The making of a musical master
Karl Grossman and Camino Rio play Saint Rocke Saturday night. Photo by Andrew Neuhart
Grossman had already led a considerable life in music. He grew up as something of a musical prodigy in the South Bay of the 1960s. He first followed in the footsteps of his jazz musician father and played trumpet, beginning in the 4th grade. As a teenager he became an accomplished guitarist. By the time he graduated from Mira Costa – where he was a classmate of jazz recording artist David Benoit – he had picked up the bass and joined a rock n’ roll band, the Bros of Manahatta.
The band toured heavy and hard, even through the dark winter months of Alaska, and Grossman acquired the training that only the road can give a young musician. But when it was all said and done, he returned to the guitar, to jazz, and to the South Bay, where 25 years ago he founded his own studio on Valley Drive.
Music Focus studio would become one of the formative musical havens in local musical history. Grossman has instructed hundreds of local musicians (on guitar, bass, trumpet, piano, vocals, violin, drums, and ukulele) and recorded such signature South Bay bands as Prop. 13. His studio has long served as the revered rehearsal haunt of Pennywise (whose guitarist Fletcher Dragge is among his former students) and numerous other bands. If you played Six Degrees of Karl Grossman, you would find a connection between him and nearly every player in the area. He is one of the true musical masters of the local music scene.
But for Grossman as a musician himself, everything would change as a result of that night at the Greek Theater. He’d gone to see Santana. After discovering his car had been vandalized he called the theater to lodge a complaint. They gave him free tickets to see the Gipsy Kings.
He was familiar with the band but had never heard them live. The Kings, with seven raging gypsy guitars and voices raised in passionate song, enraptured Grossman.
“The Gipsy Kings are a masterful band in rumba flamenco and I was just spellbound,” he said. “Seeing seven guitarists in front of you just wailing, and people around you just having a great time…It was riveting.”
Grossman became a student again. He continued playing jazz for a next few years, but began gravitating towards flamenco. In 1997, he devoted himself entirely to its discipline.
“I really started hearing that voice come out of me, that nylon string voice, and I haven’t really looked back…” Grossman said. “Flamenco is many types of song form, and it’s a vast study, a lifelong study unto itself. But I started to realize I really wanted to write my own songs using the techniques of flamenco.”
It was as if everything prior to this had been preparing him for rumba flamenco. The trumpet, with its right handed technique, had given him an attenuation to melody; the bass, with its use of the middle and index fingers to pick notes, had prepared him for “picado” technique used by flamenco players; and his long love affair with the guitar itself, of course, found its fullest fruition yet in the fusion of classical, gypsy, and Brazilian sounds that emerged in his newly found flamenco voice.
“I sort of think about that and kind of marvel at some of my early choices that actually developed into the love of the style I’m playing right now,” Grossman said. “It’s been an interesting voyage.”
It was both a liberating and a humbling experience. He had to force himself to leave his guitar picks at home when he went to gigs.
“It probably took me six years to really get comfortable soloing and using my fingers the whole time and never really thinking back, ‘Oh, I should be using a pick because I am not as fluent here.’ That is really a joy, finally breaking through to where I am free from some of the technical limitations.”
One of the key steps along the way was when he followed the time-honored flamenco tradition and studied under a master. Gino D’Auri is one of the staples of the LA flamenco scene, an Italian-born guitarist who performed decades-long run at El Cid restaurant in Hollywood and who was a musical compatriot of the legendary Paco de Lucia.
Grossman was the last student D’Auri ever took on. He studied under D’Auri six months as the master was dying of throat cancer. By the end, D’Auri could no longer even speak – the master and the student communicated through music alone, and they grew close before D’Auri’s death in 2007.
“I feel truly blessed I got to study with a true master, and he’s greatly missed in the flamenco world,” Grossman said. “It was powerful, just being humble enough to admit I want to study – I am not done learning and studying myself. That is something I recommend to every guitarist and musician in the South Bay and beyond: you are not done. Don’t put yourself in a pigeonhole.”
He has become astonishingly fluent in flamenco. Grossman has that quality only a master possesses – his playing is rapid-fire but somehow always unhurried. His technical proficiency is striking, of course, but even more so are the graceful melodic lines that course through his music.
“Through dedication to technique, you finally get to the point where you have started,” Grossman said. “It is not the end. You work on technique and then you realize this is where I need to be to get my voice out, to get the voice of this melody out. It’s not the other way. It’s like, go fast, then you are going to play really great solos and people will be amazed. That is a trap.”
His record Mar de Vida marks Grossman’s arrival as a rumba flamenco artist, and does so with a startlingly beautiful artistry. The technical accomplishment of a musician, he frequently tells his students, is a start – but musical power and beauty are the goals. Grossman has reached these goals on Mar de Vida. From the galloping outset of “Caballos en Carreras” (actually an ode of sorts to the freedom of horses), to the graceful sway of “En Mis Brazas” and the thrum and drama of “Mediterranea,” Grossman’s flamenco guitar voice is clear and strong and ranges from meditative to rousing and is always utterly enlivening. “Gates to the City,” a musical travelogue that was written about the high swooping overpass where the 105 meets the 110 freeway, is indicative of what Grossman is able to pull off. It transforms concrete into art, finding beauty in unexpected places.
Grossman has followed his own road as a musician. He has arrived at the gates to a new city and found beauty within the wild swooping forms of flamenco.
“It’s about those creative forces within you,” he said. “You can either chose to listen to them, or you can stifle them. I try to listen. That is what I keep trying to do. I hope I hear.”
Karl Grossman and Camino Rio (featuring his wife Janice Guerrerro, a flamenco dancer and vocalist, bassist Michael McLinden, conguero David Leach, and percussionist, dancer, and vocalist Kazu Nagano) perform at Saint Rocke April 17 at 8 p.m. Headlining that night are the Argentinian group Los Pinguos. ER