12 he was blinded in his left eye by a screaming line drive. From then on, all he had was the guitar. After high school, he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University, where he double majored in English and music. During the same period, he says, he taught 150 guitar students a week and found time to play in clubs at night. He'd progressed as a player over the years, but he says no one in Pittsburgh could teach him the authentic classical guitar skills that he craved. He knew that he needed to study with the best in the world: Andrés Segovia. Born in 1893, Segovia had practically defined the instrument since the 1920s, not only adapting much of the classical repertoire for guitar, but also playing with a virtuosity which had never before been heard from the instrument. He approached the guitar with a near religious sense of commitment, stubbornly refusing to allow concert microphones to be placed near his guitar, for fear that it would spoil the acoustic purity of his sound. "I had this insatiable drive to study with Segovia," Esteban says. "Everybody tried to study with him and very few got to. The waiting lines were immense. So it was disheartening. I couldn't figure out a way to study with him." After graduating from college, Esteban moved to Los Angeles, where he began avidly pursuing his idol. For two years, he sent unsigned notes to every hotel at which Segovia was staying. The message was always the same: "My life is meaningless unless I can study under you." In 1972, he finally met Segovia in L.A. The details of the encounter have varied a bit, depending on whom Esteban is telling the story to. Most often, he says that he impersonated a courier, knocked on Segovia's hotel-room door and was rebuffed by a suspicious road manager. When Segovia came to the door, Esteban repeated the message he'd written on his cards, and Segovia shouted, "It's you, it's you." However, in a 1998 interview with Scottsdale Magazine, Esteban offered a different account of the meeting, saying, "Finally, [segovia] looks me up in L.A., knocks on my door, and I greet him with the same phrase. He says, 'So you're the one.'" This discrepancy is only one of the puzzling components of Esteban's relationship with Segovia. Esteban says that after nervously playing for Segovia, the master gave him a list of music to study. A year later, when Segovia was back in L.A., they hooked up again, and Segovia invited him to Spain. He says he took part in Segovia's master classes in Santiago and was invited by Segovia for private classes at the guitar legend's home in Madrid. "He would only teach once in a while, but one class with Segovia could last you three years," he says. "He would just stop me in the middle of tunes. As soon as he heard an imperfection or an incorrect analysis or a wrong note, he would just stop you, look for a moment, and point out what it was. Then he would play it himself. The next hour or hour and a half would be like that. So I'd study for the next two or three weeks." Esteban says he studied with Segovia, off and on, for five years, splitting his time between Spain and California. In Spain, he often stayed at youth hostels for four dollars a day, earning money by playing in flamenco clubs or busking on the street. He says Segovia, the classical purist, objected to his playing flamenco music. "The only thing that bothered me about Segovia was he didn't like flamenco music, and that's the real essence of the folk and peasant music of his country," Esteban says. "So I asked him about it. Well, he had a little ego, and he talked about it. He was the father of the classical guitar and here's this kid asking him about it. He's ready to hit me over the head with his guitar case. So I learned my place from that." In 1976, Esteban got married in Los Angeles. Two years later, while Segovia was in California, Esteban obtained a note from the master. Segovia signed a copy of his then-new autobiography, adding the following message: "To Stephen Paul, who loves the guitar and the guitar loves him -- an artist." It was a modest compliment, particularly considering that Segovia was known to be very generous with his fans. But Esteban has used this simple message as proof that he was "endorsed" by Segovia, and has made it a crucial part of his mystique. The implication is that Esteban is the heir to Segovia's legacy, carrying it into the 21st century by delivering music "for the new global awareness," as his Web site proclaims. The problem is that most musicians don't buy it. Chris McGuire, president of the Fort Worth Classical Guitar Society, studied with Segovia and says he saw him sign autographs for countless people. "There are literally thousands of autographs like that out there," McGuire says of Esteban's note from Segovia. "There is a very clear distinction between signings on memorabilia and his actual written endorsements." Local classical guitarist Chris Hnottavange agrees: "No doubt, hundreds of people have received autographs from Segovia or have had pictures taken with him. It's unlikely that that alone carries the weight of a special endorsement." McGuire says he once saw an attractive young female guitarist approach Segovia for an autograph. Segovia flirted with her and wrote a note that praised her guitar work, although he'd never even heard her play. Although there is no doubt that Esteban met Segovia, many musicians question whether he was as close to the master as he claims. They point out that Esteban is not mentioned in any of Segovia's biographies and never received the kind of public acknowledgements that Segovia reserved for his true favorites. For example, Segovia wrote of John Williams, one of his most talented disciples: "A prince of the guitar has arrived in the musical world. . . . God has laid a finger on his brow, and it will not be long before his name becomes a byword in England and abroad, thus contributing to the spiritual domain of his race." Williams subsequently asked his record company and management not to use the quote, because he didn't want to ride Segovia's coattails. Another Segovia favorite was Eliot Fisk, whom he described as "one of the most brilliant, intelligent and gifted young musical artists of our time." After Segovia's death, his widow, Emilia, specifically asked Fisk to record some newly discovered compositions by her late husband. Esteban argues that he doesn't like to make a big deal about his "endorsement" from Segovia. Pointing to the handwritten note, he says, "That's what all the little guitar critics around the world wish they had. But I don't even care. I don't say anything about this unless somebody asks. It's a personal thing." Such a statement appears disingenuous, to say the least. Every piece of publicity surrounding Esteban, every interview he's given and every appearance on the home-shopping channels has been dominated by references to Segovia. What's most galling to Segovia loyalists like Bart -- who says his life was transformed at the age of 12 when his dad took him to see the master in concert -- is the way Segovia's name was appropriated for the Hyatt's drink menu, which cited Esteban as "one of 14 guitarists in the world endorsed by the legendary Andrés Segovia." In an August 7 front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, Esteban conceded that he doesn't know how he arrived at that number or who else is on the list. When asked about his critics, he says he won't utter anything negative about another musician. But he does offer a passive-aggressive jab at Bart, a musician he says he's never met. "He's so frustrated," Esteban says. "The guy's working for 40 or 50 bucks a night. He's pissed off, so he says, 'Esteban plays elevator music. It's the worst shit in the world.' People can say that if they want, but usually people don't feel that way." Esteban's musical direction changed drastically, and irrevocably, in 1980. He says he'd spent the previous two years playing straight classical music, touring colleges, and making between $600 and $700 a night. "I wanted to do other things, but I didn't dare tread off the path that Segovia had laid for me." In 1978, after suffering through a frightening Southern California earthquake, he sold his house and moved his wife, Jackie, and his young daughter Teresa (the first of his three children) to Phoenix. Two years later, he was driving north on Third Street at McDowell at 1 a.m. with his mother, whom he had just picked up at the airport. A drunk driver going south at 60 miles an hour smashed into the driver's side of Esteban's car, fracturing his ribs, knocking his teeth out and rendering his one good eye resistant to bright light. He says he spent a month in the hospital, but even as he slowly recuperated, he couldn't regain his ability to play. Nerve damage had left him with no feeling in his fingertips. With a wife and two young daughters, and no way of supporting them, he applied for a variety of jobs. "Nobody would hire me," he says. "I was this long-haired hippie-looking guy, although I never did drugs. So I tried to cut my hair short. "I went into sales to make money. I sold energy-management systems, I sold solar systems for Reynolds Aluminum, and I was very successful at it. I ended up running a franchise dealership for Reynolds Aluminum. I did pretty well, but I was so unhappy. I felt like I was going to explode inside, so I put everything into business." He says that in 1988, a combination of acupuncture and Chinese herbs brought back the feeling in his fingers. By the end of 1989, he'd started playing a few gigs. But his approach was different than it had been a decade earlier. "After that car crash, an enlightening thing happened," he says. "I said, 'I don't give a damn about precedent. I'm going to play music for anybody that I want to and I'll play any kind of music that I love.' And since I love all these kinds of music, that's what I do: I play everything from love songs to bossa nova, jazz, world music, classical music, flamenco, and I mix it all up." He began playing at the Hyatt Regency at Gainey Ranch. Initially, he'd play Sunday brunches for three people and a bunch of empty chairs. But, even early on, if there was a convention happening, he'd draw a huge crowd, and the reaction was usually enthusiastic. He started playing five nights a week, five hours a night. In 1991, he released the first of his nine CDs. In 1992, he added keyboardist Robert Brock to the mix. It was his first step in putting together a band, which now also includes drums, bass and trumpet. Brock, whom Esteban described in a 1995 concert video as "my best friend in the music world," had played in a series of Top 40 bands and gotten burned out on the local bar scene. But playing with Esteban rekindled his enthusiasm for music. "His gig at the Hyatt was a totally different vibe," the 30-year-old Brock says. "It was awesome. As far as a musician having a steady gig in town, there was absolutely no better gig to have." As audience response became more boisterous, the Hyatt began to promote him. They sold his CDs in their gift shops and paid for full-color ads in trade magazines. On the rare occasions when Esteban performed at concert venues, he found that about half of his audience would buy his CDs, an unheard of figure in the music business. "Locally, he's always had a good following, but you always wondered whether he could take this to a much bigger level," Brock says. "And one thing I've always known about him is that when you see him live it's a very different experience from what you hear on the records. "It's very difficult to capture that whole vibe and persona that he has. I've always known that when people see him, they immediately fall in love with him." Last year, Esteban's name came to the attention of Joy Mangano, a popular QVC fixture who'd invented household accessories like the Miracle Mop and the Rolykit closet organizers. A fan of Esteban's kept telling her that the guitarist was ripe for stardom and would be an ideal addition to her company, Ingenious Designs LLC. Mangano wasn't interested in working with a musician, but after she heard one of his CDs, she was intrigued enough to fly from New York to Atlanta to see Esteban play at the Hyatt. "Everybody I watched, everybody who came into the hotel stopped and sat down," says the 44-year-old Mangano. "He was just so captivating. It was really mind-boggling to think that 10 fingers could do that. I instantly knew that if you could get it across on TV, he'd be hugely successful." Convincing the executives at QVC was a bigger hurdle. No one at the network believed that an unknown musician could be successful with home shoppers. So Mangano organized an Esteban concert in one of the network's West Chester, Pennsylvania studios. She invited QVC execs, but didn't tell them what they were going to be hearing. She says they immediately sensed the same power that had captivated her in Atlanta. "His appeal is what made Elvis Elvis," she says. "There's a star quality, a charisma. Included with the talent, there's a picture that goes with it. It's the ability to take an audience and truly mesmerize them." Weeks after his history-making November appearance on QVC, Home Shopping Network bought Mangano's company, including Esteban. So, after the six-month non-compete period that was in his QVC contract, he made his debut at HSN on June 29. The network packaged together his two most recent albums, Heart of Gold and All My Love, as a $24.50 special discount deal. The prospect of playing with cameras whirring and TV hosts bopping to the wrong beat would be unsettling for many musicians, but Esteban's years of experience at the Hyatt pay off mightily on HSN. He comes across as relaxed yet enthused, and his band -- which recently added former Tower of Power trumpet player Jesse McGuire -- is a solid, efficient unit. On June 29, the group romped through slightly shortened versions of Esteban staples like "Malagueña" and "Don't Cry for Me Argentina," sat for interviews with a chirpy female host and took gushing calls from devoted fans. In two sets of appearances on the network, Esteban sold an estimated 132,000 CDs. He says he sells his CDs to Mangano's company for "a couple of dollars each," she sells them to HSN for about two dollars' profit, and they sell them to home shoppers for $10-$12 a pop. It's not a perfect setup, but it's still a better percentage deal than most artists have with major labels, and it's provided Esteban with several hundred thousand dollars in the last year alone. "It's not that I haven't sold a lot of CDs before this, because I have," he says, adding that his record label has moved a million units domestically over the last nine years. "But I've never been on TV. This is the thing I've always dreamed about, to find a way to sell my product, to get my music out there so people can buy it easily." Esteban likes to say that there's no precedent for the kind of music he's making, that it's a revolutionary ethnic fusion of styles. But if Esteban's musical approach owes a debt to anyone, it's not Segovia, or some modern world-beat artist. It's Liberace, the patron saint of Vegas kitsch. Liberace, like Esteban, was a classically trained musician who realized there was more money to be made doing frilly, pseudo-classical versions of lightweight pop songs than attempting to compete with serious concert pianists. While Esteban convincingly argues that he started playing pop music because he genuinely liked it, some of his detractors suggest that practicality played a part in the move. They doubt that he would have ever been able to make a mark on the classical world. "One has to realize the playing field," Bart says. "There are 12-year-old kids who are virtuosos compared to Esteban. At best, he's a remedial classical guitarist." Liberace's bejeweled costumes and trademark candelabras may have made him a joke to serious music aficionados, but his power was with the silent majority, which didn't care about musical authenticity, but simply wanted to be entertained. This same crowd gasps at Esteban's every glissando. "I can't tell you how many times people have come up and said, 'I've never even listened to music, but I really find that I can listen to this all the time,'" Brock says. One of those fans, a woman from Pennsylvania, called into QVC last November during Esteban's showcase. She asked the host: "Is that the most exciting and sexy music you've ever heard?" The woman said she'd seen him for the first time in Scottsdale, and was so impressed that the following year she rerouted a vacation so she could see him perform again. The Esteban experience was a bit less exhilarating for Devon Bridgewater, a jazz musician who played violin and trumpet for Esteban for four and a half years, until he was fired by the guitarist. "It was one of the most embarrassing situations I was ever in as a musician," Bridgewater says. "Because other musicians would walk into the lobby after working in different parts of the hotel, and they'd just look at me and shake their heads, like, 'How can you be doing that, man?'" He says when Esteban went through a 1996 divorce, he asked Bridgewater a few questions about his own divorce, but aside from that, Esteban never opened up to him. "I never went to his house, I never knew where he lived," Bridgewater says. "And we never rehearsed. When we went in for a recording session, I never got to hear any of the playbacks, and I was never invited to any of the mixdown sessions. When I heard it, it was already packaged, and there were a lot of things I thought I could have done better." As for Esteban's musicianship, Bridgewater acknowledges that the guitarist "has got a good right hand," but says he's limited in his ability to improvise with his previously injured left hand, and as a result, the musical arrangements tend to be mind-numbingly repetitive. Bridgewater also found Esteban's song introductions to be rife with questionable anecdotes. "He'd say, 'This song was found in an archaeological dig in Egypt in the '20s and we found it and have written it out.' And it was just some kind of minor scale. I mean, there's no notation from Egypt. He'd tell people some song was found on a piece of papyrus in the temple of the gods. I don't know how people bought into it." Bridgewater says in 1998, Esteban contacted him on his pager and fired him, with no warning. He offered the standard "creative differences" rationale, but Bridgewater had a hard time believing it. "He said, 'I'm taking the band in a different direction,'" Bridgewater says. "But, after that, it was just the same old 30-minute versions of 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina.'" Esteban is a major record label's dream. He's a hard-working artist with a built-in following that isn't dependent on radio airplay or positive reviews. He says he's currently being courted by Warner Bros., Sony, Atlantic and Universal, among others. He can't decide whether he wants to sign with a major label, but he knows one thing for sure: He's tired of dealing with business issues. "I want to play, bro," he says. "I just want to play and write. I don't want to have anything else going on. Because life is so complicated, if you take on other things, it gets hard to focus." For someone so comfortable with the hard-sell hustle of home-shopping television, he gets remarkably cosmic when he talks about his music. "This is really a quiet voice in a world of noise and confusion," he says of his sound. "So it's something that's appropriate for the times. We're so bombarded by outside influences and by nonpeaceful entities, that it's really nice to have peace. And that's what it brings people. And that's what's gratifying. "The world is kind of like a penal colony at times. And one of the things that helps is beautiful music that people can relate to and think of good times in their lives." He talks about keeping up with musical tastes -- he says he's even written a hip-hop tune -- but one of his most endearing traits is actually his lack of understanding of contemporary music. When he talks about how he's started to get into "New Wave," you wonder if he's aware that the term hasn't been in vogue for two decades. As he reclines in his study and soaks in his Mozart, Esteban ponders for a moment, and recalls the last time he played for Segovia. He says Segovia listened, then pointed at him and said, "You will play for countless millions of people." Thinking about the recent splash he made in Billboard, Esteban says, "We were beating Def Leppard and all these rock bands. And I'm just a classical guitar player, turned eclectic. So Segovia's prophecy is turning out right."

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