It's a quiet weekday afternoon in Hawai`i, and the lanky frame of Dan Crary is stretched out on a bed in a hotel room in the middle of Waikiki. As usual, his features are mostly hidden behind a big gray beard and tinted sunglasses; his large white fedora is off and resting on his chest at the moment. As he rests, Crary talks about one of his very favorite things in the world.

“The guitar changed my life. It wasn't just something to do; it was a watershed experience. Nothing was ever the same after I discovered the guitar, and in many ways, my whole life has been built around it.”

Crary has been a college professor; he's done radio for fifteen years; he spent many years in graduate school. The guitar is still the center of his world. “Being a musician - and for me, being a guitar player - has powerful ethical, community, and philosophical dimensions. I am passionate about it. I'm a believer.”

His knowledge of his instrument is intimate and comprehensive. “Scholars trace the origins of the guitar back to the second millennium BC. An immediate predecessor, which a guitar player of today could play, was an instrument called a cithara. It was popular in the streets and cabarets of the Greek and Roman Empires. When Rome burned, the myth is that Nero fiddled. But in fact Nero didn't play a fiddle; he played a cithara.”

Crary lets that sink in. “So if, in fact, Nero played music while Rome burned, he was just another in a long string of guitar players who were playing guitar while they were supposed to be doing something else! Which reminds me…”

He sits up and reaches for his guitar, a 1996 Taylor Dan Crary Signature Model longneck. He tunes it with care, and then he begins to play, almost absentmindedly. The air in the small room begins to hum with glorious runs and scales and arpeggios.

As Crary warms up, his partner on this trip, Beppe Gambetta, speaks into the tape recorder. He is soft-spoken and passionate, with a broad Northern Italian accent that melts like butter in the ears. As he talks about how he's come to be here, he grins frequently, a brightly lupine flash of white against dark whiskers, and shyly searches for words with just the right nuance.

Beppe was a founder of the seminal Italian bluegrass band Red Wine and played with them for 15 years. Eventually, life got in the way of music; though Beppe wanted to pursue music full-time, his bandmates all had careers. “I had to come out with my own solo style related to American flat picking. I really had to not be a copy of Doc Watson or the other great maestri, because I never would have made it. One of the most important things is a unique personality.”

The guitarist absorbed as much as he could from the styles of three American musicians whose music he could find in record stores: Watson, Blake, and Crary. When Crary came to Turin with Byron Berline and John Hickman, the eager young Italian saw their show and met one of his heroes.

“This band was not a regular bluegrass band,” he remembers. “The banjo was doing little chops; the violin was doing long notes… but [Dan did] the work of giving to the group the real sound. The rhythmic side of the band was him. The exchange of roles that was really interesting.”

Though Beppe had developed his own inimitable style, the assertiveness he had heard in Crary's music made an impression. In turn, Crary was most impressed by Beppe's flat-picking in a solo performance. “Flat-picking has its challenges,” Crary muses as he plays. “It's usually thought of as something you do in an ensemble. But he was able to do a full, really fat-sounding guitar line behind songs and in solo pieces. He was a breath of fresh air.” Both guitarists had similar sensibilities about their music that helped blur any cultural and language barriers.

Dan joined Beppe on his debut album, Dialogues, a collection of duets with Dan and new friends like David Grier, Norman Blake, Alan Munde, Mike Marshall, and the late Charles Sawtelle. Beppe, in turn, appeared on Crary's own love song to the art of collaboration, Jammed If I Do, which also featured duets with Blake, Doc Watson, Tony Rice, and other masters. In Live on Tour 2000, later titled Synergia, Crary and Gambetta came together for a concert album. Recorded live in Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Slovenia, Synergia was structured after the Doc and Merle Watson recordings of the 1960s. An eclectic meeting of Midwestern powerhouse delivery and European sensuality, the album beautifully illustrates Crary's declaration that guitar music is a universal language.

“I don't know the statistic anymore, but 20 years ago, there was one guitar made for one of every other instrument in the world,” Crary remarks as he plays effortless little runs on that long-necked Taylor. “Every time a piano was made, there was a guitar. Every time a fiddle was made, there was a guitar. The guitar has swept the world. Wherever you go, there are people who are part of the same community. They may not speak any English, but by God, they will know guitar music. Where do you go in this world where they haven't heard Doc Watson? Nowhere!”

Universally recognized and respected, this degree of virtuosity can build bridges over deep chasms of suspicion and distrust. “I've had the experience of going places where, if I'd been doing almost anything other than playing music, I wouldn't have been popular,” comments Crary. “Our band played in New Zealand right after we had thrown the Kiwis out of the South Pacific Mutual Defense Treaty, over the issue of nuclear-tipped weapons on our ships. Most Americans didn't even know about this! I didn't know about it, and I read the paper regularly. But New Zealanders were really pissed off.” Crary and his band were asked to do extra shows to help smooth things over. “After the concerts, there were 20 or 30 people standing around, ready to argue. When they found out that our State Department had sent us there to play music in the hopes that it would make things better between our people, it completely disarmed them.”

“The opera lovers are a tough crowd, too,” Beppe remarks.

“Oh, yes! Beppe and I once played in Portofino for people who were patrons of the opera. They were a bit reserved; they didn't know what to expect. We were a little outrageous for them; we were not proper or dignified,” chuckles Crary.

“It took us three tunes---” Gambetta interjects.

“---and then they started acting like everybody else!” Crary finishes triumphantly.

American audiences behave differently than audiences elsewhere, Gambetta has noticed. “The audience is into the idea of being a loyal, good audience, more than in other parts of the world. Outside the United States, you need to work the audience before becoming friends with them. In the U.S., the contact with the audience starts immediately.” He reports that Swiss and Czech audiences seem to require a bit more warming up than crowds anywhere else. “But when the art starts to flow, audiences become the same. This is the beauty of music; it really brings people together.”

“I think we need to pay attention to that: guitars as an instrument of diplomacy and peace,” Crary remarks. “The only thing that gets people on the same side is when they have something in common, and one of the most in-common things now in the world is steel-string acoustic guitar music.”

The steel-string guitar has taken Dan Crary and Beppe Gambetta all over the world. By the end of 2002, they will have toured Australia, the United States, and Europe. At the moment, they're in Hawai`i to do a workshop for Taylor guitars, something they've just begun to do outside the U.S. Taylor, Crary explains, is turning its attention toward the international market.

He and Gambetta are both enthusiastic Taylor owners, clinicians in a series of workshops “aggressively sponsored” by the guitar company, as Crary says with his customary candor. “Some artists define the workshop as more of a mini-concert, with a little interaction with the audience. I try to mix it up; my workshops focus on the theme of how to teach yourself how to play the guitar. We focus on how to stay off the plateau, how to make steady progress, and how to make up your own music and variations, which is vital in traditional music. The whole thing is to get people fired up about the sound of the instrument, to hear the possibilities, to want to participate in the communities around them.”

Dan readily admits that he and Beppe probably sell some Collings guitars and some Gibsons at the workshops. “We probably sell some Martins, too. I tell people, 'If you want to buy a new guitar, try all of the great makers' guitars.' A lot of them will buy from our competitors, which is fine! Bob Taylor believes that if his competition is healthy, he's going to be healthy, because he's going to be qualitatively competitive. That's a good model for business.”

The guitar manufacturer would be hard-pressed to find a more passionate advocate than Dan Crary. “Bob Taylor is a manufacturing genius! He pioneered the use of CNC computer-driven mills to make a perfect neck. He pioneered a new polymer finish that is zappable by ultraviolet, so that you can cure the finish on a guitar in one day, instead of 30. He gave that [process] to his competitors, and many of them use it now. His operation looks like they're making fine French pocket-watches; it's meticulously beautiful and clean.”

As Crary puts his guitar back in its case, he offers this final comment. “If you wanted the greatest violin ever made, you'd go back to the 17th century. People ask me, 'When was the greatest guitar ever made?' It's being made today, and it'll be in the shop soon.”

A few hours later, Dan and Beppe are preparing for their workshop in a large second-floor conference room at the Victoria Ward Center, an upscale shopping center in downtown Honolulu. Neil Shimabukuro, the manager of local sponsor Island Guitars, is taking a chance, holding this free workshop in the middle of the week at a fairly awkward time - and scarcely a month after the tragedy of 9/11. But guitar lovers begin to arrive - most male, many still clad in Honolulu's standard office attire of khakis and aloha shirts - and they quickly fill the room.

The guitarists open the workshop with “Thunderation”, the title composition from an album that Dan made in 1990. The song was reconstructed for Synergia, and is infinitely more powerful as a simple guitar duet than it was as a slickly produced tune. It is a marvelous song, with phrases that are, by turns, wistfully delicate and joyfully bold. When the applause subsides, Crary begins to talk to all the would-be guitarists in the room. In short order, he cuts to the chase.

“All those fantasies - 'Well, I'll lock myself in a room for six months and I'll emerge a great guitar player' - that's baloney. No, you won't! Nobody ever did that, and you're not going to be the first.” Crary's done 20 or so workshops each year for the past 15 years, and he's a mesmerizing speaker. He tells the audience he's a great believer in small, incremental steps toward specific, measurable goals. “All that stuff about how you have to practice five hours a day is crap! A solid twenty minutes a day will get you off the dime and make you a better guitar player.”

The audience seems to appreciate his candor a great deal. Even more, they appreciate the music that rings forth when the two men begin, once again, to play. As Crary strums rhythm, Gambetta teases a spectacular mazurka from the strings, flirting and gamboling with the melody, his slender fingers skipping over the fretboard. “Tony Trischka was a good teacher for this,” he explains over a late supper after the show. “When we were on the road with him seven or eight years ago, he was asking, everywhere we went, for a fiddle tune. We went to Hungary, and they gave us a melody; we went to Czech Republic and they gave us a melody.”

Subsequently, Gambetta developed a love for old folksongs, and began to study those of his native country. Serenata, his album with Italian mandolin maestro Carlo Aonzo, captures the world of lost Italian virtuosos from the early 20th century. On Traversata, his newest album, Gambetta is joined by Aonzo and master mandolinist David Grisman, and the three deftly resurrect material from the repertoire of Italian-American immigrants in the turn of the last century.

“Traversata means 'the crossing',” he adds. “The music is from obscure composers and mandolin players like Italians Pasquale Taraffo and Rudy Cipola; Italian-Americans Domenico Lucanese (Nick Lucas) and Salvatore Massaro (Eddy Lang), and others who came through New York and taught the music to opera. We found a lot of [compositions for] dual mandolin plus guitar.”

Gambetta's second solo album, Blu Di Genova, will be released in Europe this September on the Felmay label; he's still talking to American labels about a U.S. release. Recorded on an analog system, it features guests from both sides of the Atlantic, including Crary, Aonzo, and Beppe's son Filippo Gambetta, a well-known accordionist. Highlights include Beppe's arrangements of "Church Street Blues", "A Cimma", "On The Road With Mama", and "Fandango”.

After answering questions from the audience, the guitarists launch into a lusty rendition of “Freeborn Man” a tune from Synergia. According to the album's liner notes, it's Mama Gambetta's favorite tune.

Synergia was the first release on Thunderation Music, Crary's new indie label. His solo project, Renaissance of the Steel String Guitar, will be released on Thunderation late this year. Crary's ambitions for the label are cautiously optimistic. “I decided that it was going to run in the black. I wasn't going to create a hemorrhage out of the old retirement fund to finance music one more time.” He invested $5,000 of his own money in Thunderation, and says he's working like a dog to make it all come together.

Crary continues to produce for Sugar Hill, with whom he's had a relationship for many years. In June, the label released a new album of old instrumentals from BCH, called Chambergrass: A Decade of Tunes From the Edges of Bluegrass (SH 3945). It's an outrageous joyride from start to finish, with material hand-picked by Crary from the band's first three recordings, Berline, Crary & Hickman, Night Run, and BCH, and from their fourth album, Now They Are Four, on which they were joined by bassist Steve Spurgin.

Clearly, however, Crary is most excited about his new solo adventure, which he hopes to release at the end of the year. In his vision of the steel-string renaissance, every imaginable kind of music is featured. “Every piece will have been a Mt. Everest. There's some blues, some jazz, some classical music knock-offs; we knock off 'E lucevan le stele' from Puccini's Tosca. Beppe, Carlo, and I play some stuff from 'Caprice Viennois'.” In 1945, five-year-old Crary saw Kreisler play this work in concert, and he still remembers it. “I do not doubt that from that moment I became a musician,” he says.

Other guests on this album include blues artists Cephas and Wiggins, Windham Hill violinist Billy Oskay, lute player Mike Jaffe and harpist Kay Jaffe, and Celtic musicians Loretto Reid and Brian Taheny. “Some of the people who have heard it were reduced to tears,” Crary says of the embryonic album. “Some others said, 'Well, that's nice, but you ought to make a progressive bluegrass album.' I suspect that it will be a little controversial, but that's all right.” Crary takes a deep breath. “I'm hoping this one is going to be my magnum opus,” he adds quietly. “I'm hoping this is the best one.”

As the virtuosos play, a small, pretty woman with long blonde hair sits at a table in the back of the room, surrounded by men buying CDs and tapes. The woman is Federica Maria Gilda Calvina Prina Gambetta, and she is Beppe's new bride.

The couple just spent three days on the island of Kauai. As lovers sometimes are apt to do when they find themselves on that magical island, they quietly went off and got married during their visit there. In Italy, Beppe explains, marriage is a package tied in complex knots with acres of red tape. “We talked to this Hawaiian lady at the radio station, and she asked us, 'What do you think of this place?'” Beppe says after the show. “I said, 'It is so beautiful! If you could do the bureaucracy in one day, we could marry!' And she say, 'Are you sure?' Yes! So we did it!”

Federica - or Freddi, as Crary has christened her - is a groundbreaking and successful artist in her own right. She studied classical guitar at the Conservatory of Milan, and is now a scholar and teacher of Renaissance and Baroque dance. “Our occupations are a little fringe,” Beppe says. “We are both like Don Quixote. Every morning, we wake up and look for the next windmill.”

Indeed. As international guitar ambassadors, the cross-cultural explorations of Crary and Gambetta have raised the bar. They're not afraid to experiment, to tap the world for interesting new material. In their hands, those guitars become tools of cultural interpretation, sweet-sounding vehicles for a common musical language.

Sipping on a pint of ale, Crary reflects again on his life's passion.

“I don't expect everybody to be eaten up with it the way I was. I don't even necessarily recommend that. But there are people who love it and are eaten up with it less than me, who work it into their lives. They want to get to the instrument, mess around, see what they can come up with. They find some of the same things: the joy, the illumination…”

He takes a big swallow of ale, and chuckles. “They find guitar music dogging them through their days!”

From Dan Crary's tour journal:

Thursday 2 May 2002: After almost fifty years of jamming fusion hot licks on an acoustic guitar, I guess I've figured out that the biggest awards are the daily ones. 1. You wake up alive and are able, one way or another, to get across the room. 2. You reach for the "D" string, and it's still there, still sounds beautiful. 3. Somebody that night is willing to lay down some money for a ticket to hear you reach for the rest.

Visit beppegambetta.com, dancrary.com, and thunderation.com for more of the international steel-string adventures of Beppe and Dan.

Visit Island Guitars, home of some of the most beautiful instruments in Hawai`i!