ActionScript-ToolBox: by Leo Kottke

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Leo Kottke (Biography)

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Popularity: 3 Vote:	A few years before this happened a guy named Stanley Watson told me if I didn't stop using the fingerpicks I was going to hurt something and not just because of the picks but because of how hard I was playing with them and he was right.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	A lot of people from seasoned professionals to beginners just try too hard and it's embarrassing for them and the audience.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I also played on a bill with The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Frank Zappa at the Nassau Coliseum which at the time was the largest indoor facility in the United States.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it's fresh.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I don't come up with that much slide stuff anymore but I did in the beginning and all of a sudden I was dying to write instrumentals.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I don't spend a lot of time thinking of what they'll do musically, I try to imagine being locked into a windowless room with this person for twelve hours at a time. If you can look at that and think it might be fun then maybe you've got the right musician.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I had been playing on other instruments since I was five but there was something special about the guitar, and still is.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	I have always been a tone freak and that's what hooked me on the guitar to begin with, and I think it's the primary thrill before the music .
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I have always thought of myself as a performer first and way down the line as a recording artist.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	I never had any problems, and it was always a surprise to those audiences when they heard how much sound was available on a flat top guitar.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I really can't think of a better way to spend my time and that's kind of stunted the rest of my life but it's unbeatable.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	I really didn't hear any guitar for a long time after I started playing and when I did the first thing I heard was Laurindo Almeida playing some Villa Lobos.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I think it makes it feel more at home, I read like a pig but I don't think it directly inspires it or effects it though.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	I think that open tunings are a trap really because it's really hard not to sound like an open tuning when your using one and that gets old as well as what you learn in one open tuning is going to stay there.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I used to build motors and I learned that it's one thing to build them and It's another thing entirely to diagnose a motor.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I was required by Capital to release one every six months and the fastest I could do with all my touring was every nine months, and it would spook me every time because I never had what I needed and I really didn't want to do covers.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I was two and a half and my folks would put it on the record player and I would run around the house screaming, but I haven't been that hip since.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	I went to Chrysalis to get away from the deadlines and I got a little more room.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	I will literally open my mouth not knowing what is coming out.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I would say that if you don't feel like talking to the crowd something is wrong and if you force yourself to talk to them things will happen and to that extent things aren't choreographed.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	I'm not subject to their rise and fall because I'm not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot!
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I'm probably unique in that when I was a little boy of five or six instead of having a ball-player or ninja-turtle as a hero it was an announcer, a guy named Martin Agronski.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	If you get really worn out that's frequently a good way to get an idea because your usual noise isn't happening and they can come through easier.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	It depends on the time of the year and who I've been talking to, I try to put people in the studio I like.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	It is not a mystical thing, however, it is obvious and practical and I think that what the performer does is to try to get to that point with every choice you make from the phrasing in a tune to the choice of tunes.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	It was a kind of paralysis you would get from tendonitis and I would last about five to ten minutes into the set and it would set in and I really couldn't play.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I'd done.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	It's true that the more you put in the more you get out and that has to be there I think, If you aren't really hooked on your instrument this job would be a hell on earth but if you are, it's the best.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	So at six years old I was listening to the radio to hear some guys voice, which is strange, and I still remember his sponsor which was Butternut Coffee and he read his own copy and I was mesmerized by his voice and I didn't know what coffee or butternuts were but I did know it involved cans.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	That was when I found out that you could talk to them and it was a whole other way to blow your stack, and it's so much fun to perform that you want to do it again and the more you get out of it the better.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it's really about entertainment.
Popularity: -3 Vote:	The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you're losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it'll wake them up.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	We had a day off here yesterday and I just sat in my room and played.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	When a record company looks at me I'm very hard to market, I don't really fit anywhere, It's hard to get me on the air, and I'm hard to demography, but! because of that I'm not subject to trends like you pointed out.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	When the audience is awful you can still have a great night and people will walk out thinking they had a great time even though there was loads of loudmouths and the sound was terrible.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Yeah I do and I don't mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is not to try too hard.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	Yes and for two reasons: one, I couldn't find anything to imitate at the time, and secondly because what I heard on the radio didn't bear any resemblance to what I wanted to hear on the guitar.
Popularity: 3 Vote:	You can't really tell what the audience wants but you can tell what will keep everybodies attention in the same place.

Biography

Leo Kottke is a legendary acoustic guitar virtuoso who has developed a cult following of fellow guitarists and fans over the span of a 30-year career of recording and performing. Blending folk, jazz, and blues influences into a signature finger-picked style of syncopated, polyphonic music, Kottke's work pre-dated and predicted much of the New Age instrumental music movement while never being confined within a genre. Kottke has overcome a series of personal obstacles including partial deafness and a nearly career-ending bout with tendon damage to emerge as a widely-recognized master of his instrument.

Biography

As a youth Kottke played trombone and violin before moving to the guitar and developing his own unconventional picking style. A mishap with a firecracker permanently damaged his hearing in one ear, a condition that would be exacerbated during firing practice during his service in the US Naval Reserve.

Focusing primarily on instrumental composition and playing, Kottke has sporadically moved in a vocal direction, singing in an unconventional yet expressive baritone famously self-described as sounding like "geese farts on a muggy day". In concert, Kottke intersperses humorous and often bizarre monologues with vocal and instrumental selections from throughout his career, played solo on his signature 6-and 12 string guitars. Kottke's guitars are often tuned unconventionally; early in his career he heavily utilized open tunings, while in recent years he has used more traditional voicings but often detunes his guitars up to two full steps below standard tuning.

Kottke's most well-known album continues to be 1969's instrumental 6 & 12-String Guitar, also known as the Armadillo album after the animal pictured on its cover. Pressured in the early 1970s to be a folk singer-songwriter rather than an instrumentalist, he recorded with backing musicians on albums such as Mudlark, Ice Water and Chewing Pine. Some of this production sounds dated now, and in recent years Kottke has begun re-recording tunes he wrote and recorded in the early 1970s. 1999's One Guitar No Vocals offered a new instrumental version of 1974's "Morning Is The Long Way Home", for example, with the countermelody opened up from behind the vocal line, stripped of its original trippy lyrics.

Constant touring and recording caught up with Kottke in the early 1980s and he suffered from painful tendonitis and related nerve damage that threatened to end his career. He changed his fingerpicking style from a folk-based approach to a more classical style placing less stress on the tendons. Simultaneously Kottke moved from his relationship with major labels Capitol and Chrysalis to the smaller Private Music label and his music reflected a gradually more lyrical and less flashy style. Due to this change and the relationship with Private Music, Kottke's work during this phase was often grouped with New Age music in the Windham Hill style, though his music remained too eclectic and angular to fit into that category as well as did that of his fellow acoustic guitarist Michael Hedges.

Kottke has collaborated on his records with his mentor John Fahey, Chet Atkins, Lyle Lovett, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies and Rickie Lee Jones. He has recorded tunes by Tom T. Hall, Johnny Cash, Carla Bley, Fleetwood Mac, The Byrds, Jorma Kaukonen, Kris Kristofferson, Randall Hylton and many others.

...(more on Wikipedia)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Leo Kottke".

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