With his latest release, Best of Esteban, one of the world’s most prolific composers and guitarists of our time has not merely created a retrospective. Instead of a simple cut-and-paste collection, the man once known as Stephen Paul took a handful of concert favorites and returned to the studio to reinvent them. The result is a fiery, blues/rock/flamenco melding of the songs that have made him a beloved icon in classical and modern guitar playing.
Trademark songs like “Fuego Malagueña” - a reworking of “Malagueña” from 2001’s All My Love – have, as the title denotes, been given extra fire, fusing more rock influence into his atmospheric flamenco-based performance. “Runaway,” Del Shannon’s classic, is also seeing life in a completely new way. “That song brings back a lot of memories for people who were around back then,” Esteban says, seeing it as a bridge to younger audiences as well. Another song bringing back more recent memories is “Mediterana,” an Eastern-based song in which he plays sitar, backed by the Indian percussive tablas and dumbuk.
Global music has always played big into this Pittsburgh native’s life. Beginning at the age of four Esteban would visit his Uncle George’s house every Sunday to hear an eclectic mix of Western and Indian classical sounds, as well as flamenco and Russian folk music. His love of the floating scales inspired him early on, causing him to want to play guitar immediately. Hearing men like the great sarod player Ali Akbar Khan would “get into my cells, and it continued through my life. It’s a little dissonant for our western ears, but I’ve loved it since I was a little kid.”
Esteban’s love of “man’s original music” was sealed at age six when hearing the man that would become his lifelong hero. “I was a weird kid. I was listening to Segovia when I was six years old.” The man he’s referring to is, of course, Spanish guitar legend Andrés Segovia. Solely responsible for bringing classical guitar studies to universities and orchestras worldwide, Segovia’s influence, as both performer and educator, made him one of the 20th century’s most renowned musicians of any instrument. These two aspects, as player and teacher, would decide Esteban’s future.
Attending Carnegie Mellon with a double major in guitar performance and English literature, Esteban was discouraged by his four years of education. The man running the program was a cellist not a guitarist, and Esteban “played better than him on my first day of class.” Leaving college with little more than a piece of paper, he knew his path lie with his Muse, but didn’t know how to proceed. Then it dawned on him: “I really never had lessons from anyone really good my entire life. I was playing old standards my own way because I had never studied with a master. So I figured I would study with the world class cat.”
That cat, of course, was Segovia. Inquiring into the possibility, Esteban learned that to even see Segovia you first had to intern with one of his four main students for a number of years. Then Esteban learned each of those teachers had a waiting list of 500 students! So he approached it a different way, one in which legends are made of – indeed, Esteban’s own status resides in this very story.
For the next two-and-a-half years, working various jobs in publishing and proofreading, he contacted Segovia’s booking agency to find out his tour schedule. He then contacted every hotel in every city Segovia was playing in, stating he had a package that he had to drop off for the maestro. He compiled a list and during that time would mail him unsigned yellow cards with one simple statement: “My life is meaningless unless I can study with you.” This went on internationally for well over two years.
Segovia was performing in Los Angeles, where Esteban was living, and he made the move. Borrowing his friend’s messenger uniform he bravely knocked on the guitarist’s hotel door and eventually got to the master. Esteban revealed himself and “Segovia got red in the face, pointed and said ‘It’s you! It’s you!’. His bodyguard came to the door nearly killed me, and I told them I had to play guitar. Segovia told him to let me in. I was shaking, I was so nervous, but I played and after a couple minutes he stopped me and gave me things to practice, and told me to come back in one year. I studied my butt off and came back, and at that time he invited me to study with him in Spain.”
His apprenticeship lasted on and off for four years. Finally receiving the master’s seal of approval to perform in concert, fate took another turn. Esteban – the name given to him by Segovia – was hit by a drunk driver and suffered blindness in one eye and severe spinal damage, causing him to lose feeling for over eight years. “It was a dark time. I could move my arm but couldn’t feel it.” Taking various jobs in sales and publishing, Esteban’s musical career seemed to have ended until that destined day when feeling returned.
“I quit my day job and returned to playing guitar for $40 a show.” Eking out a living, Esteban self-released a few albums until stardom came to him. Living out such a mythology has not been easy, but today Esteban is an iconic figure for endless people worldwide, and not only as performer. Staying in alignment with his master’s teachers, Esteban’s American Legacy Guitars are played by thousands of children worldwide. “It’s the biggest thing for me. It’s everybody’s job to help out in their own way. The way I do is by getting guitars in the hands of kids.”
Educator, performer and American legend, Esteban is a name certain to be revered by many for some time. Working on a new album in which he plays a range of instruments – guitar, sitar, banjo, oud and Greek bazouki – there is no slowing this man down. Alongside this collection and upcoming work, Esteban will be staying busy with a full-fledged tour later this year. Joining him, as always, will be his daughter, Teresa, on violin. A prodigy since the age of four, she carries on the Paul name with heartfelt recordings and stunning live performances on her own instrument.
With Best of Esteban his lifelong passion of global and instrumental music comes full circle, in an entirely new manner. With such a history already behind him, it’s inspiring to see his fire only growing brighter.
ESTEBAN – "Enter The Heart" – Windows Audio:
http://vista.streamguys.com/jspiewak/esteban_entertheheart.wma
