Although the oud is traditionally played with an eagle’s
feather, eclectic multi-instrumentalist David Lindley prefers
finger picking the Middle Eastern lute instead. For Lindley, who
performs tomorrow night at Royce Hall in the Global Guitars
concert, an unusual approach to music is his typical key to
success.
Lindley has spent his life learning, perfecting, and performing
a diverse range of instruments such as the Hawaiian guitar,
bouzouki, Turkish saz, mandolin and other string instruments. But
to someone as musically skilled as he is, true genius requires more
than just mastery in an instrument, but creativity as well.
One example is the violin bow and guitar trick made famous by
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page in the early ’70s. Lindley
claims Page may have gotten the idea from Lindley’s 1960s
psychedelic rock band Kaleidoscope, which combined blues, flamenco,
Middle Eastern and folk music. After seeing Kaleidoscope in San
Francisco at the Avalon Ballroom during his residency with the
Yardbirds, Jimmy Page said in Zigzag magazine, “They’re
my favorite band of all time ““ my ideal band,” so it
isn’t too much of a stretch to assume Page had big eyes for
Lindley’s innovative use of the violin bow.
“People borrow from each other all the time,”
Lindley said. “It’s just one of those things.
There’s the viola da gamba ““ it can be considered a
guitar with frets and six strings that you play with a bow. All you
have to do is see one of those things once and then you look at a
guitar and you say, “˜Eh, “¦ you can do the same
thing.'”
Lindley actually first tried the bow technique on a banjo, the
instrument he played as a teenager in a bluegrass band in Southern
California. His practice habits were no less strange than his
techniques.
“I was literally a closet banjo player,” Lindley
said. “I would practice in my closet at my parent’s
house. I would get oxygen deprivation, and I had to come out and
breathe for a little bit and then go back in because I had a really
good and loud banjo. It gradually took me over; it possessed
me.”
Friday’s performance, which will include percussionist
Wally Ingram, Madagascar guitarist D’Gary and oudist John
Bilezikjian, is a chance for Lindley and his collaborators to
showcase their talent for mixing music from a broad array of
cultures using both traditional and modern instruments.
From the start, Lindley was exposed to a wide array of genres.
In his youth, he listened to classical flamenco guitar, classical
Indian music from his father’s record collection, the radio
hits of Little Richard and the bluegrass music of Lester Flatt.
Lindley’s interest in blending genres came naturally through
the similarities he saw in them.
“Appalachian music, banjo tunes and Turkish folk music and
the saz, it’s very similar,” Lindley said. “They
all are related; they could have originated in Africa or Central
Asia or China, and then there were variations of them and then
variations on the variations, so it must have started pretty
simply, but now we have all this other stuff.”
After having experimented with music himself, Lindley sees
sub-genres of modern music in simple terms.
“It’s either good or it’s bad,” Lindley
said. “You know, the people are either serious about it and
they really love what they’re doing or they’re driven
to it and they have to do it. You can kind of tell the people that
are from the people that aren’t. The big difference is
between corporate music and not-corporate music. It’s like
lip-synching in a video. There’s a lot of people that still
think that’s real, and it’s not.”
Global Guitars comes to Royce Hall on Nov. 21 at 8 p.m.
Student tickets are $17. For more information go to
www.uclalive.org.