We have lost a legend of acoustic flat-picking guitar.
It’s late, but more thoughts tomorrow, with personal remembrances.
[Sunday-morning update]
I saw him live several times. The first time, I think, was with the Grisman Quintet at McCabes in Santa Monica. He was later replaced in the band by fiddling prodigy Mark O’Connor, who is/was also an amazing guitarist. But the most memorable concert I saw him in was at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, about thirty years ago. It wasn’t just him, but Norman Blake and Doc Watson. It was like a pantheon of the flatpicking guitar gods.
He was an amazing innovator, in folk, bluegrass, and jazz, often integrating them. He picked up the fallen torch of Clarence White after he was killed in an auto accident while loading gear after a concert in Palmdale, CA. He bought White’s guitar, a Martin herringbone D-28 with an enlarged sound hole (the fretboard hung out over it), that gave it a unique tone. I wonder who will play it now?
[Update Sunday evening]
I was introduced to the music of Tony Rice in 1978 by a friend when I was living in Tucson (a philosophy major at the U of A, who was a great guitarist, who later went to work on AI at Los Alamos), but who while he loved the bluegrass (he loved Doc Watson, and did a hell of a version of Tennessee Stud), never got the jazz. I got the jazz.
Tony knew, in standard tuning, where every note was on the keyfretboard, and how to combine them for jazz chords, which is a hell of a lot harder to do on six strings than eighty eight.
[Update Thursday afternoon]
An elegy from Chris Eldridge.
[Bumped]
Assuming you meant “fretboard” above and are comparing guitar vs piano difficulty…(and you probably know the stuff I’ll mention below, but your other readers may not)
I play both guitar and piano, at an intermediate level, and…I think it’s more complicated than your comment. Guitar has a lot of difficult fine motor control requirements for clean fretting, bending (although jazz guitar typically has far fewer bends than blues or rock guitar), pull-offs, hammer-ons, etc. But for jazz tasks like playing over the changes (i.e., making your chords and solo improvisation be appropriate for the current part of the underlying chord progression), guitar has the advantage of its fretboard geometry – you can move common chord shapes around on the neck to get, say, a ninth chord built on any note of the chromatic scale.
On piano, I find improvising over changes more difficult than on guitar because I have to memorize the key signature for each chord in the progression and remember to apply that pattern of sharps or flats to each new section of the song. On guitar, you get that automatically just by moving to a new fret position, unless you want to take advantage of the sound of particular open strings (which I think is much more common in rock and blues, where you’re often trying to get a very specific tone). My piano teacher always encouraged me to play by intervals, but I find it much harder to do so on the piano keyboard, with the distinction between white and black keys, than on guitar with its matrix of frets and strings.
Also, I find piano demands much more hand independence than guitar. With guitar, the hands are performing different but closely related tasks, but on piano, especially jazz/blues/rock piano, the left hand is often holding down a bass rhythm while the right hand improvises over the changes. Non-trivial for me.
I’ll have to check out some of Mr. Rice’s work; the descriptions remind me a bit of the late Michael Hedges, one of my favorite acoustic guitarists.