whatsoever. The doctors concluded it was probably something called “task-specific focal dystonia” or, more precisely in my case, “musician’s focal dystonia,” which can be triggered by repetitive fine motor motions and lack of mental attention to what the fingers are doing. When neurons in the brain have fired over and over again due to the same repeated movements, and the brain is not carefully focused, the brain maps can eventually become “smudged” and confused, sending incorrect messages to the fingers.
The doctors told me it was basically an incurable affliction and that most musicians have to end their careers once this condition occurs. They recommended, however, that I try finger splints and suggested I see a rolfing therapist as they also found the muscles in my arms to be pretty tight. Back in Los Angeles, I endured ten torturous sessions, during which my poor arms were kneaded by a rolfer, whose arms were three times the size of mine. But my stubborn fingers still misbehaved.
I began a series of therapies, each time praying for a miracle: I flew to North Carolina for a week to learn Alexander Technique, consulted acupuncturists and chiropractors, and even spent a month attending sessions in Scientology at the Celebrity Center in Hollywood where Tom Cruise assured me that Scientology would, of course, be the solution to my finger problems.
Scientology was one of the stranger experiences in my life — being “audited” using their E-meter, having to strain to remember any “bad” things I might have ever done, lying on a massage table while one of their zombie-like members did their standard “feel my finger” routine, touching various points on my back, arms, and legs. Needless to say, all of this accomplished absolutely nothing. I quit after a month, realizing I had just wasted a few thousand dollars.
Looking back I really must have been pretty desperate to have sought help from this bizarre cult, known for exploiting its members. I chalked it up to one of my rather weird life experiences and was glad I had not wasted too much time being brainwashed by L. Ron Hubbard’s techniques.
Despite the failure of all of these supposed “cures,” I refused to give up. Stubbornly, I did not want to accept the recondite diagnosis of focal dystonia and felt desperate to discover another explanation.
I wondered if, perhaps, my problem could be the result of some deep-seated desire to abandon my guitar or my marriage. To test this theory I drove over to the San Fernando Valley for five appointments with a renowned hypnotherapist, followed by a couple of further sessions with another one in Brentwood who had been recommended to me. I found this one to be unpleasant and condescending, and concluded that hypnotherapy was not the answer.
Everything I tried seemed to no avail, all the efforts and therapies had no noticeable effect, and to my dismay my right-hand dexterity continued to deteriorate. It was breaking my heart to realize that my fingers, once known for flying over the strings with a speed that even Andrés Segovia and Julian Bream had marvelled at, were now in serious trouble.
I was still able to play “rest stroke,” but the “free stroke” required for advanced pieces was deteriorating. And my perfect left hand was no use to me if the right-hand fingers could not keep up! Was it now my destiny to abandon my beloved guitar? Would I ever find a way back to the music I had devoted my life to? I felt as though I had a deep ribbon of sadness running through me. I remembered how poor Schumann had struggled to design a finger-strengthening device trying to correct his fingers when they began misbehaving.
There was only one guitarist I knew of who had recovered from musician’s focal dystonia, and he had apparently taken a ten-year break from playing before retraining from scratch. For me that was not an option. Nevertheless, I made the trek to his place in Manhattan, but after a month of following his approach, which involved making huge sweeping motions with the right hand while imagining the movement originating in the muscles of the armpit, my fingers were no better off at all.
• • •
At around this time, Strunz and Farah, a virtuoso nuevo flamenco duo based in Los Angeles, had invited me to be their special guest on a new CD they were making called Stringweave. At first I refused, knowing full well I could never compete technically with their dazzling “mile a minute,” Latin jazz style of playing, but after hearing a demo of “Rimas de Cuerdas” that Jorge Strunz had especially written for me, I agreed to visit their studio.
Jorge and Ardeshir were both workaholics who rehearsed daily for hours, to the point that their playing was mind-blowing in its synchronized perfection. As a result the duo had developed a fanatic following around the world. For me, it was a great experience to stretch musically and play jazz with these amazing guitarists. It fuelled the inspiration to put out my own Latin style album the following year. I was fortunate to have them return the favour, as my special guests, performing on a piece that I wrote with their dazzling technique in mind. The CD, aptly named Camino Latino, which means Latin journey in Spanish, did indeed lead me on a huge life-changing Latin journey … but that is a story for the next chapter.
My motivation for choosing this style of music was a practical one. With my right-hand guitar technique giving me major problems, a less demanding style of music seemed like a sensible option. Why not opt for pieces that my fingers could manage more easily, and invite some of the guitar world’s Latin jazz and nuevo flamenco superstars to do the heavy lifting? Besides that, I had developed an appreciation for this appealing, Latin-based genre that radio stations such as The Wave in Los Angeles were choosing to broadcast.
The guitarists who excel at this style of music play using picks, which enables them to play at double speed compared to classical guitar players since a pick can be plucked up and down on the strings, unlike the fingernails. Another advantage these players enjoy is that most of them tend to perform on guitars with very low action.
When speaking of guitars, the term action refers to the closeness of the strings to the fretboard. The lower the action, the easier it is for the left hand to move up and down the fingerboard. Classical guitarists use guitars with higher action, which makes them considerably harder to play. However, more volume is projected by classical instruments, so they can be played acoustically without any amplification, and this results in a more beautiful and natural tone.
In deciding to work with nuevo flamenco guitarists on projects inspired by Latin music, it seemed that I had stumbled upon a perfect solution to my woes as a strictly classical performer, and I greatly looked forward to the exciting new challenge.
My arranger, Richard Fortin, agreed to produce the Latin-flavoured album I proposed. Fortunately he was also a fan of nuevo flamenco so we agreed to abandon our planned recording of classical transcriptions and originals that I had been writing and arranging for the past year. My right-hand fingers were simply not up to it. How sad that my beautiful transcriptions of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” Massenet’s “Élégie” and “Meditation,” and Schubert’s “Barcarolle,” all of which I had obsessed over for months to adapt for classical guitar, remain in their folder to this day.
In a writing frenzy, Richard and I took out our manuscript papers in Toronto and Los Angeles and began faxing each other our rough sketches and scores for mutual approval. The internet was, at that time, still in its infancy, so there were no digital files to be exchanged. Richard and I were back in the Stone Age in terms of technology, and we were happy that we could at least fax our scribbles back and forth. We wrote out every piece by hand and mailed each other demos recorded on our cassette machines. It would have amazed us then to learn how the recording business was on the brink of transformation, and that once the digital age fully blossomed we would soon all be sharing music tracks with a few clicks of a mouse.
I invited several well-known guitar players to contribute to the project and soon had on tape stellar performances by many of the world’s best Latin jazz players including, of course, my new friends Strunz and Farah. As executive producer, I undertook the dozens of phone calls to each of these performers in order to coordinate the repertoire, the recording studios, the scheduling, and the payment of all expenses.
• • •
My Camino Latino CD was engineered and mixed by a relatively unknown sound engineer called Peter Bond. Little did I know that many moons later he and I would reunite for several future musical collaborations