Unique road brings guitarist to local library

Carlos Pavan, an Argentine classical guitarist living in Brooklyn who grew up on Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, performed at the Bloomfield Public Library, Saturday, Oct. 7.

The route he took to playing in the township was a unique one, starting off with a group of neighborhood boys and their rock band in Bell Ville, which is in the province of Cordoba.

“It took three months to form that band,” he said. “We took lessons from a crazy guy, a rock ‘n’ roll player, a drunk, a bohemian, and I thought this was it! We named the band Caligula, after that crazy Roman dude.”

But Pavan’s mother, a hospital worker, and his father, a lawyer, preferred a less bohemian activity like soccer, a requirement for an Argentine boy. But Pavan was a lousy soccer player.

“Caligula was a weekend garage band and my mother was fine with it because she could keep an eye on me,” he said. “And our neighbors were OK with it because we were getting better.”

So his mother told him if he wanted to play music and promised to practice, she would buy him a guitar. His mother, he said, had come from a poor province where folklore was a significant influence.

“We drove to the city of Cordoba for my first guitar, a cheap version of a Fender Squire,” he said.

His first teacher gave him jazz lessons. His name was Luis D’Aquila and Pavan said he was well-known and had lots of material — magazines, books, videos and records — and rock albums. He died in 2019.

“I thought he was crazy, but that was too easy,” Pavan said. “He was strange and fine. He had a heart attack. He was walking along and dropped dead.”

Pavan liked jazz because he could improvise. The bus ride to Cordova was two and a half hours, one way.

“It was terrible, but I was 16, so who cares,” he said. “Because I was coming from so far away, they put lessons together for me — harmony, theory, guitar and ensemble. I was still in secondary school and got home late. The next day, I’d be absent from school, I was so tired.”

Just as he started going for music lessons, his father died.

“He had a heart attack,” Pavan said. “I got lucky, otherwise I’d be a lawyer. After he died, my mom said I could do whatever I wanted.”

Pavan went to live with a brother and once a month, traveled to Buenos Aires, a nine-hour bus ride.

For him, it was a nightmare, but he met Pino Marrone, a rock ‘n’ roll player who moved to California and became a jazz musician. Marrone told him to leave, too, and go to NYC to study. He did and Marrone joined him.

“We went to live with Juilo Botti, a tenor saxophone player,” Pavan said. “We lived in a basement and at night went up to Harlem. In the daytime, we studied English to keep our visas.”

Pavan, 45, met his wife in 2008. She was a student of his at the time. Seven years earlier, studying jazz in Manhattan, he decided to attend the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. He had gotten tired of jazz and wanted to study classical guitar.

“I wanted to clean up my act,” he said. “I wanted to compose my own music instead of playing everyone else’s.”

Getting older, Pavan said he became nostalgic for Argentina and its folklore.

“It’s a crazy mix,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who went from the electric to classical guitar. It was a painful transition, but necessary. I understood jazz perfectly. It was information I had mastered, but it wasn’t mine. The classical guitar is quite different and I got lucky again. I met an old timer who helped me change from jazz to classical.”

At the library, Pavan played three of his own compositions based on short stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

“I want to compose chamber music,” he said. “In jazz, they put everything in a box, like a rock. But in classical, they connect everything.”

He does not compose on an instrument, but in his head. He said he sees the music. He likes Debussy, Stravinsky, but especially Bartok who incorporates the rhythms of music rooted in folklore.

“I still love my Pink Floyd, Hendrix and Janis Joplin,” he said. “But once you hear Stravinsky or Bartok, you can’t go back. It always sounds fresh.”

Pavan teaches privately and also part-time in a public school. He belongs to a chamber music trio and will be recording his fourth album in November. For additional information go to www.carlospavan.info.

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