Nov. 3, 2022
My friend Rob Millis just shared this wonderful documentary from Mountain of Tongues (journalist Ben Mauk and photographer Thomas Dworzak) called Gitara, about guitar music in Azerbaijan, and I am smitten. I don’t know enough about it to say anything terribly interesting, but I sure do love what happens when electric guitars fall into the hands of folks who didn’t traditionally use them. In any case, here are some things I gleaned from it:
• Azerbaijani guitarists seem to particularly love these cheap Jolana guitars made in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 70s, especially the double cutaway model with three pickups and lots of switches. (Jolana still makes guitars, but they are much more “normal” now.)
• They take the tremolo bar off, but leave the spring in place and work the plate where the whammy bar mounts with the heal of their picking hand to get semitones.
• Most of them seem to use only five strings and dispense with the low E string (no idea about tuning).
• For effects, they like distortion and octave splitters, which, at least in some cases, seem to be built into the guitars.
• It seems like this music is mainly played at weddings.
• It also has a kind of “Spanish tinge” to it, and there are other things in this film that make me think it may have ties to Rom (aka Gypsy) culture – note the “flamenco” dancer around 29:15, and the fact that the guitarist featured in that section is nicknamed Roma.
Most of the music covered in this documentary sounds to my ears to be on the more traditional end of the spectrum. As I started digging around on You Tube I found quite a bit that is clearly more pop-oriented (with synthesizers and drum machines) and even jazzy, though I suspect the boundaries can get a little fuzzy. My impression is that a lot of these guys move easily between traditional/classical and modern popular idioms. I encourage you to start with this film as an introduction and then follow me down the rabbit hole to hear more by these and other guitarists.