”Matthew Montfort’s “Seven Serenades for Scalloped Fretboard Guitar” is an
impressive collection of meditative sonic excursions. Montfort currently
teaches music theory and guitar at the Blue Bear School of Music in San
Francisco. He has also recorded with legendary Bolivian panpipe master
Gonzalo Vargas and tabla extraordinaire Zakir Hussain. As the title aptly
suggests, this recording features the intricate nuances of a scalloped
fretboard acoustic, which has subtle qualities of both the Indian vina and the
steel string guitar. On the opening, “Gauri the Golden,” Montfort delicately
weaves Middle Eastern inspired motifs over opaque tonal layers provided by
Patty Weiss’s electric violin and Alan Tower’s didjeridu. “Celtic Raga” is an
interesting solo piece exploring the common ground found in Northern Indian
and Irish music. All of these contemporary ragas are pristinely recorded using
rich, lush reverb. Matthew Montfort is a true pioneer and master of the
scalloped fretboard acoustic and this recording is highly recommended for all
fans world music.” ��” James Scott, Minor7th.com
“The relationship between musicians and composers varies tremendously
from one world tradition to another. In European classical music, the
musician’s job is to play exactly what the composer says to play. That is why
when a European classical musician says the word “music,” he usually means
sheets of paper, not actual sound: “Put your music on the stand,” etc.
In Indian music, this relationship is dramatically reversed. A musician is
someone who makes music, in the sense of actual sound, not marks on paper.
Many teachers do use a form of written music, but it is regarded with
suspicion and usually only used to teach exercises. The preferred form of
teaching is having the student copy a melody directly with voice or
instrument. In the Karnatik music of South India, this fundamentally oral
tradition has preserved compositions by 18th century composers, who
dominate Karnatik music the way their contemporaries Mozart and Haydn
dominate European music. These Karnatik compositions, however, are
supplemented by long improvised passages, which means that the musician is
a creative artist, in addition to an interpretive artist.
In the Hindustani music of the North, the musician has even greater creative
responsibility. The “composer,” as understood in the West, does not exist at
all. A Hindustani raga is not a melody, but rather a set of rules, both firm and
flexible, which always create a similar mood, but are never “played the same
way twice.
Students learn fixed compositions from their teachers, and must play them
perfectly during the lesson. But the experienced musician must use those
compositions as raw material to create music on the spot, which must be both
completely new and firmly rooted in tradition.
This paradoxical blend of freedom and discipline was both appealing and a bit
frightening to guitarist and composer Matthew Montfort. He once had dreams
of becoming a classical sitarist and studied extensively at the Ali Akbar
College of Music. But Ali Akbar Khan was an understandably intimidating role
model. The patterns he taught in class were amazingly beautiful and
profound, but the ability to improvise great music based on those patterns
seemed to elude almost all of his western students.
Montfort concluded that he could not do his best work if he pretended that he
had grown up in a village in Maihar and only had one teacher. Northern
California was (and still is) home to music from almost everywhere: South
America, Bali, Africa, the Middle East, as well as North and South India.
Montfort decided to create a style he would call World Fusion music, which
would combine elements from all of these traditions. Stitching together all of
these different traditions could not be done instinctively and spontaneously. It
required careful musical scholarship and a discovery of connections between
styles that had developed in separate cultural universes. The kind of freedom
enjoyed by Hindustani musicians would not be possible. Instead, Montfort
became a master of arranging instruments that had never been played
together before. Although improvisation was frequent, it was usually allocated
to specific points in an otherwise fixed composition.
Montfort’s band, Ancient Future, sold hundreds of thousands of albums,
received rave critical notices, and won numerous awards. However, the trials
of managing an unclassifiable band inadvertently pushed him back to being
an improvisational musician. As his studio arrangements became richer and
more complex, it became harder to recreate them in live performance,
particularly as he began collaborating with international musicians with
worldwide concert commitments. Montfort was thus frequently required to
book whoever he could find and see what music came up. The good news was
that his decades of studying and performing so many different styles of music
gave him a depth of skill far beyond that of the young man who had once
decided he couldn’t be a classical sitarist. He could now respond to
unpredictable situations with completely fresh music created on the
spot��”music that deserved to be not only performed but recorded.
Montfort’s newest album, Seven Serenades, is remarkably similar to a classical
Hindustani improvised performance. There are brief guest spots featuring
supportive background performances of didjeridu, santoor, and violin, but
most tracks are single note melodies on guitar, accompanied by nothing but
an unobtrusive drone. The basic form of most of the tracks is the Hindustani
alap/jhor/jhala, that slowly explores every part of the selected scale, first with
no rhythm at all, then with a slowly increasing rhythmic pulse that builds to a
heavily strummed crescendo.
But although some of the scales on this album are based on traditional ragas,
they do not come from a single guru, but from every corner of Montfort’s
diverse musical history. “Celtic Raga” is based on the Hindustani scale khamaj,
known as mixolydian in the west, which is the basis for many Irish fiddle
tunes. Montfort’s interpretation starts by evoking a slow Celtic air, then
gradually falls into the structure of a dancing Irish reel as it picks up tempo.
“Lilalit” is built on the challenging scale of raga lalit. Montfort’s interpretation
combines the broad stark intervals of that raga to reveal jazzy chords that
sound dissonant at first, but are actually following a special kind of
consonance. “Purple Raga” unpacks the melodic rules contained within the
guitar riff of the famous Jimi Hendrix song “Purple Haze” and reveals some
powerful connections between Afro-American and Hindustani musical roots.
Because Montfort’s guitar has a scalloped fretboard, his fingers touch only the
strings, enabling him to produce ornaments more characteristic of the sitar.
This album reveals a thorough knowledge of Hindustani microtonal
ornaments, transferred in ways that create one of the most distinctive guitar
sounds in contemporary music. However, it also reveals a lifetime of
exploration in world music, which can be immediately summoned in a flash of
inspiration. When this level of mastery is reached, there is no need to rewrite.
The first improvisation has the depth of a reworked composition.” ��” Teed
Rockwell, INDIA CURRENTS
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