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Stories   >   Jesse Cook set for Great Barrington's 'Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center' / the Berkshire edge

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Jesse Cook set for Great Barrington's 'Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center' / the Berkshire edge

Posted: July 22, 2023

"The nylon-string gets a bad rap as being a little bit dainty, but it’s not – it can be nasty, and I love it." — Jesse Cook
 

The Berkshire Edge - DAVID NOEL EDWARDS writes…..You can be forgiven for thinking Jesse Cook is a Flamenco guitarist, but nobody in Spain would ever call him that. “If you go to Spain,” he says, “and you play [my] music, they’ll say, what is this? They don’t recognize it as Flamenco because it’s not, it’s a hybrid.”

So … what hybrid style will Cook play when he appears at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center on July 29?

Here’s an important clue: As a youth, Cook lived next door to Nicholas Reyes, the leader of the Gipsy Kings, who ended up exerting a powerful influence. “In addition to hearing them,” Cook told Guitar Player Magazine, “I’d hear local kids in the street playing that way. They were treating the guitar as a percussion instrument, and I remember just loving it. That was totally my thing.”

And it is still totally his thing. For what it’s worth, Cook calls his playing style Nouveau Flamenco, but even that term is inadequate. “I love Flamenco,” he confesses, “but I also love world music, jazz, pop, Brazilian Samba, and Persian music.”

Evidence of Cook’s appeal to general audiences is found in his Juno Award in the Best Instrumental Album category for “Free Fall,” several gold and platinum records, and a YouTube channel with 221,000 subscribers and almost 55 million views (not to mention big numbers on Spotify and Pandora).

By temperament, Jesse Cook is musically impressionable. He scours the earth searching for new and exotic musical flavors and enjoys reflecting on the artists who have most influenced him, all of whom give a hint about what he might play next. For example, the Gipsy Kings, Peter Gabriel, John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia, Al Di Meola, Buckwheat Zydeco suggest certain kinds of sophistication and virtuosity.

Cook’s first guitar lessons were in the Flamenco style, but as he improved, his teachers tried to steer him toward classical. He also studied at Berklee College of Music, where he learned to play jazz and rock with a pick on a Les Paul (electric guitar), something a straight Flamenco player would never do. (Cook says, “Flamenco people hate it when you play with a pick. It’s like sacrilege.”) Since that time, he’s been strictly a nylon-string player. “The nylon-string gets a bad rap as being a little bit dainty,” he explains, “but it’s not—it can be nasty, and I love it.”

Cook seems to have an innate sense of what audiences need. While his early records had a lot of flashy playing, he is nowadays more interested in taking listeners on a journey. He understands what you expect when you kick back in your living room and put on a record: “You don’t want to listen to somebody play 64th notes in your living room,” he quips.

The concert stage, however, is another matter: “When you go to a concert, you want to have your socks knocked off.” And he has a 25-year track record of getting the job done.

The pandemic afforded Cook the opportunity to write and record a lot of music in his home studio. But playing live shows is what he really lives for. About returning to the road, he said, “I’m looking forward to having that conversation with the audience, where you’re making music and sometimes they sing it back to you, or maybe you do it together. You start to forget after two years away, but the concert experience is truly remarkable.”

Hear jazz-pop-Flamenco guitarist Jesse Cook in concert at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center on July 29 at 8 p.m. 
 

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