It's a dual story about what's happening in Latin America during the 17th century and what's happening in Europe during the same time or even as far as Asia and so the guitar tends to be that vehicle that I can use to take us to those different places, the vehicle that I can use to take us back to 15th century Spain and it's a way of understanding different types of guitarists, those who were very trained and those who learned in a different way, troubadour type training. The guitar is the moment that is about race, culture, it's about a pandemic, about the world being on the brink of maybe ecological collapse and a humanitarian crisis, and the guitar is helping me think about some of these aspects.
The colorful forests that occur in Hawaii that were almost depleted to create the guitars that Taylor Swift plays with, the kind of ivory that was used in the 17th century, to make roses and make bindings on broken guitars, as you can see in various museums, the African black wood that came from Africa that was used, ebony and all kinds of things that were used for guitars, all of those woods were part of the guitar. We were thinking again about how they made these instruments and what these instruments represented in the whole history of our own ecology and use of natural resources.
The core of Mexican music today is a type of music that is called "Son", there are many forms of "Son" the word is obviously in Spanish, it means sound, musical sound, which makes it different from many other types of sounds, it is a very old word in the Spanish language, it goes back to the 13th century, probably the 12th century, and it is one of the basic forms of Hispanic music. In baroque times; it is the chacona, servanda, folia, all these types of forms that are par excellence Hispanic or Spanish music are in this tradition the "Son", this type of music is based on recording difference patterns, something that began to exist in the sixteenth century that is in music books and is still alive in Mexico today. Son Jarocho" has preserved many elements of baroque guitar traditions.
Everybody plays the same way because they always be obsessed with melody, in the classical world. You must decide the melody and follow it. Baroque guitar is not based on melody, baroque guitar is based on strength, for example, between 1590 and 1630 there are like 200 guitar books, all of them don't have a single note in "plucked style" all of them just in strength. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of patterns on how to strum a guitar and at least in Spain, I'm sure there were some impressive strummers, in the sense that they used to say "he makes the guitar talk", "he is eloquent with the guitar" and probably just using the "rasgado".
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