Alex de Grassi
No Strings Attached
By Anil Prasad
Redwood Valley, California, isn’t your average country town. It’s beautiful, serene and distant, yet close enough to the big city manic panic to remain accessible and familiar. Perhaps that’s why the area is a haven for many ex-Frisco folk who chose to trade in two-hour traffic jams and skinny double mocha latté frappés for a more sensible and simpler lifestyle. Renowned acoustic guitarist Alex de Grassi is one of those people.
A glance at de Grassi’s living room leaves little doubt that one is in the home of a musician. An acoustic guitar sits beaming in the sun deck next to a pile of sheet music. A grand piano looms in the background with a framed photo of Antonio Giacomo de Grassi, his grandfather, residing on top.
"My grandfather came to the United States from northern Italy in 1913 and was an old-school classical violinist," said de Grassi, slouching comfortably in an easy chair and decked out in a navy blue t-shirt and jeans. "He told me his first instrument was a cigar box with a sawed off broom handle and rubber band stretched across it—a toy violin. He played with the San Francisco Symphony, taught music at UC (University of California) Berkeley, and had his own string quartet. When I first started playing guitar at 13, he would say ‘You gotta learn how to do more than strum a few chords if you want to get serious about this.’ "
As it turns out, the younger de Grassi became very serious about the instrument. At 46, he’s just released The Water Garden, his ninth studio album. Like his classic discs Turning: Turning Back, Slow Circle and Southern Exposure, the release is a solo guitar tour-de-force. It finds him combining folk, neo-classical, and world music elements with technique that goes far beyond strumming a few chords. The album features a wide array of fingerstyle tunes that fully illustrates his diverse approach, including intricate picking, dazzling arpeggios, alternate tunings and ringing harmonics. But he’s careful to avoid virtuoso sterility by combining chops with the passion necessary to evoke pulsing emotion and rich imagery.
