A CONVERSATION WITH LEO KOTTKE (continued)

PM: Do you have any problems anymore with the tendonitis of the 80s, and is your hand position and technique more classical now?

LK: Yeah, yeah. Hand position happens automatically, and automatically it's correct if you don't use any crutches in position, or picks, or things like that.

PM: Are you using a thumb pick?

LK: No thumb pick. And almost no nail. Probably 80% of the attack is just the fingertip, and there's just enough nail to kind of back up the fingertip. So it's more like pulling the string with a hammer than picking it with a surface or something.

PM: So all the country blues influences that were there, you don't pick like that anymore?

PM: Well, actually, I pick more like those guys than when I had finger picks and all of that, because a lot of those guys couldn't maintain, for example, a fingernail for two seconds, given their day jobs. And they used a lot of fingertip, and a lot of what turns out to be really good hand position. You know, like John Hurt, for example.

PM: Yeah, sure. That's how I came up, too, John Hurt. So he had what Segovia might call pretty good hand position?

LK: Yeah, he would. Segovia'd be upset that there's no nail, because Segovia was very--now, I'm getting this third hand--but Segovia really preferred to hear the nail alone, which is the way John Williams plays, and possibly also Julian Bream. And they make it work. Their idea is that it's not good to hear that little bit of friction when you hear the fingertip. They want to hear the note as unadorned as possible. I like that friction. And I remember as a kid really liking to hear that in John Hurt's playing, because it's just more color to my ear. But for Segovia and the more strict classical interpretation of right-hand technique, it's kind of...

PM: It's unseemly.

LK: Or just un-pretty.

PM: [laughs] Yeah, jeez, I had no idea. Live and learn. It seems like the nail alone, I mean, that's kind of the closest thing I can imagine to a plectrum.

LK: Yeah.

PM: I'd much rather hear the flesh whacking on the strings.

LK: Yeah, I would too. But when you get to hear somebody really do it right, then you see what they're talking about. John Williams, I was--oh, this was just one of those wonderful days. I was at Paco Piñon's. He has a little house on a mountain top outside of Cordoba. And John Williams and I and Paco were up there, and another friend of John's from London. There are these two sort of little houses. And one of them is just a big open space next to a pool that was empty.

And I had the nerve to tell John how much I thought he should be writing more, because I really liked what he'd written. And he said, "Oh, I can't write." Which a lot of those really developed, really virtuosic players say, I think because they know so well what the geniuses have written. And I said, "No, no, no." And so I asked him to play this tune of his called "El Tuno," which is an orange of some kind, it turns out. I thought it meant "the tune."

PM: Yeah, right.

LK: And he said, "Oh, yeah, I might remember that." And he played this thing. And oh, God, it killed me. It was just this beautiful, beautiful thing, and so much satisfaction in the sound. So he can do it. He can really make it work. It doesn't sound nail-y, or any of that other stuff that kind of makes your skin crawl.

PM: Right.  continue

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