It is said that a great artist is not the best of their kind but the only one of their kind. By that metric Tim Brady is truly great. He is currently the only one I know of composing music for guitar ensembles measuring in the hundreds. Here is his latest, recorded remotely, as one does these days. Read more about Tim here and here.
I have often extolled Downtown Music Gallery in New York as a great place to order records by many of the artists I cover. I have also found it to be a terrific resource for discovering new modern guitarists.
Their periodic email blast often lists records featuring players that have escaped my attention and sends me scurrying to YouTube to check them out. Patrick Higgins is one such guitarist. He is also a composer of note on the modern classical scene. How he has remained unknown to me over a decade of touring and recording, I have no idea, but I hopefully have rectified that for you here.
Patrick was on his iPhone and on the move when we did the interview, so if you suffer from motion sickness, you might want to just listen. Either way, you will find our conversation rewarding.
Tim Brady is one of the premier composers of might be called the new classical canon for electric guitar. He largely does ensemble work ranging from quartets to groups of 200. Last year I went to his home of Montreal to write about him for Guitar Player and garnered enough additional material for a two part Guitar Moderne interview here and here.
As is typical during this lockdown, Brady and his group, Instruments of Happiness, are offering a remote performance of one of his pieces. He also answered some questions about the process.
Last year, I interviewed James Moore from the Dither Guitar Quartet around the time he released his record performing the entirety of John Zorn’s The Book of Heads. This set me on a path examining the place of the electric guitar in contemporary “classical” music. I recently posted a two-part interview with Tim Brady, where we discussed this fascinating (at least to me) subject. With this month’s release of Dither’s fantastic record, Potential Differences [New Focus Recordings], I deemed it time to talk to one of the Quartet’s founders, Taylor Levine, about how they manage to make the electric guitar sound like a natural vehicle for modern composed music. Again, the conversation ranged wide and so there will be a Part II. Please subscribe to find out when the post goes up.