A Generic Guitar Inspires a Distinctive Project

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/arts/music/the-100-guitar-project-releases-a-cd.html

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It started out as an inside joke and quickly became an international art project, linked to a charitable cause.

Nick Didkovsky, a guitarist and composer, and Charles O’Meara, the guitarist in the eclectic rock trio Forever Einstein, were in the habit of scanning eBay for used instruments, and e-mailing each other links to the ones they considered interesting. Usually, their finds were expensive vintage guitars — say, a Gibson SG from 1961, the first year of its production — or exotic pieces that were also priced out of reach.

But one day in 2010 Mr. O’Meara stumbled on a beat-up, no-name red, white and black electric guitar — a starter instrument for a kid in a 1960s garage band — priced at $100.

“He sent me this e-mail called ‘The guitar of my dreams,’ ” Mr. Didkovsky said in a recent interview. “It was so generic. It had no brand on it. It was a mystery, with super retro vibes. One of the pickups was missing, and the other looked truly ancient — like a radio in a black-and-white movie, with electric bolts coming out of the speaker. It was like a generic token, the kind of electric guitars you drew in notebooks when you were 8 years old. And the price was just a magic number. One hundred has a culturally interesting meaning.”

Mr. Didkovsky and Mr. O’Meara decided to go halves on it, and even before they heard back from the seller, they had a plan: for their $100 Guitar Project, as they called it, they would invite some of their composing and guitar-playing friends to take the guitar for a week and write and record a new, original work using the instrument. Each would then autograph the guitar and send it on (or personally hand it over) to the next musician on the list. The new works would be collected, with the vague idea of assembling a CD.

Within 12 hours, 20 musicians had signed up, and word of the project spread beyond the original invitation list. Mr. Didkovsky set up a Web page and a Facebook page for the participants, who sent photos and videos along with their recordings. Eventually, the guitar crisscrossed the continental United States and made stops in Hawaii and in a couple of European countries, as dozens of guitarists of all stripes — rockers and classical recitalists, avant-gardists and country pickers, the famous and the unknown — submitted pieces.

Mr. Didkovsky and Mr. O’Meara compiled 69 of them, in just about every style imaginable (though with heavily distorted rock and several forms of experimentalism dominating) on “The $100 Guitar Project,” a two-CD set recently released by Bridge Records.

Alex Skolnick, the lead guitarist of the thrash-metal band Testament, said that he was “immediately intrigued, inspired and amused” by the project, and recorded a crunchy, multi-tracked two-minute piece, “$100 Guitar Blues,” with echoes of early Led Zeppelin, although he traces the work’s roots back further.

“The guitar presented a few challenges, mainly in tuning and intonation,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to use it for my main gigs. Still, it played surprisingly well for a $100 instrument. I decided to be as spontaneous as possible, capturing the first ideas that came to mind — blues variations, inspired by Link Wray, John Lee Hooker and others — with no additional instruments and minimal effects.”

Nels Cline, of Wilco, took a slightly quirkier approach in “Seared Beard,” a riffy meditation punctuated by a single cymbal crash and a hint of laughter.

“To be honest,” Mr. Cline wrote in an e-mail, “the guitar isn’t all that unusual — at least not to me. I have played and continue to play many ‘cheap’ or, as I call them, ‘ugly duckling’ guitars. I find that I seek out and enjoy their unique sound potential, and many times the tones that they can produce are only achievable on such instruments because guitar tastes and accouterments have changed over time. The ‘$100 Guitar’ is much like my first couple of guitars that I owned in the late ’60s-early ’70s. That said, I don’t think the guitar itself had much to do with the form or vibe of the piece I ended up doing. In fact, I have no clue as to why I went the direction I did. Mood swing? Desperation?”

Fred Frith, the experimental rock guitarist and film-score composer, went against the temptation to mine the instrument’s hard-rock potential. His “Light Erases the Thought” is a clear-toned meditation, and at six minutes is the longest piece on the set.

He recorded the piece in his living room, he said, with “no writing or any other conceptual process other than the idea that this would be as spontaneous an experience as possible, with the simplest setup I could imagine.” He added that he was drawn to the guitar’s resonance and its “clear, ringing sound,” and that he therefore abstained from using pedals or effects.

Once the collection had grown to a couple of CDs worth of material, Mr. Didkovsky began thinking about how to release it. He did not have to look far. David Starobin, a classical guitarist who had contributed the colorful, mildly dissonant “Berceuse Bas de Gamme” (“Cheap Lullaby”), and who runs Bridge Records, offered to release the set.

It is an unusual addition to the Bridge catalog, which is best known for its expansive traversals of works by Elliott Carter and George Crumb, as well as recordings by Mr. Starobin and a highly regarded Beethoven cycle by the pianist Garrick Ohlsson.

“But this is exactly what we do,” Mr. Starobin said. “We take projects that are out of left field, and we try to market them sensibly.”

What made the project particularly appealing to Mr. Starobin was that all the players had agreed to devote their royalties to CARE, a group that fights global poverty. The label is donating 50 percent of its proceeds to the charity as well.

“We were looking for a charity,” Mr. Starobin said, “and there was a lot of talk about finding a musical one. But we wanted something very solid, and CARE seemed the most solid and far-reaching.”

At the moment Mr. Didkovsky is thinking about the project’s afterlife. The filmmaker and photographer Emon Hassan is making a movie about the venture, and there is talk of a concert, which may include pieces that did not find their way onto the CD set. The notion of a second volume has been raised.

But if another set of pieces is to be recorded, Mr. Didkovsky and company will probably have to find another guitar. Once pictures of the guitar began appearing on the Internet, a specialist in Japanese guitars identified it as a Fujigen Gakki EJ-2, probably produced in 1964. So it has lost its anonymity, which was part of its original charm. And now that it sports more than 60 autographs, it is worth a good deal more than $100.