Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Enrique Yara - “Corre, Corre, Caballito”

My single favorite few moments of music from the past 6 months. Enrique Yara’s guitar sounds like someone washing overalls in a crank-powered washing machine, in a cart on a rutted road, bouncing along behind the caballito. It’s the sound of infinite intersecting histories - ancient travelers across the Bering Strait, horses evolving in tandem with people and together returning to America in the second millennium, the wood and steel of the instrument, developed and refined by Arabs, Germans, Spaniards, Pennsylvanians, taken up by Enrique Yara and made new again.

This recording is from Jack Loeffler’s “La Musica de los Viejitos”, a book and CD collected by Loeffler, on whose radio program “Southwest Sound Collage” I heard this music, as I drove West into Taos (driving in the Taos Canyon is the best place to listen to music). Loeffler says:

“Enrique Yara was born in 1892 and spent much of his long life in Watrous, New Mexico. Even though he was all but blind, he chose to live alone in his adobe home, with his dog for a companion. He played both the guitar and the mandolin. When we recorded him in 1978, he claimed to recall few songs that he had learned after the age of five years.”

Ahh, to forget everything from the past 80 years! We can only hope to live long enough to be so fortunate.

The guitar: can you make this sound on purpose? Of course Yara is acting intentionally, but you have to assume that for this man, blind, skin stretched by a life in the high desert, with a dog, tuning his guitar was a challenge, not to mention playing the notes - notes recalled from the mind of a boy only this tall.

In this age, execution has fallen out of fashion - we want to conceive, to arrange, and then immediately to reflect-on. I remember the early 90’s, when Guitar Player magazine began mocking Yngwie Malmsteen and praising “the song”. Who knew that what we would soon detest was not his sound, but only the chops? Now mouse clickers delicatessen us with loops and twisting synthetic noises sandwiched in pieces of vinyl. It is the shredder’s very mastery which is so idiotic and shameful - unless he is not an artist, but a millions-of-youtube-views collector.

The artist does not operate the controls, does not even navigate - they declare intent.

But isn’t it impossible to intend to fail? The bleeps and blips on the periphery of our space-age atmosphere can fail only when they have the wrong intention. How can we recognize weakness in an idea without ourselves being masters of intention? Are we not human? We are all masters of intention.

We in fact must intend to fail. We must intend to execute, so that we can fail to execute.

This guitar sound is attainable only once in the whole history of music, only once in a life, at its end, stretching back to its beginning.