Who's the most capable
classical guitarist of all time? What a small question to ask. But apparently this is what everyone really
wants to know, so let's just roll with it. Obviously that question is
not a good one to start with. Music is not sports and it's all
about preference and taste and you shouldn't even try to approach it like this. And anyway, it's this guy. Not Bream, not Segovia, not Yepes. This is Kazuhito Yamashita and honestly no one at the top of these Hall of Fame lists
can match this man's raw potential. It's not even close and fairly obvious too. Yamashita easily has one of the strongest
claims to be classical guitar's Paganini. Our Franz Liszt, a dominant virtuoso that
reshapes their instrument for generations. But it seems he didn't fully get to
be that yet, at least in the West. Especially in America he is pretty much an enigma. At best a figure of controversy and a lot of
people actually know fairly little about him. So who is he? What makes him relevant and why the
heck do we not listen to him a lot more? Before you head into the comments,
let's examine the evidence. There is actually a lot to learn from
Yamashita, even if you prefer other guitarists. I think there is somebody
capable of matching his skills. Someone you probably weren't
thinking of, so stay tuned. Don't forget to like and subscribe
if you enjoy these videos. The 70s. The classical guitar had carved
its niche in Europe and North America. It was finally established in conservatories. Concerts were packed, there were prestigious
festivals and celebrated competitions. The excellence of Japanese guitarists was
not entirely unknown in the Western world. Still no one was prepared
for what was about to happen. In 1977 Kazuhito Yamashita took
the European scene by storm. He was only 16 years old. He signed up for several of the most
prestigious competitions that year. And this is still baffling to this day. He dominated them, securing
the grand prize in all of them. In the eyes of every single jury,
this teenager without even a shred of institutional backing bested an entire
generation of established guitar players, many of whom learned from the
world's most celebrated maestros. It was just the beginning. Yamashita's subsequent achievements etched
his name permanently into guitar history. One of the most significant events
was his transcription and performance of Modest Mussorgsky's pictures at an exhibition. To put it mildly, even the
thought of adapting this dense, multi-layered piano suite to the solo guitar
was considered just absolutely ridiculous. A little pop culture comparison? Imagine a celebrated, dense, multi-layered book series being adapted to a clearly inferior
storytelling medium such as "the movies". That would be just unthinkable, wouldn't it? The classical guitar world had
its Peter Jackson moment in the early 80s. Let's just read one of the
early reactions to Yamashita's release. Yamashita hasn't just learned
how to play the guitar well. He seems to have taught the instrument how to do some things it's never had the
smallest notion of doing before. He gives you the distinct impression that he has
no holes, none at all, in his technique anywhere. I have never heard such speed, such control. Yamashita writes his own rules. It remains to be seen whether there's anybody
else on the face of the earth who can follow them. Bold words. The 1980 recording and edition of the
pictures was received with amazement, but also with utter disbelief and skepticism. Nobody could really explain what was happening. The music went far beyond what was
considered possible on the instrument. We're going to base our analysis mostly on the famous live performance at the
1984 Toronto Guitar Festival. If you haven't yet, it's a must-watch. It's just an amateur tape, but the
most recent digitization is clear enough to observe everything that's happening. Yamashita had been performing the suite in
concerts already for four years at that point, but for many North Americans, this
was the first time they saw him live. Anticipation was sky high. The guitar elite was in the audience
and everybody was there to find out if he was actually able to perform the impossible. Turns out he was. Compared to the well-known players at the time, Yamashita commanded complete
technical superiority. There's no doubt about this. Yamashita was a professional guitar player, but he
wasn't the only one who was able to play faster, cleaner, and with a significantly
higher mechanical efficiency. Nobody really contends that
he was able to play faster, cleaner, and with a significantly
higher mechanical efficiency. However, even the craziest technique
is merely a tool for expression. And just playing fast and loud does
not make you a mature musician. This is really important and
people who have Yamashita pegged as a mere technician are missing the point. He used his almost limitless
manual abilities to perform not only never-before-heard virtuosic feats,
but with these techniques he also pushed the latitude of musical expression on the
guitar into completely uncharted territory. He had unprecedented dynamic contrasts,
the most diverse tone colors and eclectic phrasing combined with extreme drive, intense
theatrics, and a seemingly endless stamina. It's really the fullest range there, from the smallest sensitivity
to the most violent outbursts. And somewhere in between all of
that, he is also able to just groove. In a traditional, educational setting, musicians
first acquire a predetermined set of musical tools and solutions, and then set out to find, compose,
or transcribe pieces that fit these requirements. Yamashita, however, went full-on mind-over-matter
and reversed the usual transcription process. He set out from the source material
and developed entirely novel skills and techniques to create a true one-man
orchestra version of the original. Yamashita had more potential in his pinky finger
than some other players in their entire hand. This is not even a metaphor, literally. Let's have a look at some of these
phenomenal techniques in detail. The first thing you notice when
watching Yamashita play is his complete freedom and fluidity in all
parameters, technical and musical. His entire body, every angle and lever,
can shift in fractions of a second. This is at least partially inspired by the fluid
transitions of classical Japanese noh theatre. When he's playing, Yamashita's nearly
always in this transitory mode. His finger independence and
coordination are basically perfect. He can use any combination of digits,
always perfectly synchronized at any speed. The idea behind this is simple in
principle, but very difficult in execution. By using additional fingers in, for example, a
scale, the individual fingers can move slower, but it's exponentially more effort to coordinate. Of course, Yamashita is by no means the
first or only player to notice this. What makes his approach truly
outstanding is him freely combining these advanced concepts all of the time. Playing a sixteenth scale at 140 bpm is impressive. Playing two scales at that speed concurrently,
one of them spaced in octaves, that's madness. Yamashita pulls it off seemingly with ease. Ever heard someone mimic an entire
balalaika ensemble on one guitar? A trill in first position shifted into a chord in tenth position and back so fast you
don't even notice the interruption. A well-maintained melodic line walking
straight through violent rasgueados. Dedillo-tremolo is the rapid alternating
of one finger on one string, a technique perfected by flamenco masters and it's
quite challenging to stay fast and even. Yamashita's dedillo-tremolo would be
pretty praiseworthy on its own. His transcription, however, requires it to be done concurrently with three-part
harmonies and artificial harmonics. So when needed, he switches from index
finger dedillo to pinky finger dedillo on the fly, without interrupting the line while maintaining
full control over the additional voices. If it wouldn't be enough, on top of that,
throughout the entire 33-minute performance, he continuously and actively
monitors the tuning and intonation. He is flawlessly adjusting even minute deviations on the fly and even changing notes within
fractions of a second between movements. Every technical solution is tailored 100% to
an expressive intent or orchestration idea. He knows and understands the
source material intimately. No two sections are approached the
same and he does not compromise. His transcriptions are incredibly meticulous. They're written with highly
detailed performance instructions, which is kind of funny because for almost
anybody else they're basically unplayable. In the sheet music, he even often
delineates the exact position and angle of the right hand string attack
to achieve a particular tone color. When there are two notes to be played
in that register at the same time, he will adjust the shape of his right hand
to maintain absolute tonal consistency. His attention to detail is immense
and let's not forget: he wrote this as a teenager at the start of his career! No matter how long this video will end up being, it will fail miserably at conveying
the entire range of Yamashita's output. At the moment, he is somewhere around 100
published recordings, among classical musicians that makes him one of the more prolific
performers, no matter the instrument. And he is still going strong at 63 years old,
so we can assume quite a bit more to come. Things permeate slowly in the
guitar world and reading through correspondence from the time, most guitarists initially were
just overwhelmed by Yamashita's appearance. Some immediately feared their own career was getting evaporated by this
new and foreign phenomenon. He tore down so many limits at once that
people didn't really know how to deal with it. After the dust settled, many guitarists, especially in North America but also in
Europe, started to refute the newcomer. Critiques emerged that were as much about personal
taste as about genuine stylistic differences. Unfortunately, not all responses
were well intended or fair. Don't understand me wrong, I don't
subscribe to every single stylistic decision that Yamashita has made,
but that's really not the point. Even listening to a few minutes of
his vastly diverse and inventive playing makes it perfectly evident
to me that the common criticism of him being just shallow, flashy technique
without musicality is simply unfounded. Less is only more if you know what more is. For many artists, a crucial impulse is to
explore the edges of the playing ground. Only then you'll be able to
meaningfully set boundaries. In the 40 years since Toronto, only a few other players besides
Yamashita have performed the pictures. These interpretations are highly
impressive in their own right, even just being able to get through the
material at all requires exceptional skill. Yet to this day, none of these attempts were able to reach the energy and expressive
latitude of Yamashita's version. A guitarist that could keep up with
that would be the needle in a haystack. You would need to find someone with similar
mental fortitude and physical skill from a similar nurturing environment with the
perfect blend of discipline and freedom. There actually is one. Less and less people are aware of this
nowadays, but there exists a guitarist who not only shares Yamashita's upbringing,
but also his extraordinary musical talent. It's his sister, Naoko Yamashita. Most of the recordings I have of her are
duos with her brother and listening to these it is immediately evident that
they are pretty much evenly matched. She's not playing the second fiddle here. Unfortunately, sourcing her only solo album
was not possible in time for this video, but I discovered an exhilarating performance
of Tarrega's Gran Jota on this 1982 duo album. Naoko's playing is just as virtuosic, limitless,
dynamic and vibrant as her brother's. Regrettably, she retired from performing in 1992,
a decision attributed to her marriage. In the late 80s, Kazuhito Yamashita
began to shift his focus away from performing these groundbreaking but divisive
mega-transcriptions and focused on new challenges. With his ability to absorb
vast amounts of literature, in a short time he just kept
releasing album after album. Many stylistic choices he made
in conventional repertoire were received as controversial and he kept being
criticized as being simply too much to bear. I'd recommend to just listen yourself,
instead of relying on me or anybody else. Probably his most easily agreeable
recordings are the chamber music ones, there are several that are just beautiful
with flute legend James Galway, and his Boccherini guitar quintets with the Tokyo String
Quartet are simply brilliant ensemble playing. Yamashita also plays an important
role in expanding the repertoire by commissioning and performing heaps
of music by East Asian composers. A bunch of it, by the way,
works by his wife Keiko Fujiie. The talent keeps running in the next
generation and Yamashita's daughter Kanahi keeps doing absolutely stellar
things from her base here in Germany. And just recently she was featured in
the Gendai Guitar Magazine in Japan, where among lots of other things she
talks about how learning music was never really a strictly formalized
process in the Yamashita household. When we're talking about Yamashita not being
recognized as much as you would expect, this is of course only really
true for the Western Hemisphere. The Yamashita family continues to
be massively important in Japan and they're surely one of the reasons
why guitar is doing so well over there. What can we actually learn from
this overpowering musician? Obviously trying to simply emulate Yamashita's
playing style is doomed to fail spectacularly. It'd be like telling someone that the best way
to learn soccer is to just play like Messi. As far-fetched as it might seem, there are still lessons we can extract
from musicians of Yamashita's caliber. These are not insights entirely unique to
him, but he serves as a great case study. First, beyond stability there is control
and beyond control there is freedom. What do I mean by this? Mainstream pedagogy is somewhat aware of
this, but it's applied only selectively, such as with initially planting
and preparing arpeggios. Later on, students are told to
let go to improve speed and sound. This logic can be applied
to basically any technique. Once you've gained control,
you don't need to stop there. Deliberately releasing control or redirecting it to a higher lever can open
up entirely new possibilities. This leads straight to the second insight. Technical orthodoxy masks inadequate teaching. If I were to stop the performance video,
at almost any point we would see something where Yamashita is blatantly
violating the textbook approach. To criticize him based on that is of course
laughable, his solutions obviously work for him. Insisting on a certain technique
or posture just for the sake of it, when an individual unorthodox solution works
better, is not helpful and often even destructive. More than any other instrument, playing the
guitar is influenced by individual physiology, from the nail shape all the way
to specific body proportions. The difficulty lies in accurately understanding which approach will work best
in a particular situation. But more often than not, players
and teachers will be able to work towards an optimal solution if
they're encouraged to experiment. Like with his own children, a lot of Yamashita's
guitar education was through indirect osmosis in his father's chamber music ensembles, rather
than by having explicit one-on-one lessons. Both this and the general distance from
the Western institutional approach led to him heavily relying on finding his
own unique way, by working from the music towards the technique rather
than from technique to the music. This is fundamentally difficult, but it
is the definitive way to gain confident and independent musicianship
in any genre, to be honest. Consistently, the greatest
results arise from this mindset. Even at the most basic level, we should
strive first to have a musical intention in our mind, and then make our body and the
instrument approximated as best as we can. Practice precedes theory. Theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. Kazuhito Yamashita is the living proof for this. Tonebase will not prescribe a one-size-fits-all
solution to your guitar playing. Instead, it offers you a rich and diverse
repository of masterclasses, live streams, workbooks, and sheet music, as well
as a community of fellow guitarists. All to enable you to choose
your own musical adventure. Follow the link in the description to learn more. Let us know in the comments what your
thoughts and experiences with Yamashita are. Don't forget to subscribe and
like the video if you enjoyed it. Cheers! See you next time.
