"An Alien With Extraordinary Ability"

6 November 2014 - Timonium, Maryland

      Flavio Sala greeted me at the door in a bathrobe. I wasn't expecting that. He had that signature Flavio smile that I did expect and he gave me a big Italiano hug that was a bit disconcerting. In my world it's OK for two combat Marines to hug each other; maybe I'll hug my wife and old girl-friends, but I'm still a little put off by the ubiquitous American habit of hugging each other. The same way I'm disconcerted and put off right now by the American fad-habit of everybody calling everybody else "Guys." Deep down I'm trying to express that I'm disconcerted and put off by insincerity and a creeping disease of bad manners among the American people. At the gate recently at Dulles Airport, getting ready to fly to California, the young woman representing Virgin America Airlines at Gate 63 got on the speaker and said, "Hi. We'll be lining up soon. If you guys could look at your boarding passes and see your Group Letter . . ." I noticed lots of people just staring at her. I wondered whatever happened to "Ladies and Gentlemen" as a way to greet people or make a general announcement. I blame it all on the TV show "Friends." (which I never watched, by the way, because it  and that era of television is the current source of all the snide and smarm that infects our current bad manners and bad speech patterns). It irritates me. But then I'm old and of another generation. And I'll continue to fight the slide into the abyss of bad manners and bad speech patterns because I and others with degrees in English know that it inevitably leads to the destruction of civilizations.

      I excused Flavio's enthusiasm. After all, he's Italian, and recently transplanted to our great nation. I returned his hug with a strong male handshake that tried to impart a message to him. American male friends shake hands like in the old days when two mountain men who hadn't seen each other in a year or two of trapping beaver in the Rocky Mountains would suddenly meet up at the same time near a mountain stream. They would shake hands, maybe trade knives or hatchets, and then ask each other if they had any coffee or beans. It was about survival in a harsh landscape and communion with another human being. It went deeper than addressing the world with "You Guys" and realizing that bad manners with another human being might get you killed. I tried to impart in the male handshake with Flavio that I took this stuff seriously. And after that greeting I felt badly that I had gripped his right hand so tightly. I've got a strong grip even though I'm old. Flavio is only 31 years old and has his whole life ahead of him as a classical guitarist. Those hands are golden and need protected like a beautiful rare butterfly you discover in your garden. The true beauty of the hands is the reality that he hopes those hands will carry him into the future of a career here in the U.S. music business. It's an immigrant dream as old as our country; a familiar story. But there is always a new twist in America. What's fascinating to me is the combination of parts that have been conjured together in this latest episode of an immigrant landing on America's shores.

      Ruth Perella Barker came into the room in the midst of greeting Flavio again after a month or two of  not seeing him. Ruth has family connections with Flavio's family back in Italy. Dealing in boring conversations has never been a part of my lifestyle. I've never had a boring conversation around Ruth and Flavio. I met Ruth and Flavio in the most crazy circumstances you could ever imagine. In the midst of  last summer Ruth sent out an e-mail for help to a community of friends of  Italian descent in suburban Baltimore. A young Italian was coming to the U.S. and needed help obtaining a long-term visa. He was a guitarist; a classical guitarist, and very good, according to the original e-mail. Could anyone out there get him a gig so he could prove to the U.S. Immigration officials that he was serious about staying here for a while? Robert Miller and a group of  hard-core bluegrass music fans provided him with that opportunity. I was there the night it happened. In front of an audience that is used to hearing "Three Chords and the Truth" Flavio Sala stunned everyone with the Truth. To say that bluegrass music is the lesser of all genres of music and has no importance except to a bunch of Appalachian provincials is to proclaim your royal snobbery to the coterie of the Philistines you hang out with. In the audience were some of  Maryland's best guitar-players and banjo-pickers and it was they who immediately identified with what was happening before them. Flavio bent the rules, mesmerized, went from Venezuelan and Russian classical composers then blew everyone away by finishing up with Carlos Santana. Everyone agreed with two factors: the program wasn't long enough and they'd never heard anything like that before. The real musicians who were on board recognized the most important musical factor that evening and the discussions were fascinating. In music all things are possible, and there's always a new way to look at things.

      Ruth and Flavio and I had business to attend to and I wanted to quickly get that out of the way. I had one more opportunity to talk to Flavio previous to today and it only spurred more personal interest on my part, to talk to Flavio. He loves to talk. He's personable and easy to talk to. And he's young. To me, he's just a kid with a whole life ahead of him. When you're 70 years old you experience this sudden life-change. Everyone else in the world looks like a punk-kid! It becomes easier, too, to separate the serious ones from the non-serious. Some burn with a bright fire. Others wait for everything to be handed to them on a plate; like the 30-year old kid who explained to me one time on an air flight that since he worked for the government he could expect a good salary and a good retirement someday and not have to worry about anything. Everything he said told me everything I needed to know about who he was. I wasn't interested in his conversation. I wanted to chuckle to myself and say something obnoxious like "Since I'm Catholic, I'll pray for you" but that would have been cruel to someone so youthful. Ruth said "let me show you something." She pulled up a video on her iPad. It's a grainy video of a family dinner party in Italy that she attended. A scrawny 13-year old is unconcerned and uninterested, like most 13-year olds, and he's isolated himself in a corner with a guitar that looks as old and as worn as the hills. The kid doesn't seem to care about what's going on around him. You only notice his connectivity to the guitar, and the beauty of the sounds he's producing on that old instrument. Having been born into a recognized family of musicians in rural Italy you can understand that he's a prodigy destined for a career of classical training. Today, a conversation with Flavio reveals a fire way beyond the confining box of Italian 'classical' training that had as its main desire, to confine the spark

      Flavio entered into the classical training that he seemed destined for and of course, he did well. His degrees, pedigrees, resume, his performance appearances and accomplishments, his Curriculum Vitae all suggested success or future success at an early age, as long as his thinking remained cubical. My conversations with him kept summoning to mind images of boxes and how a young artist never wanted to be confined to a cage or a box (like the young bureaucrat who had already decided his retirement plans - locked up in a box). When we first met I asked him the pointed and blunt question as to why he was here. His answered was just as blunt. He wanted out of Italy and wanted out of  Europe. The next set of statements from one so youthful also intrigued me. "It's just me, my guitar, and the internet" came out of his mouth as quickly and as easily as the young bureaucrat's vapid argument for wasting away his life in non-creativity. It's not all one-way. He's deeply grateful to his mentors, his old teachers, and the Italian classical music 'system' that nurtured him and launched him. But as Flavio points out, the world of  the music business is changing rapidly, ever more so in the U.S.  After spending some years in South America, Flavio set his sights on the United States as the natural place to expand his career and rather than fight it, as the cubical thinker would, become a part of the internet revolution that is changing art and especially changing music and the way it's purchased and appreciated.

      Dreams are great things to spur one on to greater actions - or maybe great disasters. We grow older, more cautionary, and even worse,  maybe less creative. It was all well and good to hear a young man talk about his dreams, but I'm more interested in hearing about the Game Plan. Age also endows you with a sense of the practical - or is supposed to. I know a lot of old fools. And I'm certainly not the brightest man in my world. Today was an opportunity to gain more insight (I hope) into Flavio's game plan for winning hearts and minds. It sounds fantastically simple and I'll express it in his words: "I want people to hear what I have to offer - and it would be great to connect to those who hear it, appreciate it, and maybe meet them some day at one of my concerts." CD sales and internet downloads aren't even a piece of  his game-plan right now. As far as he's concerned they're a dead issue. "Everything will come from a public's recognition that I exist and can be accessed on the Internet." You could easily box that up as the talk of fools too, but a two-hour conversation with a young Italian immigrant ( who does need to be heard and does need to be accessed on the internet) convinced me,  the Old Gentleman,  (I refuse to use the word "Guy") that I need to change my way of thinking about what's on the horizon of the American and World music business.

     Ruth Perella Barker walked me out to my car and thanked me for visiting. I told her I would see her and Flavio at some future concerts that were coming up fast during the holidays. "He's doing well." I said. "How's the visa-thing working out?" "Better than expected." she replied, and then she continued,
"You know what his classification status says on the visa?"
"No." I said.
" An Alien With Extraordinary Ability."
We both laughed. Ruth gave me a big hug. It's OK for Ruth to hug me. For once maybe our government speaks the truth. Maybe it was issued by that same rubber-stamp bureaucrat I met on the airplane.

 

Flavio Sala and Ruth Perella Barker, Flavio's U.S. Manager.

         
Contact: flaviosala.com
Latest Discographical Project: Mi Guitarra y Mis Amores
Concert opportunity:  Concert at Temple Emanuel, Reisterstown, Maryland, December 13th, 2014 at 7:30.