PAGE 2 • March 2022 •
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Sounds Of Syracuse
by Chuck Schiele
Kevin Roe – Eloquence in Guitar No tricks. No master plans. No BS. Just one man. One guitar. Fingerstyle guitar is an art that goes way back by way of its own tradition. Afterall, it’s probably pretty fair to assume that the guitar was developed prior to the development of the guitar pick. (Which means that the earliest guitarists never had to survive the misery of losing – and not being able to find their plectrum.) From classical players like...Scarlotti, Segovia...to...new agers such as the late Michael Hedges, Pierre Bensusan...to great jazzers like Paco de Luca and Alex De Grassi, the fingerstyle approach to the guitar is always in transformation. It is one of the last – in my humble opinion – hands-on arts going today. One cannot get paint on their hands when using a computer. One cannot feel the way your instrument vibrates back to you if it’s a computer. Fingerstyle guitar is still the earthy, feet-in-the-mud-so-you-can-feel-the-earth kind of art form. Sensuous infact. Kevin Roe is a superb musician with a grand articulation for the fingerstyle approach to guitar. He’s been playing in a number of bands for years here in the Central New York area. He took a few minutes to tell us about it. Chuck Schiele: How did you get started in music? Kevin Roe: My older brother Howard bought a $15 Stella guitar when I was 10 years old. I was fascinated by it, and when he went out I would sneak into his room, pick up the guitar and try to make some noise that sounded good. I stumbled onto an E minor chord by trial and error, and was hooked – played that chord for hours and eventually discovered a few more. Howard upgraded about a year later and sold me the Stella for the same $15. CS: How did you come to the fingerstyle approach you wear so well? KR: It is a combination of a lot of different influences. It started with my brother again. He was six years older, so I looked up to him. Whatever he listened to and played, I listened to and played. In the beginning, that was early ‘60s acoustic folk – Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger – and that featured fingerpicking accompaniment. So, from the start, I was doing that. When I was around thirteen, a new music store opened in my hometown (Corning, NY) and the owner became an early mentor. He had played guitar in Chicago for years – had his own radio show, did studio work and played clubs. He liked the way
I played, took me under his wing and gave me free lessons. He explained harmony and chord theory, and taught me out of a book of standards by the Brazilian guitarist, Laurindo Almeida. That was my introduction to true fingerstyle, chord-melody arrangements. I learned arrangements of Over the Rainbow (which I still play today), the Shadow of Your Smile (which I have mostly forgotten) and several other tunes. That got me using my right-hand fingers in more ways than standard fingerpicking. Instead of just keeping the beat with my thumb alternating on the bass notes and filling in with the other fingers in a repeating pattern, I learned to find the right strings with my right hand to play partial chords, individual melody or bass notes, pinches, arpeggios, and that kind of thing. It opens up a lot of possibilities for your left hand when you don’t have to worry about all six strings being part of the chord. I also picked up a Christopher Parkening book of Bach compositions arranged for guitar, and learned a few classical pieces, like Bach’s Boureé, and a couple of Minuets. I only dabbled in classical guitar – I didn’t pay much attention to technique – but learning those pieces helped to develop finger independence with both hands. Another big influence was Bruce Vanderpool, a singer/songwriter that I met when I was about seventeen. He was a contemporary of my brother, and they each had a weekly gig in the local hippie bar that had music six nights a week. Bruce was the best guitarist around, and I followed him around and bothered him until he agreed to give me some lessons. He introduced me to a number of alternate tunings. He was a fan of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn from the British band Pentangle, and I started to listen to those guys – both great fingerstyle players. Jansch had a solo album called Rosemary Lane that listed the guitar tunings for each song on the liner notes. That’s how I discovered DADGAD tuning, which I use quite a bit. It works really well for fingerstyle playing. The most recent piece of the puzzle was meeting Loren Barrigar after I moved to the Syracuse area. I met him at the very first meeting of the Syracuse Guitar League. He has been incredibly generous in sharing his knowledge and more than a few licks. I have had the good fortune to play a number of gigs with Loren, and learned a lot about fingerstyle playing from him. CS: Please share your music path with us. KR: I did not start playing in public until I was 23, and once again, my brother Howard is the star of that story. I had lived on the West Coast for a couple of years in the mid-‘70s and, when I decided to return home to Corning, I went by way of New Mexico so I could spend a few days with my sister, Dianne. Howard had decided to visit Dianne at the same time, so we arrived within a couple of days of each other. We went out to the local roadhouse one night for a beer and the owner was just locking up when we arrived. Dianne told him that Howard and I would play him a song if he opened back up for us. We played a song that Howard had just written, and the guy hired us to play every Friday and Saturday for the next six months. That was the
“I was fascinated by it, and when he went out I would sneak into his room, pick up the guitar and try to make some noise that sounded good.”
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