Ed Gerhard, it's about connecting with the audience

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., June 6, 2000) - Some musicians talk about getting lost inside their music when they’re performing, using music as a means of transcending the here and now. But when guitarist Ed Gerhard performs, the last thing on his mind is escaping the reality of his surroundings. Instead, the New Hampshire musician’s goal is to be as focused and attentive to what’s happening as a member of the audience.

“I’m trying to experience the music like a listener,” said Gerhard - who performs at the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington on Saturday night at 8 -- in a phone interview earlier this week. “To make yourself one of the listeners helps you to honor the connection between the performer and audience better.”

Gerhard is skeptical about musicians who claim that music transports them to other realms. “I’ve read where others have said they totally vanish, which I think is irresponsible,” he said. “People aren’t there to see you experience rapture.

“I love the experience of everyone in the room relating to the music and having the same experience all at once. And as one of the listeners, I can involve myself in the process a lot more.

“I love that aspect, the communicative aspect. So rather than trying to vanish or disappear, I try to be fully there.”

As a recording artist, Gerhard is fully there on his six albums, which include his 1987 debut, “Night Birds,” which was chosen as one of the Top 10 albums of the year by the Boston Globe, and his latest, “The Live Album.” His career got a big shot in the arm when Windham Hill included a cut off “Night Birds” on its popular “Guitar Sampler” album, which propelled Gerhard into the rarified world of guitar heroes like Michael Hedges, Andrew York and Bill Mize.

Gerhard’s music is a genre-defying mix of original compositions and versions of folk and popular tunes. Although he was strongly influenced by guitarists including Andres Segovia and John Fahey, his style is his own. His playing is lush and full of spaces, and he combines a folk-like melodicism with classical technique.

“When I first started out, I considered myself a ‘serious composer’,” said Gerhard. “But at some point I loosened up and saw that I didn’t have to be the one doing all this stuff, that it could be just as rewarding to play an Everly Brothers tune or an old folk song if you put a lot of yourself into it.”

Songs generally buzz around in his head for a while before he decides to try to play them. “They pop in and then one day I realize I haven’t been able to get them out of my head for a few days,” he said. “It doesn’t take too long to make a workable arrangement. Having things occur to me that way is a sort of catalyst.”

Another characteristic of Gerhard’s style is how easily one forgets that the music is being played on a guitar. This is partly a function of Gerhard’s technique, which eschews many of the clichés associated with guitar playing, but it also intentional.

“One of the things that I’m trying to do is almost make the guitar invisible,” said Gerhard. “The phenomenon of sound itself is one of the more compelling aspects of music. Certain sounds make you feel a certain way, or evoke something - like the sound of geese when they pass overhead. Before you even realize it, it’s done something to you. And that’s what I try to do with the sound of the guitar.”

One thing a listener notices quickly is how much space or breathing room there is in his playing.

“That’s something that took me a long time to come to terms with,” he said. “There’s a responsible and irresponsible way to use silences. When we all start writing guitar music, we approach it as a device rather than as something integral. Now, my style of playing is almost the opposite of what’s going on in guitar music. Sometimes the notes can get in the way of the music.”

Gerhard’s sound can be shimmering, lyrical or bluesy, depending on the song or the instrument. Gerhard plays several different guitars and guitar-related instruments. In any concert he’s likely to choose among several different six-string guitars, a modified 12-string guitar, and a Hawaiian lap guitar.

Gerhard likes to experiment with the different instruments and play a song he recorded with one guitar on a different instrument in concert. “You uncover different layers of things about the songs by getting a different sound and seeing what that evokes in the music.”

In addition to guitar, Gerhard has played banjo and mountain dulcimer. He also plays on a cumbus, a Turkish instrument like a banjo with a big metal pot on the back and a fretless neck. “It’s a bizarre, Middle Eastern Frankenstein thing that kind of sounds like a banjo but with twelve strings and that gives off a pungent, Middle Eastern sound.”

Gerhard, a native of Abington, Penna., didn’t begin playing guitar until he was 14, when he got his first axe. He says he took three professional lessons at the local music store and then quit. From then on, it was learning by ear and from friends.

But in retrospect, says Gerhard, there was never any question that he’d wind up playing guitar. “I think it was in the schematic,” he said. “I really had no choice about it. There was a time where I thought about being a cop or a doctor, but the guitar edged all that stuff out. My passion for it just pushed everything else out of the way. There was nothing else I wanted to do.”



[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on June 8, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]