Yesterday was the 17th anniversary of the passing of the great composer/guitarist Michael Hedges. I got to know Michael a little bit. In 1986 he played in Toronto for the first time as part of an Evening with Windham Hill concert at Roy Thomson Hall (the home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra). There was another act on the bill who, at the time, were the top-selling act on Windham Hill, and Michaels set was not so much meant to be a support slot...it comprised half the show. He tore the roof off the place. I dont know that the fans of the other act on the bill (an ethereal new age-y band called Shadowfax) were at all prepared for Michael to completely steal the show the way he did. Frankly, I remember nothing about Shadowfaxs set! I was just starting out in the music thing and during the break between sets I took the liberty of asking the monitor mix engineer if he could pass my little cassette demo to Michael. He smilingly said hed be happy to. Months passed and I heard nothing, so I assumed that my cassette had eventually met the bulk eraser and now had something more interesting on it! :-) One day the phone rang and it was an old friend of Michaels who lived in Toronto. He explained to me that Michael had listened to my cassette and was impressed. I nearly wet myself. A few months later that old friend of Michaels and I attended Michaels first solo show in Toronto at the Bathurst Street Theatre (now the Randolph Theatre). After his wonderful concert, Martin (the mutual friend) and I were waiting to say hi to Michael in the autograph lineup after the show. There must have been 20 people ahead of us, but Michaels eyes kept darting over to Martin and then to me. After exchanging eye contact a few times, Michael asked the person at the front of the line to wait a moment while he walked straight toward me and said, Are you Don? Im sure I must have stammered out a response, but all I remember was Michael saying, That tune of yours with the 6/8 feel...(and here he started singing the introduction to my tune The First Ride)...that tune is incredible! At this point, I could feel the eyes of the 20-odd people in the lineup all boring a hole through me while they silently must have been asking, Who the hell is that? Michael and I made a habit of hanging out every time he came to town after that. One time, Michael had asked me if I could find any and all recordings by Toronto singer Lisa Dalbello (or simply Dalbello, as she came to be known). He had heard that she had released a string of records as a teenager and in her early 20s that were hard to find. My friend the late great violinist Oliver Schroer and I scoured the used record stores and found three or four early LPs. A short time later, Michael did a double-bill show with Leo Kottke at Convocation Hall in Toronto. I was invited backstage and I handed the cache of LPs to Michael. He feigned almost fainting into an easy chair and declared, This is the nicest thing anyone has done for me. He invited my late wife Kelly and I for a drink at the Sutton Place Hotel after the show. Eventually, Michael, Leo, Michaels manager Hillary, renowned guitar builder Linda Manzer, Kelly and I were all seated around a table at the bar sharing a couple of bottles of champagne. It was a pretty out-of-body experience. Another time we went to a Windham Hill show at the Forum at Ontario Place. Michael closed the show. He invited Kelly and I backstage. This time we had my (then 6-year-old) stepson with us. He was very sleepy, so we laid him down on a sofa in Michaels dressing room, right next to an open flight case containing the famous Dyer Harp Guitar that Michael played to revive interest in that crazy beast of an instrument. Over the years, Michael and I kept talking about recording a duet together. My tune “Afraid to Dance,” was originally meant to be a duet. Michael loved the tune but felt like I had “filled in all the cracks,” and he asked me to try writing something with a bit of room for him to contribute something cool to the mix. I finished writing something just before he died, so obviously that wasn’t going to happen. The result was my tune “Michael, Michael, Michael.” Michael Hedges was an amazing guitarist, but focussing on his guitar prowess is a bit like admiring the tip of an iceberg. He was never comfortable with the “guitar community” and was not obsessed with the instrument. It was a means to a musical end. I admire his contributions as a composer first. He studied at the Peabody school with luminary avant grade composers such as E.J. Ulrich. He was also enamoured with popular music in all its forms, from the Baroque to Hendrix. He was much, much more than a revolutionary guitarist. He was a consummate composer and musician. That is an even more important legacy.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 14:03:45 +0000
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