The Passion of Strunz & Farah: An Interview with the Guitar Virtuosos of World Music

Early in 1991, Dana LaFontaine and Mark Kenaston spoke with Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah at Jorge Strunz’s Los Angeles home. Those who've had the good fortune to experience Strunz & Farah know that this Costa Rican/lranian guitar duo pack the strongest one-two punch in "World Music" today. Characterized by Latin & Afro-Cuban rhythms, lyrical melody and technical proficiency few can aspire to, Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah are clearly at the forefront of a genre that is catching the ears and the imaginations of an audience eager for fresh, exciting and dynamic music.

Begun as a collaboration to explore new directions for the acoustic guitar; Strunz & Farah recorded their first album Mosaico in 1980. Drawing on their individual backgrounds from Latin America and the Middle East, they've created an artistic tour de force that has continued to evolve, as evidenced four albums later; by their current bestseller Primal Magic[1991].

Mark-Dana: Why don't we begin at the beginning? What inspired you both to become guitarists?

Farah: I started in music playing the accordion, which was very popular in Iran at the time. It was natural for anyone wanting to get into music to pick up the accordion. At some point I remember thinking that the accordion wasn't going to make it for me and about that time I acquired my first guitar, so it was a natural transition. This was back in Iran in the late 60s.

Mark-Dana: The guitar was popular in Iran?

Farah: Well, Latin music and flamenco were very popular, and I used to hear a lot of people playing those styles of music. So when I got my guitar I started taking lessons from an lranian/Armenian person who played flamenco guitar--my first few lessons were with him.

Next, I got into electric guitars and started putting together top 40 bands. I did this until I went to England in 1969. Although I went to Britain mainly to study, I ended up in these rock bands for several years. I continued doing this until the end of my studies when I started listening to jazz-fusion, which I was listening to a lot

Mark-Dana: Bands like Chick Corea’s Return to Forever?

Farah: Yeah, Chick Corea and guys like John I McLaughlin. These people really started changing the way I looked at music and the instrument.

Mark-Dana: We've played your music to people who've never heard it and several have compared it to McLaughlin and Al Dimeola because of your speed and technical prowess.

Farah: Yes, it's the same school of technique. There haven't been too many people who have done it on record or have the facility to do it One of the bands I was listening to at the time was Caldera--Jorge's band. When I finally met Jorge and we started playing together, I started playing the acoustic guitar again. And the rest is history.

Mark-Dana: Jorge, were you playing electric guitar at that time?

Strunz: I did for a while when I was with Caldera, which was a Latin-fusion band that recorded for Capitol in the late seventies. My original interest was flamenco and that's what I first learned to play--on acoustic guitar. Most people start with acoustic guitar because they're easier to get

Mark-Dana: Yeah, or a Sears electric guitar, those were always popular.

Strunz: They don't have those in the Third World, but acoustic guitars are very easy to get And because I liked flamenco, I started studying that. My uncle from San Jose, Costa Rica, gave me my first acoustic guitar when I was six years old. It got left behind when we moved away, but the idea stuck in my mind to replace it when I got the chance.

It was at this point that I started studying flamenco fairly seriously, I played in Spanish restaurants with singers and dancers. I became very involved with the music and was very determined to become a flamenco guitarist

I did that until I was 19 or 20 at which point I realized that I wanted to do something else. Flamenco was not really my background and I wanted to synthesize my own experiences and communicate those things on the guitar, although at that point I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to take. I had lived in many parts of the world, but I knew I wasn't a Spanish gypsy. As much as I liked the music, I knew I'd be chasing a Spanish gypsy for the rest of my life if I stuck with flamenco. So as much as I loved the music, I gave it up as a serious pursuit

At that point I became interested in rock and electric guitar. Jimi Hendrix was a big influence during that period. Later I started listening to Coltrane, Miles Davis and John McLaughlin--they were all big influences for me at that time.

I also became involved in Latin folk music, which was my own music in a way, but I suppose I always took it for granted. I didn't study it seriously until the eighties when I became involved in Latin folk rhythms and rumbas--things like that. I was studying some of the older salsa concepts, the roots of salsa, which I prefer over contemporary salsa. It was all done on guitars; it was string music that was done on small instruments in Cuba and on the islands. Later, when salsa moved into the bigger salons they had to leave their guitars at home because they weren't loud enough to play the large dances.

Now, of course, you can electrify any acoustic guitar and get the volume. In this way we can place an acoustic guitar in a very rhythmic format that normally it couldn't tolerate because it's a very intimate instrument It's the quietest of instruments really--practically every other instrument blows it out of the water because of its volume.

Mark-Dana: Okay, so now that the acoustic guitar is being electrified, guitarists like yourselves are able to do things that before were impossible. How are you synthesizing traditional Latin, Middle Eastern and Afro-Cuban styles into the music that you're doing now, and does this synthesis take place on a conscious level?

Strunz: When Ardeshir and I first got together it happened in a sense subconsciously, because at that point I was looking for another guitar player after Caldera--I could see the writing on the wall for most of the fusion bands. It was not going to continue into the eighties unless you were one of the three or four big names--John McLaughlin or someone like that. I figured that it was time to evolve the music into different formats and I started thinking about going back to the acoustic guitar. I also thought what would I like to hear with the acoustic guitar. Being a guitar chauvinist, I said another acoustic guitar!

So I started looking for other guitar players at that point, but I wasn't specifically looking for an ethnic orientation-other than someone who understood Latin music because that was my background. It also needed to be someone who was technically good enough to do something that made sense for the two guitars. Ardeshir happened to be that person. I was fortunate to get together with him after I had tried some things with other guitar players that hadn't convinced me that a collaboration could work. With Ardeshir I realized that we could make a record very easily.

It turned out that Ardeshir is from the Middle East. I wasn't looking for a Middle Eastern guitarist, but it's become a point of interest that we're from different parts of the planet. Because of this, we've been able to work in many different contexts with the music over the past few years, including a Middle Eastern band where I was the only non-Middle Easterner. This was during the time-frame '84, '85, '86.

Finally, we decided to put a rumba band together which meant mostly Latin players, that's how Primal Magic started. We decided to put a heavy emphasis on rumbas and danceable rhythms and put the guitars on top. Having done so many things on the guitar in the past ten years, we decided to hit the grooves hard and make them Latin oriented because that's something we know how to do. That's the basic format for Primal Magic and that was the focus we had for putting that music together.

It turns out that right as we were recording Primal Magic we were having a lot of trouble with the drummer we were working with because he was just too loud for the kind of stuff we were doing. The music is energetic and we're playing a lot of notes so it was natural to feel that you want to bash'em. He's a great drummer, but we needed someone who was more sensitive and more groove oriented, who didn't want to play so much and wouldn’t get so excited about the timing.

We started looking around and found an African named Paul Tchounga, from Cameroon, who turned out to be the best person for the job. He could play rumba very well and at the same time was a very sensitive accompanist--which the guitars need. We're not doing jazz-fusion where we're playing Les Pauls plugged into Marshall stacks. We may be playing solos with a lot of notes, but we can't have everyone behind us going crazy. Because if they do, that's it, the guitars are buried.

Farah: Besides, you lose the essence of the acoustic feel.

Strunz: Yes, the romantic intimacy of the guitar. So when Paul joined the band, it took on an even more international flavor. It took on a greater point of interest for the press that there are four continents represented in the band. And though we were very conscious of our Third World roots, we didn't set out to be just two more guitarists playing electric jazz tinged with exotic elements. We wanted to contribute what we had to the scene.

Mark-Dana: Your music has too much authority and passion to get lumped into some of these more generic styles.

Farah: That passion comes from our backgrounds--Latin America is very passionate.

Strunz: Flamenco is a very emotional music. The passion is heavily emphasized-in both cultures in terms of musical expression. You're encouraged to be that way. In some cultures it can be a little embarrassing to express yourself too much, but these cultures are not like that. So we've tried to do something with that passion, but something that makes sense for domestic audiences.

What we've found with Primal Magic was putting that kind of artistic expression on top of a very rhythmic format--the rumbas and such--made it much more accessible to the people outside the jazz clubs.

Mark-Dana: There seem to be many artists today, especially in the so-called New-Age genre, that are pulling in these different influences in an attempt to create some sort of musical hybrid. Unfortunately, most of what you hear is bland and not very convincing. What you hear in Strunz & Farah is a rhythmic authenticity and a strong lyrical quality. A devotion to making a melodic statement.

Strunz: You can have a solid rhythm section, but if the melody isn't there then it's empty on top. You've got to have that balance.

Mark-Dana: Getting back to the musicians that you have behind you, the Zen notion of less is more may be important for the musicians that accompany you. You guys aren't exactly laid back.

Strunz: We're fully expressive as guitarists and not everyone in the band can join us in that We've been technique conscious in our development, which means to say that…

Mark-Dana: You can play a lot of notes.

Strunz: Well, in order to fully express yourself, it's best to have complete control over all the techniques. If you can play very fast, you can play very slow. If you can play very slow it doesn't mean you can play very fast So there's something about having a complete technical vision of what you’re doing if you really want to express all the different sides of the guitar.

I, for one, have always been interested in the guitar players who have full technical capability--like Paco DeLucia and John McLaughlin--who I felt were very complete guitar players and had put a lot of time into the instrument. They’re hard workers--it's a labor of love. The amount of love is shown by the amount of time they've spent with the instrument, and you have to spend a lot of hours with the instrument if you really love it-then you're going to develop a lot of technique on it

Mark-Dana: If you write novels and your vocabulary is limited, you won't be able to fully express yourself.

Strunz: Yes, you're limiting your possibilities, you're not going to be able to express certain emotions perhaps, certain thoughts that you want to express. Whereas, if you have a good control of the language, then you're going to be able to say all kinds of interesting things that you can feel, but you might not have been able to express.

Mark-Dana: Given the reputation for musicians in general, and guitarists in particular, to have large egos, have ego clashes ever been a problem for the two of you?

Strunz: It's never been a problem.

Farah: It's never been a problem, that's why it's lasted this long.

Strunz: It's been a very smooth collaboration between Ardeshir and myself. Sometimes people are established as solo artists and that can be the cause of ego clashes. In our case, we like the idea of what you can do with two guitars. Its very functional, the concept of two guitars, it fills many harmonic and rhythmic niches all at once.

Mark-Dana: In the seventies, it was in vogue to have rock bands with two guitarists playing double-leads, playing either harmonies or in unison.

Strunz: The Allman Brothers come to mind, the Eagles--bands like that

There will a1ways be that concept, it's one of the basic instrumental capabilities of the guitar. Plus it's streamlined--we started out as a duo, and we eventually came to realize that we have a nucleus that we can work from and add other musicians to. We're at a point now where most of our work is with an ensemble situation. We still have duos we perform, but much less than we did before.

Mark-Dana: Isn't your album Misterio essentially a guitar duo?

Strunz: Most of it is guitar.

Farah: Most of it is trio or quintet At the time we were doing a lot of guitar duo and trio stuff and performing in Cuba, Peru and Switzerland. It went really well, especially the Montreax Jazz Festival.

Strunz: That went really well despite the fact that nobody knew who we were! The organizer invited us because he liked our music.

Farah: He liked our album Guitarras.

Strunz: Which is a more difficult and obscure record for most people.

Mark-Dana: What do you think of the categorization that goes on in the music industry? It seems if a record company doesn't know how to market you, you're out of luck getting a con1ract.

Farah: We had that problem for a number of years with record companies because they didn't know how to classify us. They have all these departments--the jazz department or the pop department--and if you don't fit into one of those channels, they don't know what to do with you.

Mark-Dana: That's how you've ended up in the New Age and Jazz bins and who knows where else.

Farah: Well that's been the problem. World Beat is a concept that became popular in Europe three or four years ago. We've been doing World Music, which is probably the best way to categorize us, since 1980. Finally, World Beat became a genre in the industry. The Gipsy Kings got signed to Elektra/Asylum and that opened the eyes of the industry to what we now call World Music.

Mark-Dana: Since their name came up, we suppose Strunz & Farah are often compared to the Gipsy Kings.

Strunz: We do get compared, and frankly, their success has definitely helped us. Before that, the industry thought our music was too exotic to do anything with. They said, "you guys play great guitar, but this music you're doing, we're not sure where to put it." So therefore, no contract, no deal and no access to the media--this happened a lot. We had stacks of letters of rejection, usually because of this same thing.

When the Kings came out, nobody expected them to do as well as they did. They're very different from us in the sense that they're really a vocal-pop group with a good guitarist--Tonino plays nice. But their main focus is tunes, songs--we don't do that, we're really into instrumental music. Yes, we use flamenco guitars like they do. Yes, we do use rumbas like they do, and yes, there is flamenco influence in both cases. Because it's a sound that is not widely heard, people in the industry said that these guys sound like the Kings, therefore it's of interest now. "How come these guys haven't been signed before?" was the question in the industry. We got several offers at once, so we had the advantage all of a sudden.

Farah: We were playing at Le Cafe (a club in the San Fernando Valley), and Jorge walks in and says, “By the way, we have a deal."

Strunz: Whenever they invite you to lunch, you know it's serious. So yes, the Kings actually had a lot to do with it. We think that it's somehow prophetic that it was gypsies that opened the ground for us, because we've always been fans of gypsy music.

Mark-Dana: Always aspired to do a version of Volare yourselves?

Strunz: (laughing) We did, but we realized that the voices weren't coming. We were taking vocal lessons and looking at those Italian hits, looking to expand our market.

Farah: We're going to do the Godfather theme.

Strunz: Well, we're going to do it rumba style. (laughter).

Mark-Dana: How do you keep in shape musically for your live performances?

Strunz: There is a lot of practicing that's involved, especially early on. It's not as though you have to keep it up for the rest of your life, but there are points of monastic dedication to the instrument You have to break certain barriers and if you keep your objectives firmly in mind, it makes it a lot easier. It strengthens your inspiration and dedication to achieve your goals. Which means, of course, your income goes plummeting downhill for a number of years.

Mark-Dana: How do you go about the process of composing music? Do you write individually or together?

Strunz: We do both. We've collaborated and we also write individually. Composition is a process of collecting ideas. I usually put my ideas down on cassette tape and then catalog them by hand. I've built up a whole library of them, so that if I write something in E minor, tempo 120…

Mark-Dana: And you need a bridge…

Strunz: And I need a bridge, and I look-E minor, E minor, then something comes up and it's the perfect bridge, and it was there all along. But you can't remember all that stuff unless you either write it down in manuscript, which means you need to be a sight writer or sight reader, or you record them on tape as I do. There are so many ideas that fly through, and some are good and some are not so good. Later you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Then you chain these ideas together in tempo and key. Arrangement-wise, we sit down later and ask ourselves if we want to harmonize or if we want individual expression. In other words, one melody/one melody--where Ardeshir plays by himself and I play by myself. Or we might harmonize and then I'll express myself on one part and Ardeshir on another part Those things we usually arrange together, and later the band joins us for their arrangement

Mark-Dana: If you can't decide, do you arm wrestle?

Strunz: Arm-wrestle or play poker, one of the two.

Mark-Dana: When you're improvising on stage, how do you communicate? Is it an intuitive process between you?

Farah: That whole thing is arranged. We are given a time-frame that you cannot go beyond.

Strunz: Three cycles, three cycles--head. It's that simple. Sometimes we have open-ended solos, modal things that are difficult to cycle off because they're all A minor. In that case there's usually a cue at the end of the solo, a little motif that says I'm finished.

Mark-Dana: Do either of you have a personal favorite among the pieces you've recorded?

Farah: We have a feeling of love towards everything that we've done.

Mark-Dana: Maybe that question is too much like: Which child do you love the most?

Strunz: Yeah, I think it gets into that kind of a thing.

Farah: Every song represents a certain part of your life, a certain part of your life back then.

Mark-Dana: Are there any songs that you can't stand playing anymore?

Strunz: We can't play a lot of them anymore. You know how it is with performers, it's a floating repertoire. Every year it's a different repertoire and if you ask me a tune from three years ago, I'll ask, "What key is it in?

Mark-Dana: When you're getting ready to go out on tour, do you dig through your catalog and say, we haven't played this one in a while. Why don't we play this one?

Strunz: Yeah, we do that to a certain extent. But usually when you have a new album out, and it's doing well, you put an emphasis on that music, mostly because that's what people are expecting to hear. You spice it up with a couple of things that your fans have always liked from the past and usually there's a concert there, there's a coordination. There are some requests that we can't fulfill anymore. Nomad from Mosaico was a very popular piece.

Mark-Dana: What key was that in?

Strunz: C sharp minor, I think, but that's about as far as we're going to get on that one (laughter). It's hard to put a repertoire together. There are a few simple tunes, but most are pretty elaborate and memory is very important

Farah: Most of our tunes really need to be in shape. If we don't play them for a length of time…

Strunz: You wouldn't want to hear us play them!

Mark-Dana: We just wanted to ask you briefly about your work with Jackson Browne. What kind of music were you doing? What's it like to work with him?

Strunz: We did a whole summer tour with him last year [1990], it wasn't Strunz & Fatah, it was a group called Sangre Machehual--very colorful Latin folk music. He's an extremely nice man. He has been very supportive of the music we've been doing.

Mark-Dana: So what's next for Strunz & Farah?

Strunz: Well, we're preparing for our next album in between some live things we have to do. We're taking some time off pretty soon to start recording our next album [Americas] which is due mid-spring of this coming year[1992].

Mark-Dana: We wish you the best and look forward to the new material,

Strunz: Thank you.

Farah: Yes, thank you.