The acoustic fingerstyle virtuoso looks back at his 40-year career with the release of Encore.
As anyone who has heard Pierre Bensusan live can attest, the French guitarist is among the world’s finest solo performers. Difficult to pin down to a single style, Bensusan has played steel-string fingerstyle guitar with peerless compositional depth, harmonic richness, and dynamic range for 40 years. “Pierre’s work transcends the guitar itself,” says fellow fingerstyle god Tony McManus. “What he communicates are pure musical ideas—storytelling in melody, rhythm, and harmony, always creative and always inspiring.”
Bensusan started out playing folk guitar and bluegrass, which eventually led to a gig as mandolinist for American banjo master Bill Keith. But the release of Bensusan’s debut album Près de Paris in 1974 (at the age of 17!) immediately established him as an extraordinary guitar talent. In the years since Bensusan has released nine more albums (not counting compilations and box sets). While his early efforts focused on arrangements of traditional Celtic music, the emphasis has increasingly shifted toward original compositions influenced as much by jazz and classical music as by North African styles, showing Bensusan’s Algerian heritage.
Most Bensusan recordings feature additional instrumentation (2000’s Intuite is his only true solo studio album), at times veering into a smooth new age/adult contemporary sound, though always featuring stunning guitar work and gorgeous, engaging compositions. But many fans have longed for an album that captures Bensusan as he appears onstage: solo, with his guitar tuned to DADGAD, the tuning he’s used almost exclusively since 1978.
Good things come to those who wait. Not only has Bensusan released a live recording, he decided to make it a beautifully packaged three-CD retrospective. “I wanted to celebrate 40 years of making a living with just my own work, making very little compromise,” he said via Skype from his home near Paris. “My life is on the road. I exist mostly because of my concerts.”
The result, fittingly called Encore, is a stunning overview of Bensusan’s career. While not arranged chronologically, Encore features glimpses into Bensusan’s earliest work playing bluegrass with Keith and solo guitar arrangements of tunes originally found on Près de Paris.Also featured are incredible versions of such tunes as “Nice Feeling,” the Middle Eastern-flavored tapping masterpiece “Agadiramadan,” and "So Long Michael,” Bensusan’s beautiful tribute to Michael Hedges, as well as the looping and vocal workout “Cordillière.” There are also several previously unreleased staples of Bensusan’s shows, such as the guitar and scat-singing “Bamboul’hiver,” and even a couple of duets with Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess. Overall, Encore is an amazing 40-year retrospective that sounds great (thanks to Grammy-winning engineer Rich Breen) and serves as an excellent introduction to Bensusan’s work.
What was it like to listen to recordings of yourself from 30 or 40 years ago?
It was agonizing! I hadn’t heard most of the recordings in years, and you never know what you’re going to find. I spent three months without playing, just listening.
How did you decide what to include?
It had to do something to me. It had to move me. The guitar had to be in tune, and the sound had to be decent. Even if the sound wasn’t decent, I’d choose the performance over the sound. For instance, the Celtic medley was recorded in Charlottesville, and every time I played my second bass [5th] string, there was a bit of feedback. That dictated my way of playing, because I tried not to hit that string too much, and when I did, I tried to control the resonance and sustain so it wouldn’t be overwhelming. I thought, “Okay, that’s bad luck, but the playing is really fine.” It’s a marathon—for 18 minutes!
I’m glad you included some early bluegrass recordings. Not many players have gone from flatpicked guitar and mandolin to fingerstyle. Were you already doing both at the time?
I was doing guitar first. I enjoyed bluegrass music a lot and played with a flatpick. Then I joined a band in a suburb of Paris, and we couldn’t find a mandolin player. My friends asked me to play the mandolin, so I bought one the next day. My reference and inspiration came from people like John Duffey, Sam Bush, Bill Keith, and the Stanley Brothers. I also loved Country Cooking, and Clarence White with the Kentucky Colonels. I was going to some hidden record stores in Paris where you could find those records. The guy working in one of those stores came to me one day when I was 16 and had just left school. He said, “Would you like to join the Bill Keith Bluegrass Band? I’m going to produce a tour for him.” I said, “You’ve got to be joking!” That’s how it started for me. Those recordings come from that very first tour.
I took my guitar with me on the road because I was backing Bill on one song, using a flatpick. In the daytime I would practice on my own, and Bill heard me play those different arrangements of Celtic tunes and some of my own compositions. He said, “I want you to play a couple of numbers onstage every night.” That’s how it started for me, because we were in Belgium, France, and Switzerland, and all the promoters of those shows wanted to invite me the next year on my own.
You mostly play original music now. Do you have a composition process?
Probably, but I’m not aware of it. I listen to the music inside of me. As Bobby McFerrin put it, I am my own Walkman. The idea is for the moments when I play and the moments when I hear music to coincide, so that I can play what I hear. There are a lot of different approaches for getting there on the guitar. One of them, of course, is to be ready technically. I never feel that I’m ready, but I work a lot on my arrangements and my technique. I want something difficult to become agreeable and pleasant so I don’t have to be anxious when I play.
Your live shows have the feeling of a single connected event, rather than a bunch of tunes strung together. How much do you plan your set, and how much just happens?
It’s both. I feel that a show is a bit like listening to a record or reading a book. You can’t do just anything at a show. I wish sometimes that I could start a show on a very high energetic point. I get there during soundcheck, but when the show comes, I need to calm down, start low, and then come up and up until the end. I try to give a form to the concert so that it sustains attention until the end. It has to include contrast, surprises, predictable moments, and unpredictable moments.
You’ve said the tuning players use doesn’t matter much as long as they’re familiar with it. But obviously, DADGAD had a big impact on what you do.
It’s not a tuning that influences me—it’s the music, and DADGAD becomes a tool. But at the beginning, DADGAD was amazingly and vividly present, and it probably shaped my approach to the guitar for a while. But I realized very soon that you had to look for the notes, and it was not obvious. A lot of people take open tunings for granted. They get a flattering first impression, which is great, because it inspires. But you can’t stay there. That’s why I chose to play in only one open tuning, rather than spend my time going between various tunings and always having challenges with intonation, breaking strings, and never really knowing my way. I chose DADGAD in 1978, and my life became much simpler.
Pierre Bensusan Gear
Guitars
Lowden Pierre Bensusan Signature Model
1978 Lowden S22
Amps and Effects
Highlander iP-1 pickups
Line 6 Relay G30 wireless system
Ernie Ball volume pedal
Roland RC-50 Loop Station
Universal Audio Apollo Duo FireWire audio interface
MacBook Pro
Schoeps CMC 64 mic for guitar
Neumann KMS 104 mic for vocals
Strings and Picks
Wyres Signature DADGAD set, gauged .013, .017, .023, .032, .042, .056.
How did your collaboration with Jordan Rudess come about?
We met at the New Milford summer camp in Connecticut 20 years ago and became friends on the spot. A couple of years later I was commissioned to create a piece for a children’s choir. I invited Jordan to join me. We were the only two musicians backing 200 singers! In the first part of the show, I played solo a bit and then I invited Jordan. We played some duets, and two of them can be heard on Encore. That was the only time they were played, so I was very pleased that they were played so well.
You played your original Lowden S22 (“Old Lady”) exclusively for 25 years, and now you’ve been playing your signature Lowden for quite a while. Can you compare those guitars?
I played the Old Lady in Germany the other day, because my signature Lowden was stuck between airplanes. It was not even set up, so I found a great German luthier, Dietmar Heubner, who spent three hours setting it up for the show. I played the guitar all day to get familiar with it again, and I felt, “Oh my god, this is my home!” It was amazing to play that guitar again. It was like, “Why do I play another guitar?”
Two Extraordinary Lowdens
Pierre Bensusan is a virtual guitar monogamist. Sure, he played a Gurian at the very beginning of his career, and for a few years he played a signature model Kevin Ryan guitar. But for most of his career, he’s been a Lowden man.
Bensusan first fell in love with Northern Irish luthier George Lowden’s work in 1978, when he acquired an S22 (equivalent to today’s O-22 model). Featuring a cedar top and mahogany back and sides, the guitar was originally a non-cutaway model. Rather than replace it with a new guitar when he felt that a cutaway was necessary, Bensusan had Lowden modify it in 1989, and also had the fretboard and string spacing widened. For 25 years “Old Lady” was the only guitar Bensusan played. He still pulls it out of semi-retirement from time to time.
In 2009, Lowden and Bensusan began work on a signature model. To the surprise of some fans, the result wasn’t a copy of Old Lady, but an updated guitar. Using the company’s midsize F-model body, the guitar is built with an Adirondack spruce top and Honduras rosewood back and sides. It also has a bevel on the bass side of the lower bout, a maple neck with a nut-width of 1.77", and fairly wide string spacing of 2.36" at the saddle. An unusual but very cool feature is the neck shape, available on other Lowdens as a “fingerstyle” option: It flares out slightly more than standard, providing a bit more width in the upper positions, which makes it less likely to slip off the fretboard when playing vibrato on the outside strings. The guitar’s list price is $8,765.
Bensusan and Lowden are now working on a 40th-anniversary signature model: a faithful recreation of Old Lady. Due in 2014, the guitar will have Lowden’s original jumbo body (slightly deeper than the current O-shape, and with a more pronounced taper between the neck block and the neck joint), older-style parabolic bracing, and an optional bevel.
How does it differ from your signature model?
It’s richer. You can’t invent 35 years of life in a guitar. Even if today the high harmonics have less sustain, they are still very present. In fact, I like less sustain, because sometimes it’s overwhelming, and it’s hard work to tailor that sustain so that it’s not in the way of the musical conversation. But the new guitar is a very special instrument. It’s three-dimensional. It has depth, horizontality, sustain, a lot of harmonics, and a lot of sound. The relationship between a note and the history of the note is extremely vivid on those two guitars. It’s a bit like the taste of a great wine. There’s the first taste, and then the whole history of the taste after the first drop. Both guitars have that quality, which is what defines a great instrument.
What can you tell us about your amplification setup?
First of all, the pickup is very important. I use the Highlander. From there I go into a Line 6 wireless preamp, an Ernie Ball volume pedal, and a Roland RC-50 looper. From there it goes into Universal Audio Apollo Duo hardware, and then into a MacBook Pro. I’m very happy with that setup. I can now do my stage monitor sound on my own. I can even do my front-of-house!
And your guitar and vocal mics also go through the MacBook Pro?
Yes, and all the effects—reverb, limiter, expansion, EQ—are there. I can even record the show.
Why a volume pedal?
It’s very convenient, because when I tune, I cut the sound. I also use it to shape the note attack for a bowing effect.
What are you using an iPad for onstage?
For walk-in music. I also use it for my song lyrics, and I have a little Bluetooth foot controller that turns the pages.
What’s next?
I’m going to be doing a lot of touring from January until the end of July. Until then, I’ll stay home, work on some new pieces, revise my old pieces, work on my improvisation, and catch my breath a bit. I’m doing my album release shows in Paris, and I’ll be in the States from March until May. It’s going to be a driving tour with my new van!
YouTube It
If you haven’t heard Bensusan, you’re in luck—there are lots of great clips on YouTube.
A mid-1980s performance of “Nice Feeling.” (The title is a play on the word “nice” and the French city of Nice.) This performance occurred before Bensusan’s Lowden S22 (“Old Lady”) was modified with a cutaway and wider, extended fingerboard.
Pierre Bensusan plays “Agadiramadan” on Old Lady in 1993. Note the fluid single-note improvisation over the looped theme.
Pierre Bensusan plays his tribute to the late Michael Hedges, “So Long Michael,” on his Lowden Signature Model.
The world-renowned fingerstyle guru talks about his new album, Vividly, breaking his effects addiction, and why he made DADGAD his go-to tuning more than 30 years ago.
The 53-year-old Bensusan was born in Oran, Algeria, and reared in Paris—an upbringing that would eventually lend a cosmopolitan sense to his music. Like many young musicians, he got caught up in the folk revival of the 1960s, strumming and singing songs in the mold of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, before developing his trademark fingerstyle approach.
Bensusan was only 17 when he signed his first recording contract. A year later, his first album, Près de Paris (1975), won the Grand Prix du Disque at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Since then, Bensusan has released a handful of carefully conceived albums filled with compositions of orchestral-like complexity and stunning stylistic variety. Bensusan also wrote The Guitar Book to illuminate the concepts behind those records.
With his warm baritone voice and trademark scatting, Bensusan is also an accomplished singer. Unlike previous releases, his latest album, Vividly, is split evenly between instrumentals and pieces with vocals. But the recording has plenty to offer the guitar aficionado, including cluster chord voicings, unusual chord progressions, shimmering harp-style harmonics, and dense counterpoint.
We recently spoke with Bensusan about his influences, his short-lived foray into electronic effects, and more.
What were your formative musical experiences like?
I was 11 years old when I first got a guitar and mostly strummed it, accompanying myself singing French tunes and American folk songs. Then, when I heard the music of players like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, that really gave me a kick in the pants and stimulated me to learn how to fingerpick and play solo, in a contrapuntal style.
How’d you get into using DADGAD tuning, and what was it about it that moved you so deeply?
Tell us a little about the Lowden that has long been your main guitar.
In 1978, when I was touring Northern Ireland, I met a friend of George Lowden. Several months later, I saw a Lowden guitar in a shop in Paris, and I immediately fell in love with both the sound and look of the instrument. So I called the luthier immediately and asked him to make me a guitar with mahogany back and sides and a cedar top. I’ve played that guitar, which I call “Old Lady” [Ed.: It is officially known as the model S22], for almost 33 years now and have used it on all of my records. I also have another Lowden, my “New Lady,” which is about three years old and is my signature model. It has a spruce top and rosewood body, giving it a different sound than my original Lowden. It’s very responsive, has a lot of headroom, and is very clear and bright. What’s amazing about the newer guitar is it can be so fast and effortless that you really have to pay attention to what you play so things don’t get out of control. It forces me to approach things carefully, which is good.
In what way do you feel like the new guitar can contribute to things getting “out of control”?
If you aim right, that instrument gives you a 3-D rendition, close to perfection, but if you don’t pay attention, you can get overwhelmed by the strength of projection. I am grateful that I have to pay that attention to how I touch it, which is the way it should be, and can only help me to become a better player.
How would you describe your compositional process?
I let my imagination play its role and then allow the guitar to take over. At the beginning, a new piece is just an idea that I have. Over several weeks or several months or several years, I’ll start to incorporate my fingers without ever losing sight of the original concept. Technique can distort an idea, and I’m vigilant about watching out for that. In a way, composing has strengthened my instrumental technique—figuring out how to accurately express something on the guitar has greatly improved my knowledge of the fretboard and my touch on the instrument.
Bensusan plays a November 2009 gig in Germany with his 1978 Lowden flattop,
which features a cedar top and mahogany back and sides. Photo by Schramberg
So in the beginning a new piece is only in your head?
Very often, it is completely and only in my head and has nothing to do with the guitar. I like it to stay that way until I feel the time is right to give it an actual sonic form with what I have in my hands—a guitar—without losing the content to comfort zones dictated by my instrumental technique. Of course, I also find lots of inspiration just by wandering on the instrument. So, it’s a combination of both—imagination and talking with the guitar, looking for the right notes.
Your style is all over the map. Can you pinpoint some of your influences?
Oh, they’re so varied. It can go from Arabic music—I was born in North Africa—to Celtic music and songs from central France, Brazil, India, Cuba, Mali, and beyond. I’m a sponge and am constantly listening to a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, I’m trying to put all these different sounds—which I’ve learned not by studying techniques and theory, but through osmosis—through my own filter to see what comes out. My music is also influenced by my life today and the world in which we live, which is not the perfect place. And thanks to music, for the last 40 years I’ve been very fortunate to have traveled all over world, experiencing a lot of different cultures and geography. This has definitely informed my music as well.
You sometimes scat sing in the manner of George Benson. How did you get into that?
When I first heard [Brazilian singer-songwriter] Milton Nascimento, it occurred to me that he was not only a great singer but a painter who creates beautiful moods with the color of his voice, and that inspired me to augment my guitar playing with my voice. At the same time, I got into scatting through George Benson, and later I was influenced by the amazing things Bobby McFerrin does with his voice. But I’ve tried to scat and sing in my own way—what’s the point of copying?
I was reluctant to enter that world to start with, but once I did I went all the way. I was like a child in a toy store. It was amazing to discover ping-pong delays, to be able to record more than a minute of myself playing, then add layers and layers on top of that. I did sound-on-sound effects live onstage for 15 years, and my music reached a very inspiring place—though I know that some people weren’t happy with my experiments. Using effects, I felt powerful, but that ended up being a very dangerous thing. I started to feel as if I couldn’t function without effects—and that freaked me out. So, one day before a new tour began, I took a look at all my equipment and said to it, “You stay here— I’m going without you.” I left for the tour with only my guitar and a cable, wanting to touch people with just the instrument.
At first, it was difficult to be stripped of effects. The guitar sounded so small, and on some sound systems, not so great. But I started to accept those sonic limitations and work within that dimension. I concentrated on things like making a beautiful vibrato tell a story, and after a while I got to a point where I could do a concert with no PA—just a guitar and a room. Now I bring a minimum of equipment on tour— my guitar, a volume pedal, a reverb unit, two microphones, a little guitar stand, a music stand for the lyrics so I don’t forget them. And that’s it, except for an electric fan to keep me cool—and that takes up the most space of all.
Has ditching effects changed your playing at all?
Yes. Effects, especially reverb, can greatly mask the sound of a guitar and cause you to forget its natural sound. When you just play a naked guitar, you’re confronted by the pure tone and understand that it requires a lot of work and attention to make the instrument sound beautiful. When I stopped using effects, I found myself concentrating a lot on my right-hand attack and on my left-hand touch. I was forced to address the sound correctly on an acoustic level, and that’s why these days I record without headphones and maybe add just a tiny bit of effects later in the recording process.
Tell us a little about your latest album, Vividly.
On the last recording [2001’s Intuite], I put my singing aside. But this time I wanted to do a record where songs with lyrics and instrumentals shared the space equally. I tried to create a sequence of tunes that would make sense as a whole and would also make sense if you listen separately to the songs and the instrumentals. For each of the songs—some of which I was happy to collaborate on with my wife, Doatea, and a singer-songwriter friend from Los Angeles named Nina Swan—I was careful to record parts that didn’t conflict with the lyrics. I wanted a listener to be able to pay attention to one element at a time without any confusion. In other words, I treated the voice and guitar like equal instruments. I’m very happy with Vividly, which some people have told me is my best record to date. My guitar tone has improved. I sing better than I did in the past. Most importantly, it’s a record that shows where I am as a musician and as a person.
Improvisation seems to play a real prominent role in your music.
I try to be as spontaneous as possible by approaching a new composition with the notion that it’ll never really be completed. I’ll of course try to learn what I’ve written note-for-note, but very soon after that I will deviate from the piece and play it more freely, giving myself a bit of a vocabulary around the places that my fingers know. I’ll follow a piece to where it leads me. Here’s another way I look at improvisation: At the end of the day, everything we learn on our instrument has to be forgotten, because as much as you work hard to overcome the technical challenges that surface when you approach music, ultimately you need to ignore all that information in order to be fully attentive and reactive to what you are instantly composing.
The “New Lady” acoustic that Bensusan’s signature Lowden is based on (shown here) features an Adirondack spruce top, Honduran rosewood back and sides, a Madagascar rosewood bridge, a 5-piece maple neck, ebony headstock overlay, and sycamore, rosewood, and mahogany purfling. Photo courtesy of George Lowden
What makes for a strong improviser?
It helps to have a thorough knowledge of the fretboard, to know the different locations of any given chord and its inversions, to have multiple positions for scales and modes under your fingers. At a certain point, though, you have to stop thinking about scales and actually play music. Music is much more than just a logical and harmonious juxtaposition of melodies. Inside all this, there is an intact abstraction— a brutal and vibrant jewel—calling for your senses, emotions, and all our human feelings. No words can describe that sensation. If there were, then there would be no need to play or listen to music anymore.
Pierre Bensusan's Gearbox
Guitars
1978 Lowden S-22 (dubbed “Old Lady”), Lowden Pierre Bensusan signature model (dubbed “New Lady”), signature Altiplanos archtop made by Michael Greenfield, Juan Miguel Carmona nylon-string, Kevin Ryan steel-string
Effects
Ernie Ball Volume Pedal, Zoom H4 handheld digital recorder (for reverb)
Amplification
Headway Pickups piezo pickup routed through Fishman internal preamp (60 percent of the signal), custom mic handmade in Michigan (40 percent of the signal), RØDE vocal mic
Strings and Picks
Wyres .013–.056 signature set, clear Dobro thumbpick
On Vividly, Pierre Bensusan defends his title as the all-time king of DADGAD tuning.
Vividly
DADGAD Music