THEME
Today’s dispatch comes from Los Angeles. Well, sort of. Today’s dispatch actually comes from parts of California, Brazil, and Spain, where the current and past members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet reside. It took them 46 years to get to where they are, and there were a number of detours along the way, so this is the first of two non-consecutive episodes devoted to the ensemble’s storied career. Today’s show covers the quartet’s first 20 years, from their formation at USC in 1980 through their recorded output for the Orpharion, GHA, Delos, and Sony Classical labels.
Like a number of guitarists in my generation, I co-founded a guitar quartet in grad school, back when the dominant creative voice in the field was LAGQ. It still is. The quartet lineup I became familiar with had a 16-year run. In masterclasses, performance series, guitar studios, and guitar societies, these guys were so ubiquitous that we just referred to them by their first names. So I might as well let them introduce themselves:
Bill: “Well, I’m Bill Kanengiser, and I’m one of the two remaining founding members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. We’re celebrating just about our 46th year in existence.”
John: “My name is John Dearman, and I’m a founding member of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.”
Scott: “Hi, this is Scott Tennant. I was in the LA Guitar Quartet from its inception in 1980 all the way through, let’s see, what’s this, 2026? I would guess about 2022 or 2023.”
Andrew: “Hi, this is Andrew York. I’m a prior LAGQ member from 1990 until 2006, but I really started playing with them in ‘86, but that’s another story.”
And we will get to that story. Bill, John, Scott, and Andy had clearly defined onstage roles. Bill was the fleet-fingered emcee, the ringleader. Scott had the monster chops, and literally wrote the book on guitar technique with his manual, Pumping Nylon. John was the laid-back, quiet one, the George Harrison of the group. And Andy was the composer, the one guy in the classical guitar world with the curious ability to knock out hits. Because those roles were so clearly defined, I have to admit I went into these conversations thinking I knew the LAGQ story.
I didn’t.
I also went into these conversations with just a pinch of trepidation. I mean, I look up to these guys. They were in guitar magazines. Not just the classical guitar magazines, the Jimi Hendrix guitar magazines. And they won a Grammy, for Christ’s sake. And unlike Julian Bream, the subject of the last Dispatch, they’re all still above ground, so to tell the LAGQ story, I reached out to all the members, past and present, and asked for an interview. And yes, they have a reputation for being almost cartoonishly West Coast, cool, and approachable. But since I harbor an equally cartoonish East Coast, don’t-meet-your-heroes skepticism, I worried that the whole exercise might knock them off the pedestal that I placed them on.
It didn’t.
Let’s get started.
VARIATION 1: Moving Forward to the Fallback Position
Los Angeles Guitar Quartet’s original lineup consisted of Bill, Scott, John, and Anisa Angarola. Anisa couldn’t record an interview for the show because of a family obligation, but she sent some comments that I’ll share throughout the episode.
The idea for the quartet emerged around 1979, when John, Bill, and Anisa were studying at the University of Southern California. At the time, Jim Smith chaired the classical guitar department at USC, and Pepe Romero taught as a visiting adjunct. John recalls those early days with Bill:
John: “Bill and I immediately became kind of best buds, or frenemies, actually, because we were competitive with each other. I said frenemies just to be cute, but we were actually really good friends. We would practice, make dinner together, hang out, and play duos together over the next two years. That was the 78-79 school year and the 79-80 school year.”
Bill picks up the story from here:
Bill: “This would have been in the summer of 1980, and it was at this famous masterclass centered around the Guitar Gallery of Houston. That was a real community of Romero devotees. It was at that masterclass that I met this young kid who had already been accepted to come in as a freshman, and I was gonna be a junior.
I was like, ‘Who is this kid, this Scott Tennant,’ who had already gotten the moniker by Pepe of “super kid” because Scott was this incredible prodigy. Five minutes into our meeting, we had grabbed guitars off the wall. We opened up the Rodrigo Concerto Madrigal, and we tried to sight-read through the “Girardilla” movement, the hardest movement, which of course we couldn’t play at all. I like to say that I had met Scott, and five minutes into meeting him, we were playing together.”
Bill and Anisa met the “super kid,” who had just finished high school in Detroit:
Scott: “I’d been going to Pepe’s classes in Houston for four years prior to that, so since 1976, when I was 14. I was getting ready to pack my Chevette and move out to California, and Pepe told me he had a few people he wanted me to form a quartet with. Here are two of the people I’d love to have in a quartet that I can coach in class.
John Dearman - they told me about him, but he wasn’t there. I met him when I got to LA. In fact, he was the first person I met in LA, so that’s how I ended up knowing about it and thinking, yeah, that sounds great. It’s going to be fun.”
Back on campus in the Fall of 1980, everybody was getting acquainted and starting to think about repertoire.
Scott: “I got a call from John Dearman, and he said, ‘Hey man,’ very cool and laid back and chill (as he is). He said, ‘I’m going to bring some music over.’ He handed me some arrangements by Pepe, which is kind of what we had to go on at that time.”
Bill: “Pepe was like, ‘Let’s put this quartet together, and you can try out some of my arrangements!’”
John: “And then we would play in the master classes. We’d always get a slot in Pepe’s classes when he was up at USC, and that’s the origin story.”
I’ll add a quote from Anisa, who wrote about this developmental period:
“Bill, Scott, John, and I practiced hard as an ensemble for precision and homogeneous sound, which was facilitated by the fact that we were all Romero students, so we had compatible techniques.”
That compatibility was getting noticed around campus. They were playing the scant catalog of classical guitar quartet standards of the day, pretty much the Los Romeros songbook. But Bill dropped a bit of info that was definitely new to me:
Bill: “I also want to dispel the idea that Pepe was our day-to-day, building-our-ensemble-chops kind of guy because he only came in four times a year. It was really Jim Smith, who passed away about 12 years ago. Jim had arranged some amazing arrangements. Those were some of the first things we played in addition to some of the Romero repertoire. Jim Smith’s arrangement, for instance, of the Brandenburg Sixth Concerto, was one of the first pieces we learned together. Jim’s arrangement of ‘La Soirée dans Granade’ by Debussy. This fantastic version of the ‘Circus Polka’ by Stravinsky. Those are some of the first things we played and the first things we actually recorded on the Orpharion LP that we made in 1983.”
Moving into year two and the transition from their first on-the-nose moniker, USC Guitar Quartet, to the on-the-nose one that stuck:
Bill: “Even though we were just students, we were still just the USC Guitar Quartet at that point. We put energy into it, and step by step we ended up getting a local manager to get a couple of gigs. We changed our name. We couldn’t think of anything better. We thought of all these different names, and the only thing was, Okay, we can’t think of anything. Let’s call ourselves the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Okay, it was our fallback position, but here we are, 46 years later, three membership changes later, and still doing it!”
VARIATION 2: Baptism by One Too Many Fire Analogies
An ensemble’s early gigs, no matter how modest, are formative. You’re young, you’re inexperienced, and you find yourself in situations you’re not quite ready to be in. If the group can survive the hijinks, those hijinks become lore. Four decades on, Scott talks about being introduced to vegetarianism and feeling a long way from Detroit; John remembers a Self-Realization Fellowship group meditation just before a gig at Brigham Young, which led to a lugubrious opening number. Anisa recalls opening for Barry Manilow, of all people, at the Hollywood Bowl, of all places. Bill summarizes the whole experience as a “baptism of fire.” Returning listeners will note that this is the third baptism the show has covered in just six episodes, though this is the first of the burning variety.
I’d like to focus on one of those incendiary experiences, which Bill says helped forge the ensemble’s vibe and work ethic for the decades that followed.
Bill: “The first tour we did in Mexico was a five-week, 48-appearance tour, basically playing at schools and community centers in rural Mexico. All of the really hysterical disaster stories of touring happened on that trip. I think we were either going to anneal ourselves and be really strong as a group or we could have split up.”
The most disastrous of the Mexico disaster stories seems to have befallen Scott somewhere in the Yucatan, so let’s give him the mic for the rest of this story. Quick warning: it gets a little graphic. Also, Scott was recovering from the flu when we spoke, so he takes frequent pauses to avoid coughing or laughing…
Scott: “We had one afternoon off before our concert, and we’re going to the beach, man. We have a concert tonight, and we have all day.
Well, Mr. Gringo here, super, super bright white skin, freckles. I got in the water. The water down there is super clear. It’s like a magnifying glass, and so I’m just hanging out, trying to swim and trying to stay in the water. Somebody yelled at me, “Hey, you should put some kind of lotion on you.” Just to appease them, I did, but it washed off immediately.”
At the end of the day, we thought, well, we better start heading back to the van. I started getting sick and nauseous. By that night, when we arrived at the place where we were going to play the concert, I’d already had bubbles all over my body, and I couldn’t move my arms. I mean, it was such pain, so they helped me drape a shirt over my shoulders, and they handed my guitar to me. I could kind of sit in a guitar-player position. I couldn’t move my arms above my ears. It was really painful. It got worse.
It was like a second-degree burn. A doctor happened to be at the concert. He said, ‘Well, look, I’ll tell you that’s a bad burn. Don’t get bitten by any mosquitoes.’ He said, ‘Well, you need to get a mosquito net, but you can’t lie down.” Yeah, I had to sit up all night in a chair with a mosquito net over the chair, so I wouldn’t get bitten by a mosquito because I’d get infected. It was just one of those things. It was a horrible night.”
I want to reiterate that the dude couldn’t move his arms above his ears, so someone else had to drape a shirt over him. That’s deep into screw-this-I’m-out territory for a lot of young performers I know, but the thought of canceling the concert didn’t seem to occur to any of them. That said, Scott’s post-concert celebration was likely muted that night. And the next day didn’t offer much of an improvement:
Scott: “In the morning, they took me to this clinic. It wasn’t the cleanest place. They found an empty table and laid me on it. There were people there. There was a guy with a knife wound, so they proceeded to burst each bubble and pour alcohol on it. I had it all over my back and shoulders. This took a while. I didn’t pass out, but it was painful. I hadn’t slept the night before. I was just dying, and they bandaged me all up. I looked kind of like a mummy. They put this ointment on me, and I had to keep it on for a week or so, but we had a concert that night, so we played and kept going.”
Yup. They kept going. Banging out 48 shows, sometimes two a day. For Scott, that was the obvious choice.
Scott: “I have to say that was right there. That’s the place where if you’re put in that kind of situation, you can either say this life isn’t for me, or I can do this. That’s it. On that tour early on, that’s where I decided I can do this. Yeah, that was boot camp.”
VARIATION 3: And Then There Were…Five?
By the mid 1980’s, the Quartet was humming along nicely. They made their recording debut in 1983 with the now-defunct Orpharion label. They were getting high-visibility bookings within the guitar community, such as the Guitar Foundation of America and the Toronto International Guitar Festival, an event worthy of its own episode, by the way. After Orpharion, they made a pair of records with the Brussels-based outfit, GHA, which made them label mates with the Assad Brothers and David Russell.
Things were looking good for the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. But critical acclaim, a handful of albums, and some juicy festival gigs don’t necessarily produce enough scratch to cover car payments, food, and rent for four people living in the City of Angels. Bill says their agent came up with a solution:
Bill: “Maybe not too many people know this, but later on, to give us some work to keep us together because we didn’t have very many concerts, we ended up doing school concerts in LA. This was partially sponsored by the musicians’ union and had something called Music Center on Tour. We auditioned and got a slate of about 60 school gigs in a year, and it was pretty tough. 8:00 in the morning, show up at a middle school for kids who’d never seen a guitar before.
Bill: Anyway, we learned a lot from that. I became the de facto emcee and clown for those shows, and we ended up with a pretty entertaining show that worked well. For whatever reason, Anisa was just not into it, and she was like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ There was this guy who was a studio major at USC named Andy York, and we were like, ‘Hey Andy, can you join us?’ He was like, ‘Sure.’ Andy, even though Anisa was in LAGQ, played these school gigs with us for a long time.”
This is that “another story” that Andy mentioned at the top of the show. Sixty school gigs in a year with John, Scott, and Bill pretty much made Andy the fifth member of the group. I asked Andy about those gigs, and aside from the 8:00 AM call time, they sound fun:
Andy: “We built a musical taco. Scott was chopping the lettuce as we did this song. We started layering this piece, and then there was a little bit of salsa in the spicy part, maybe a tremolo. I don’t even remember what the piece was now, but yeah, we all added something. There was the cheese, just to give them an idea of how music is composite, how additive things can be put on top of each other.
Then we did another thing, a classical piece that was very canonical. Every time we had an entrance with a theme, we would lift our heads. We’d be playing with our heads down, and then we’d lift them and play the main theme. Our heads would pop up like 1-2-3-4, then 1-3-2-4 because of the way it was written, and sometimes two at a time. The kids loved that! They’d be laughing, but they could also really hear and see visually where the theme was. It was a really fun show! I think it was very effective. Hopefully, it had a positive effect on some kids’ interest in music. I hope they didn’t go into it as a profession; I wouldn’t wish that on them!”
Yeah, that would be cruel and unusual…
The next phase for the group was transitional, and transitions are hard. We’ve all watched enough VH1 Behind the Music to know that a group’s brand can be riding high, while the human beings who created that brand can be struggling. I’m fascinated by a specific genre of music documentary that captures slow-moving train wrecks in which nobody in the band directly addresses the problem, but the problem is the documentary. Like “Loudquietloud: A Film About the Pixies,” “I am Trying to Break Your Heart, A Film About Wilco,” and the 1970, pre-Peter Jackson film about the Beatles called “Let It Be,” in which, and know I’m wading into treacherous waters here, but my interpretation of the footage is that an unwelcome E dominant 7 flat 9 chord during the arrangement process of “Get Back” became the proxy for everything that annoyed George Harrison about Paul McCartney.
When it comes to the LAGQ story, Anisa’s departure is the one area in which the people who lived through it are, to a person, cagey. I pressed a little during the interviews, but it was clearly a nonstarter, so I just let the tape roll.
But I will pull an old NPR trick here and choose a moody underscore so the ensemble members can tell their story, while the listener is cued to hear what is said and infer what isn’t. I may not have a Behind the Music production budget, but since Andy is peripherally involved in the narrative and can easily rock an underscore with the best of them, I’ll use his “Miur Woods” from the 1986 solo disc he made for GSP, titled Perfect Sky.
Bill: “The first ten years were developmental. That was when Anisa Angarola was in the group. Rightfully so, we saw ourselves as being kind of like a Romero tribute band. We played a lot of their repertoire and looked up to them so much. They were our idols and our role models. Near the end of that period, there were definitely some creative discrepancies about, well, do we want to keep doing the Romero shtick, or are we gonna find our own direction here?”
John says there was a disconnect between their personal identity and the music they were presenting as a quartet:
John: “ There was a little bit of a pull to maybe break away from the Romero mold. The Romeros grew up in Europe, in Málaga. Their mother was an opera singer, their father was a concert guitarist. They ARE Spain, you know? Spain, Spain, Spain! But we…I was playing Chet Atkins, Bill was in a rock band, Scott was into Roy Clark.”
And those influences were creeping into the school concerts that Bill, Scott, and John were doing with Andy:
John: “We were doing silly stuff. We were playing like “La Bamba” and bluegrass. Things that we weren’t doing in our concert repertoire. The funny thing is, Anisa was not like a snob or anything. She was really into Celtic music.”
That’s true. Here’s Anisa detailing some of her Celtic music activities:
“Outside of quartet work, I have had the opportunity of working with some of the best Irish traditional players…Paddy Keenan, Seamus Connolly, and Tommy Hayes. My recording, “Birdwatcher Hill,” has some of my compositions, as I have been involved for the last couple of years composing for documentaries and choirs.”
Five people found themselves pulled into rather disparate musical orbits; John says it just wasn’t sustainable. Andy was doing the gigs, and…
John: “Anisa was doing the tours with us. Eventually, things came to a head with what she wanted to do and what we wanted to do, I guess you could say.”
Anisa didn’t offer details about the circumstances of her departure. Instead, she summarized her time with the quartet by focusing on the early days:
“I can tell you that the quartet was a lot of fun! We had many interesting experiences, particularly the tours we did through Mexico via the Department of Education. We were able to see much of the Yucatan, the temples, the archaeological sites in between concerts, though in general we played two concerts a day at two separate locations, so it was busy but fascinating.
There were also a lot of non sequiturs: one of the funnier ones was after we had been soaked, driving through rain for a concert at an elaborate but deserted church in the country (possibly San Luis Potosi), we saw a film crew, floodlights set up all around, and a host who wanted to interview Bill for TV. Bill had to borrow the interviewer’s coat and tie for optics, and of course the interview was all in Spanish, which Bill navigated well. But I have to say we were all cracking up behind the scenes, as it felt like something out of Comedy Central. I have fond memories of all my colleagues, and I always will!”
Obviously, there’s more to the story. If this were a think piece for The New Yorker, I’m sure the editor would assign some extended digging for salacious details under the guise of journalistic objectivity, which may be entertaining for those of us who weren’t there. But I’ve been through the whole artistic-differences thing, having lived it from the perspective of the one who leaves. Professional divorces are never just professional. I lost a good friend when I left the quartet I founded, and that was after a comparatively measly eight-year tenure, with two records and maybe a dozen concert bookings a year. I figure if you have the fortitude to look back on the good times, and call them good, you’ve earned the right to tell the story, or not tell the story, any way you want.
VARIATION 4: The New Lineup Takes On the Guitar Rags
It’s difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when MTV was culturally relevant because it played music, and Tower Records and Barnes & Noble were thriving retailers. For those of us who played guitar in the 1990s, these cultural institutions made up the bulk of our information diet, and it all culminated at the magazine rack, where a cornucopia of guitar periodicals, like Guitar Player, Guitar World, and Guitar for the Practicing Musician, awaited. The guitar rags provided a generation of aspiring hipsters, metalheads, chicken-pickers, and jazzers with lessons, transcriptions, reviews, plenty of gear to salivate over, and glossy cover photos featuring so, so much hair.
Nestled alongside Wolf Marshall’s transcriptions and Eddie Van Halen’s latest rig rundown was a classical guitar outfit from Los Angeles, featuring William Kanengiser, Scott Tennant, John Dearman, and their newest member, Andrew York, who feels he may have been a bit timid at the start:
Andy: “For about the first year, I laid low too much, I think, not asserting my personality. You may get different viewpoints, but because they were an established group and I was just kind of stepping into something that was already a going concern. Nothing like what we became later, but still. Had an agent, and we were doing tours, not for a whole lot of money yet, but some really nice shows.”
The quartet’s new lineup recorded one more album with GHA before signing with the American label Delos. They released four albums on the label from 1990 to 1997. Lineup changes aside, I see this period more as a gestation phase than a rebirth. You can still hear traces of what Bill described earlier as a “Romero Tribute Band,” especially on 1993’s An Evening in Granada.
Ahem, John?
John: “Spain, Spain, Spain!”
But then came Labyrinth, which veers in a completely different direction, opening with Andy’s original composition, Quiccan, then launching into Ian Krouse’s Labyrinth (On a Theme of Led Zeppelin), which features a trippy version of the Page and Plant classic “Friends,” assigning vocal parts to the players and incorporating improvisational elements alongside more traditional, guitary textures. If you listen closely, you can even catch a quote from Steely Dan’s “Reelin in the Years.” Anachronistic hat on a hat? Maybe. But, I mean, why the hell not?
The Delos years weren’t exactly a Moses-wandering-in-the-desert period for LAGQ. Important, concrete steps came along the way. The first thing to go was the getups:
Bill: “After a little while with Andy, he was like, ‘I don’t want to wear these tuxedos.’ We’re like, yeah, let’s not do that. And then he started writing this cool stuff. We started playing his Nutcracker arrangement, but I believe the first piece he wrote for us might have been Djembe. It was like, whoa, we’re going to play African music, and we’re going to imitate drumming! It just sort of opened up this, ‘oh, we can try to do this, and we can try to do that. It was a very important artistic divergence for us.”
The divergence was already underway on the recording that catapulted LAGQ into magazines alongside the icons of the day: the 1992 Dances from Renaissance to Nutcracker. Dances features John’s treatment of Praetorius and Bill’s Gabrieli arrangements, and of course, Andy’s setting of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, which served as my generation of players’ introduction to LAGQ. I was surprised to learn that Andy’s four-guitar version of Nutcracker Suite started its life as a duo:
Andy: “I did that before I even started playing with the group. I did it as a two-guitar version in maybe ‘84 or ‘85. Just as an aside, that’s how I met John Williams: I played at a festival in Spain. He was coaching ensembles. I had a duet partner, and we played my duet version of the Nutcracker Suite in 1986. That’s when I met him. The quartet version came later when I joined the group. I began arranging and filling it out for four guitars, going back to the orchestral score. I left two of them as duets because they were perfect as just duets. The others I enlarged and brought in more of the orchestra parts, but even as a duet it worked great.”
Andy recently published the manuscript of his duet version. It’s available on his website.
The Delos years featured recordings of arrangements by every member. Some of those arrangements had been part of the group’s stage show for years. There’s John’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba from Handel’s opera Soloman, and Scott’s “Fuego el Fatuo” from Falla’s El Amor Brujo. Bill was emerging as the most prolific arranger in the group, and the quartet recorded Capriccio Espagnol by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Copland compositions, “Simple Gifts” from Appalachian Spring, and 4 Dances from Rodeo, including the show-stopper “Hoe-Down.” LAGQ’s perennial crowd-pleaser, Pachelbel’s “Loose” Canon, has contributions by every member, proving good music can indeed be written by committee. That track is the first time their collective sense of humor shows up on disc, but John ain’t laughing:
John: “I was a real snob about the Pachelbel Canon even though it’s our most successful, most famous thing, and I had as much to do with that as anybody, really. Scott and I started that whole thing. I showed him that Foggy Mountain Breakdown that someone had shown me, but of course he ran with it. It started creeping into rehearsals when we were taking a break or something, and one of my students had shown me this (sings rhythmic pattern). Scott and I were the ones throwing out ideas, and then finally Bill was like, I’m gonna structure this thing. Of course, any genre you throw at Andy, he’s going to be a genius at.”
Sorry, John. I’m with, like, the rest of the population on this one.
A potential result of globalization in the late 80s and early 90s was the rise of what became known as World Music. In 1980, Peter Gabriel launched the WOMAD festival and collaborated with numerous international artists throughout his career. He featured Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour on “In Your Eyes” from his 1985 album, So. Paul Simon blew the doors off cross-cultural collaborations with projects like Graceland in 1986 and Rhythm of the Saints in 1990. A few hours’ drive north of LA, the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet was making waves with its 1992 world music classic Pieces of Africa.
LAGQ was listening.
Bill: “When Andy joined the group, and we started doing this very obvious world music thing, it was not ‘Oh, let’s do this because that will increase our audience interest or change our career.’ It was like, ‘Well, this would be really cool,’ and it was a kind of enthusiasm of discovery.”
The Kronos Quartet’s influence on LAGQ didn’t stop at world music. Kronos is likely best known as a commissioning body that redefined the string quartet repertoire with more than 400 works written for them. LAGQ’s approach to commissions built on their already fruitful collaborations, such as with their friend Ian Krouse. Ian’s 15-minute Folias is a major contribution to the guitar quartet repertoire, an absolute onslaught of variations and invention over the centuries-old ground-bass form.
I mentioned Ian’s Labyrinth (On a Theme of Led Zeppelin), and John remembers it being a handful:
John: We were playing these early pieces by Ian Krouse, and they were just showstoppers. They were massive, super difficult, not just technically difficult, but you’re just struggling on stage to count and to pull off these crazy dynamics. He was a real genius for pieces that were super meaty. The famous one was the Variations On A Theme of Led Zeppelin, which ends with a 12-tone fugue! (laughs)
I have a minor beef with music that is commissioned, not for the artistic merits of the project, but as a C.V. booster. I mean, it’s your money; do what you want. But as a listener, music from those sorts of projects always sounds a bit disconnected. As floofy as it sounds, I want to hear the relationship between a composer and the people that commission the work. LAGQ’s personal relationship with Ian Krouse is tangible, and it gives the music a lived-in quality.
Scott: “We met Ian right away, and he was an important element in our development, I have to say. He and I would go out and have sushi. I won’t go into it, but we were in this sushi restaurant he liked. We were just sitting there eating sushi and minding our business. Then the sushi master, or the chef at the counter, presented this fish on a bed of ice to this couple, and we thought, wow, that’s really artfully done. Then we see the fish start to move. We thought, What the? I was horrified.
Anyway, that’s one of the first traumatic experiences I had with my hangouts with Ian. It was never boring, and he’s still a really good friend. A really good friend.”
I doubt there’s much data on the success rates of Ikizukuri-fueled friendships, but I suppose we can add one more to the plus category. While we’re at it, we can add another tick to the “Scott experiences horrors, and the group thrives” corollary.
The final ingredient in the LAGQ artistic soup came when the ensemble committed Andy’s original compositions to disc. Pacific Coast Highway, Quiccan, and Bantu are all featured prominently on 1995’s Labyrinth. And any timidity Andy may have felt in his role in the group was replaced with a conviction to find a unique voice:
Andy: “You’ve got to find the authenticity of whatever you are and what you are as a musician and what you want to do. That became clear to me. As I began to write for the group, I began to assert more of my ideas for the group’s future. There was some tension from this but also some willingness.”
If the net effect of the group’s Delos tenure was evolution, it wasn’t strictly linear, and it never feels like they’ve arrived at any conclusions. I like that. Reminds me of experimental phases in great pop acts. For example, when you consider Radiohead’s complete discography, The Bends can be heard as a precedent for OK Computer and Kid A, in which experimentation is the arrival.
VARIATION 5: I’m Ready for my Close-Up, Mr. Sony
LAGQ spent the 90s carving out its own identity with a mix of arrangements, humor, world music influences, commissions, and Andy’s original compositions. That final element was the key that opened the door at Sony Classical.
Andy: “Grace Row, who was our producer at Sony, told me, ‘The reason we’re signing the group is because of your music.’ Now that was a very controversial thing for the others to hear because in a group…I don’t take that as a huge ego issue. I just thought it validated my idea for the group’s path. I didn’t want to dominate the group in any way. I wanted to create great music in a direction that would make the group more successful and give us an avenue to make new music.”
Right. And, if there was any “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” vibe from the other members at the time, it didn’t stick.
Bill: “That was the golden age for the quartet in terms of us becoming known, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and Japan especially. I’m very proud of a lot of the things we put out.
Their first Sony project, the eponymously titled LAGQ, continued to advance their world music ambitions with pieces like Andy’s Djembe and Brazilian composer Paulo Bellinati’s A Furiosa. In Bill’s case, the quartet’s travels were a direct influence on the music he was writing:
Bill: “We heard this gamelan ensemble when we were in Singapore. I was like, how can I possibly make four guitars sound like that? I just put all this weird stuff on the strings, trying different things until I came up with this pretty accurate way of making nylon strings sound like a gamelan, this piece called ‘Gongan’.”
LAGQ and their follow-up Air and Ground represent the group operating on all musical cylinders. From an audio engineering perspective, these are first-rate listening experiences. The only reason the Sony projects aren’t my favorite-sounding of the quartet’s records is that they were immediately followed by four albums produced by the incomparable Bob Woods at Telarc. More on that in the second installment. Returning to Sony, the relationship turned out to be short-lived:
John: I mean they were really going to promote us. We did the photo session, which was like an all-day thing. It was catered. They had brought all this wardrobe and stuff. They said, ‘Oh, you can take that home too when you’re done. Peter Gelb, he’s really famous now. He’s been the director of the Met Opera for the last 20 years or something. He left to take that gig, and he brought somebody else in, and then they had a lot of different ideas about what they were going to do. Shortly after that, our producer was gone. The engineer who did our stuff was gone. This is kind of like it’s like being in the movies or something. ‘Heads will roll’ kind of thing! (laughs)
That’s show business, I guess.
VARIATION 6: Steering the Boat With Four Separate Oars
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this shakeup at Sony happened before the Quartet won their Grammy and got a lifetime achievement award from the Guitar Foundation of America. We know now it was just another fork in the road for LAGQ. But they didn’t know that then. They didn’t know if their audience would embrace a group that wasn’t a Romero clone. They didn’t know their arrangements and original works would become repertoire standards. They didn’t know if people would get their humor, or if they could stick the landing with the world music and crossover projects. They couldn’t make those decisions assuming success was an inevitability. Really, the only inevitability while the group was taking these wild swings was artistic tension.
Andy: “We were young, and we were not hot-headed; we actually got along very well. But of course, that being said, we were in a band, and there were tensions, inevitably different ideas about the direction of the group.”
John: “I was still the biggest advocate for stuff like Ian’s music or doing stuff like the Kronos Quartet. Andy, in a way, was a populist. Bill saying, ‘what we do works. Why mess with it?’ There was this sort of triangle. Despite my complaints, if we had followed my idea about what the quartet should have done 30, 40 years ago, we probably wouldn’t have had any success at all.”
Maybe. But you can’t know that either. I asked Bill about the formula for surviving a 46-year musical partnership, and I still can’t decide if his answer was comforting or chilling:
Bill: “There is this kind of interesting dynamic of how choices are made because we’ve got four personalities with four musical aesthetics. Everybody’s got their own little ego and their own little place they want to be artistically and ethically. Part of the art of keeping a group together for 46 years is learning how to get the boat steered with four separate oars without running into the shore or beating each other over the head with the oars.”
So, if Bill gave us insight into how to steer a quartet using four oars, each individual member still needs their own why for putting up with it when things get tough. For Scott, the answer is simple:
Scott: “The joy of the hunt. Every question you asked today, you could formulate an answer based on that. Why pursue the quartet? Well, it was the joy of the hunt. How did you come up with new repertoire all the time or discussions? Joy of the hunt. There was always that joy, that inquisitiveness of the next thing.”
Andy: “The audience responded to that. To me, that was the right kind of tension: this beautiful energy flowing back and forth between current styles moving in new directions and older styles playing, not pristine but just bringing them to life as if they were new. I think that’s what we did, and that’s why we had, unlike most classical groups, when you looked out at the audience, you didn’t see a bunch of gray and white hair, which is what you get in a lot of classical. That’s just the way it is. The demographic we had was kids who were 18, very excited, and teenagers, and we had people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and, of course, the contingent that loved the classical music. We brought them all in, and that was one reason we were so successful. I think I did play a big part in that, but we all four did.”
Bill: “The gradual morphing of our identity was that there were no discrete moments where we said, ‘Okay, click, this is the turning point. We’re now this kind of group or that kind of group.’ It was just following our enthusiasm and our sense of creativity, and I think we felt it was validated by audience response.”
As a member of that audience, I suppose I should fess up: the 1990-2006 LAGQ lineup overlapped with my inculcation into the classical guitar community. That included a memorable masterclass in which I played Leo Brouwer’s first Sonata for LAGQ at Domaine Forget Academy in Quebec. It also included three performance degrees, during which I saw LAGQ perform about a half dozen times, and my first professional experiences on the festival circuit with my own guitar quartet. When those activities put our mugs on the same poster as LAGQ (albeit way, way beneath the headliners), my primary focus was to not audibly squeal when passing by my heroes in the green room. All that to say, I can’t claim much objectivity when it comes to telling their story.
So I won’t.
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