continued from page 1


Calling itself the USC Guitar Quartet (neither the first nor last ensemble to bear that name), the fledgling group had begun performing at USC functions and neighborhood concerts, delivering the Romeros repertoire in its best Romeros imitation. County arts-enrichment programs dispatched them to dozens of elementary schools. “That’s how we cut our teeth as performers,” says Kanengiser, who rates kids the toughest of all audiences.

By the time Pepe Romero left USC in the mid ’80s, the quartet he’d groomed was concertizing locally and in Northern California, and beginning to make inroads on the East Coast. “We’d get in John [Dearman]’s Volvo wagon and just go,” Tennant recalls. “Sometimes we played for nothing; we slept on a lot of people’s floors for a very long time. It was cool – until you reach an age where sleeping on the floor really hurts,” he adds ruefully.

The satisfaction of making it as professional musicians mingled with humiliating indignities on those early road trips. There was the gig in Fresno, where the ensemble outnumbered its surly audience; the polytechnic high school that neighborhood thugs inexplicably pelted with rocks during one recital. And that unforgettable 1981 Hollywood Bowl debut, when the quartet was invited to open a Barry Manilow benefit with light Spanish fare. So what if the 18,000-strong crowd talked through the program? They got fired up over the flashy Falla concert-closer from La Vita Breve. A Romeros staple, it ends with a palmas section of rhythmically complex hand-claps accompanying the guitars. “Bill had a way of hamming it up like a cheesy Flamenco dancer,” Dearman recounts, smiling hard. The Bowl crowd misinterpreted this as an invitation for audience participation. “But they were clapping much too slowly, getting really off tempo. It got so loud we couldn’t hear each other on stage. We barely managed to finish the piece,” Dearman says. “That was one of the most bizarre experiences.”

Only slightly more bizarre, however, than the group’s first foreign tour – a five-week, 48-concert whirlwind through rural Mexico arranged by the Los Angeles cultural affairs department. “Everything was screwed up,” Dearman grins. One miserably hot night in a small town in Yucatan, the quartet played city hall with the doors and windows thrown open onto a tree-lined plaza. This time the audience behaved itself, but a flock of birds became unruly. “It was just awrrk, awrrk, awrrk,” crows Dearman. “These birds were going nuts! They drowned us out completely.”

Another concert, staged under the open cupola of a lovely adobe church, presented new technical challenges: playing guitar while dodging the droppings of pigeons roosting overhead. There was the time the quartet played in a movie theater – the house lights on, the stage in complete darkness. And the time they puffed clouds of cigarette smoke across the stage to fend off a swarm of mosquitoes.


On a rainy December afternoon in O’Henry’s, a swank Burbank recording studio, the LAGQ is winding up a week of daylong sessions, the end-product of which will be LAGQ: Latin, to be released in August. As the guitarists warm up, they’re getting better acquainted with “En Aranjuez,” an Andrew York composition hot off the inkjet, so to speak. Inspired by the ultimate guitar war-horse, Joaquin Rodrigo’s concerto of the same name, the final arrangement was finished only the night before.

Headphones on, their hand-made instruments cradled in their arms, the quartet members are relaxed and ready. Inside the mixing booth, producer Bob Wood rhapsodizes about the audio artillery trained on the foursome beyond the glass wall. Wood’s label, Telarc, has pulled out all the stops for this CD, experimenting with six-channel superaudio technology streaming directly to disc. This ensemble’s superfine sound warrants the extra attention, he implies. As the producer calls “Take 1,” six brawny speakers arrayed around the booth ripple distinct wood-timbred notes that coalesce in a cascade of sound.

Like prior LAGQ releases, the new CD has a theme: (Air and Ground and Labyrinth had been “world”; Evening in Granada, Spanish; For Thy Pleasure, Baroque.) Trust this ensemble of eclectic musicians, though, to buck stereotypes. They define Latin loosely: two Mexican-flavored dances by Aaron Copland and York’s quirky “Syzygy” for flute and guitars mix with more likely selections by 20th-century composers Astor Piazzola, Leo Brouwer and Eduardo Martín. A traditional flamenco “Sevillanas” and Bizet’s Carmen Suite (a sure crowd-pleaser) round out the tracks.

The quartet members make very few mistakes, adjusting their tone, correcting their dynamics, picking up the tempo on demand. Even so, take after take is required to nail “En Aranjuez.” A building fan automatically flips on, scratching the first take. Inaudible to the naked ear, a truck roaring down Magnolia Boulevard and an airplane overhead spoil two more takes. “Recording classical guitar and solo violin is very difficult,” explains Wood, who diligently marks up the score wherever it is marred by ambient noise or the occasional performance blemish. He offers stylistic pointers, too, calling for a ritardo, a fade-out, a bit more “punch” in guitars one and two, less volume in guitars three and four. The quartet accedes graciously. No creative tantrums or unchecked egos. No clear leader of the band either, though York has slightly more pronounced opinions concerning “En Aranjuez” – it is, after all, his composition.

So when Wood makes the 11th-hour suggestion of adding an instrumental cover of Sting’s “Fragile” to the playlist, no one freaks out. While Dearman and Tennant record a Flamenco duo, Kanengiser and York slip into another room to sound out the chords and harmonic voicings of the popular post-September 11 ballad. The tune represents a creative departure for the group: “Usually we’re very leery of covering vocal tunes, because they always sound kind of muzaky,” says Kanengiser, “but this one, we hope, sounds really good.”

The spontaneity of playing from chord charts rather than a score was another exciting first. “There’s an improvisational section where Andy took a solo and John followed in the bass part. I left the session walking on air,” recalls Kanengiser.

Selecting music is probably the ensemble’s most creative and conflict-riddled task. “We all have different slants,” says York, “and that’s what makes it so cool. We can trust each other. We don’t all agree; we’ll pull in different directions. It’s kind of exhilarating.”

For Tennant, the question of what music to transcribe boils down to this: Does it sound as good, if not better, on guitar? Here’s where Kanengiser’s genius comes in. With a keen ear for imitation and a talent for transcription, he’s responsible for most of the quartet’s arrangements and gets credit for nearly all the exotic guitar effects they’ve created. To simulate an Indonesian gamelan choir, he experimented first with paper clips, bits of film and tin foil before settling on alligator clips clamped onto the bass strings. Plastic twist-ties wrapped around the treble strings produced the felicitous effects heard in Air and Ground’s “Gongan.” For the clangy African sound of “Mbira,” he affixed staples to the strings.

The mission, as Kanengiser sees it, is to explore the guitar’s infinite possibilities. “There are more pieces to play than just “Leyenda,” or Bach, or Villa-Lobos,” he said in a 1997 Guitar Live Q&A. “I’m not saying that’s bad stuff to do. It’s great stuff! But the guitar … is a universal instrument. It can play music from almost any culture, almost any style, almost any form.”

When it comes to assigning guitar parts, the group is passionately democratic. Dearman’s seven-string gives him an expanded bass range, but that doesn’t mean he gets stuck with boring whole-note chords. Melodies pass from player to player, and parts shift so nobody’s stuck with second fiddle for long. Rhythms bounce back and forth too, as in “Cumba-Quin,” a conga-rumba meditation in which each guitarist at some point produces two separate and opposing rhythms simultaneously, one in each hand.

Why not? “We’re all playing the same instruments,” points out Kanengiser, “so any one of us at any given time can be doing the most important thing.”