The Genius of Lenny Breau documentary

[Music] okay we're here a gentleman by the name of lenny brew and his uh his wife jewel lived in this apartment from information received from friends and relatives they apparently had some rather rocky marriage [Music] sometime in the morning of the 12th the victim lenny brew was found in the bottom of the pool which is on the roof of this building good evening everyone we'd like to uh we'd like to welcome you to the first set and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to have to tune up so we're going to do a little tune called a tuning tune for five hours when i play music that's when i feel close to god because i feel as a gift from god and i'm using that gift to fight for people you know i got the inspiration at first but in the end it turned against me it turned against me it wasn't inspiring anymore it was a habit [Music] when guitar players talk players talk we talk about the great ones we always start with at the top of the scale basically have you heard what montgomery is doing oh was that a fabulous recording and how about taro farlow isn't he his technique incredible in those gigantic hands and uh what about that thing charlie christian played that's still my favorite solo have you heard about this guitar player in canada his name is lenny bro i said no i've heard about him well man wait [Music] all he wanted to do was play guitar he was kind of a shotgun shot guy those brown all the eyes very unpretentious there was just nobody like [Music] [Music] fantastic humor personality he could sing he was great looking plus he was an incredible guitar player i i think boy man this guy should have been an absolutely major star because he had everything going for him [Laughter] he knew the guitar so well he had the great knowledge of the harmonies and he could play classical angers in many different styles a little genius he was a mess he was a mess [Music] in his case it was such a loss because he came up with a way of addressing the instrument technically that actually nobody had done before certainly and actually nobody's ever done since he wasn't prominent or successful things weren't polished things weren't the way they should have been in the traditional sense he was successful in the ways that mattered to him or that mattered to real musicians [Music] again as usual he was one track mine all he thought about was music it was just this was it i mean i'd wake up in the middle of the night before o'clock in the morning he'd be sitting on the couch like working out things you know and i'd go back to sleep i'd wake up he'd still be sitting there in the morning working out odd cord patterns and things he was trying to do some new thing with these little bell things you know and um it was so hard he kept doing it and you'd hear him kind of make these sounds and suddenly he i didn't want to interrupt him he didn't even know i was standing there and um he got done and he looked up and saw he goes boy that stuff is hard a lot of times when people have virtuoso chops it's because they got them because they practiced a real lot and if they practice things like scales and exercises and standard chord changes and it you know it could sound like noodling and i know you know it took it took a while but after a while i was able to discern the difference between you know as frank zappa says good noodling and bad noodling and uh even when lenny was just noodling it was a feast [Music] ladies and gentlemen lenny bro as you can see we don't only like the same music we also like the same hair styles lenny went from completely playing on a tune or something so anyway we got off the stage and pine went to lenny and he said don't you ever play that kind of music behind me again and he slapped him and i could say that was the slap that changed the jazz world forever [Laughter] lenny knew he had to move on and you could tell he left his dad's show i am trying to get laid tales of the sin i'm gonna sing a song now called time after time one two one two three [Music] [Music] the one you've gone [Music] i think your father was extremely aware of all this huxley i think your father was aware of doors to perception and then you've got maybe some other things that come from nature [Music] maybe that's called mind expansion and then maybe just maybe through all of that fall in with someone who may say try this and maybe try it and maybe it's your frame and your body does not really reject it a great deal and then maybe there's a chance that you can get hooked [Music] there were a lot of people here in toronto who loved the way lenny played and then found out what what a relatively naive person he was [Music] and i think some of them did take advantage of that you know not vengeful or anything like that just just because it was easy to get talking to him and say you want to get high and get him high i think everybody did some experimenting around that time and he was certainly coming up through the through the ropes with some heavy jazz musicians and it was just it was common way of life any idea what drew him to heroin i've wondered about that really hard and no i don't really have any idea uh i know that that it was hit [Music] this tune is a sort of a spanish song mixed with other feelings from other places other times other other things there's a boat leaving soon for new york come [Music] my mom and lenny met doing cbc shows in the 60s out of winnipeg she was from edmonton i think she was only about 19 years old and she was hired to be in the house band and lenny was the guitar player and she had a wonderful voice you buy me the swellen on upper fifth avenue and through harlem we'll go straight we'll go astray nothing too good for you he was stalling her in the green room when they had me [Music] i had never really known him though i think i saw him maybe half a dozen times as a child the last time i saw him i was in elementary school my mother didn't really tell me that much about him i knew that he was a guitar player but i had no concept of how great he really was that's the place i had never met any of my paternal family until i started working on this project meeting my grandmother was very inspiring she's a wonderful woman but you know the talent and her strength and her resilience and her grace it's all very inspiring oh look at that oh thank you so much so beautiful in here yes it is yeah well what do we say well we say welcome welcoming welcome to video you look very nice thank you dear everybody was warm and loving and again it was that instant bond [Music] there's something about that that flesh and blood connection that's very powerful but those times are all gone i'm coming [Music] lenny came home for a longer period of time and he was real cool you know that's what i thought man this guy is cool and uh he used to take me up in his room and he'd show me all his robe indian robes and jewelry and i he gave me a few pieces of this and that he gave me some robes but i i wasn't ready to wear those but he had this stuff called tiger bomb and he you know he'd put it on his head right there and it would it would tingle and you know i thought that was all i thought it was all pretty cool you know he was a neat guy to be around and everybody kind of felt that from him that he met the first time i saw lenny one that says come on down rachel my nephew from canada is here and you know i says oh good i'd like to see him and i expected to see him clean cut like i the last time i'd seen him and my god he's in a dress he's dressed like a gypsy he comes down and oh no rachel you know he's walking like a little old man and he was into the indian music and uh sigmund freud reading books he was so deep and he's he had a whole trunk just dresses and long tops and then i think he came down he was sick then on drugs too because he used to ask me cody how to get up and down the stairs he was too weak to even come up and down the stairs and his mother used to say well do it one one step at a time on your butt you know so that's how he went up and down the stairs and they they nursed him back to help that time [Music] so [Music] do two there were times when lenny needed to be taken care of but not out of being a brat or not out of being in here i just it was sometimes it was unkind i used to think stock garnet many sometimes you make me think that you go across the street and trip over your own shadow [Music] so [Music] what he was doing with harmonix specifically nobody's even begun to address that and probably they won't it's just it's too hard on one hand but it's too personal in a way it's sort of it's sort of his voice what he did with those harmonic things anybody can do that a little bit the thing with him is that he could do it sort of for days at will [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] i guess i was like everybody else when i got to know lenny a little bit i mean the first thing i did was say well how do you do that thing with the harmonics [Music] yeah it was funny because he was like sure i'll show you you know and and he picked up his guitar and he's and i had mine and he just showed me this thing and i could sort of do it um but you know he he he had no uh well i mean it was great actually i think he was into the into the sharing of the information because he really did find something i was on tour in america actually with the police and um i arrived in nashville i thought somehow i knew that you know lenny lived there and i thought well i'd love to meet him and you know see if i can learn something i called him up i'm here playing um did you give lessons and he said yeah sure okay but it's expensive i went oh okay and he said it was going to cost you 45 dollars i said all right you know i've got to swallow it i guess [Music] he'd be really in his own world i'd be sitting in a room with him and we wouldn't speak for two hours he would just be in this trance and i'd be watching his fingers and making little notes and trying to hide a little silvertone guitar trying to put my fingers where he put his fingers on the neck and i learned just by watching him and he had a very early stage got me the mickey baker jazz guitar books that took a standard song that was three chords and showed you chord substitutions and the first song wrote she's come undone which was a very big hit for the guests who that was um a bunch of chords i go to that mickey baker guitar book that i strung together that somehow held together and then i found a melody line over that and i went and showed it to lenny he said wow man that's really that's really good [Music] [Music] well you know he decided that he might need an extra string so he had a special guitar built [Music] a seven string guitar so so we could have now we have more flexibility i mean this god i mean this guy just a complete [Music] genius [Music] yeah that's good that was it lenny you didn't know we were i mean was that the real thing that was that was it was your talking he started getting high you know as we came to town i said man what happened he said well i said i'm a druggie you know i said that first thing you do is you go to people's house you go through their medicine cabinet and he said i went through their medicine cabinet and saw some volume there and said i took six of them i don't know what strength they were wanna do something a little like uh [Music] he took a whole bottle of water pills aqua vast i'll never forget it and he was staying here and he was telling his mother gee my mom said i have a kidney infection and she's why he says i keep peeing blue and i'm going to the bathroom over and over again and i looked in my cupboard and i said to betty he doesn't have the kidney infection he took all my walk-up clothes [Music] and pill bottles from everybody's house that i'd taken him to ted green's grandmother's pill bottles she used to have a lot of medicine [Music] i was talking to two uh and mary once i said then lenny used to work for you and she said yes she got my whole damn band on drugs [Music] he showed me his needles and [Music] i always think i was probably around 14 at the time maybe 13 and i used to go down and when he was trying to kick his habit i would go down to the methadone clinic with him and i mean i know my mom would would probably wouldn't like this but uh i mean we smoked it for my first joint was our first taste of hash was with my dad i think it was like 13 yeah maybe 12. he and my mom reconciled when i was in about grade two so i was in elementary school and he came and lived with us they were going to get married he proposed and he was clean at the time apparently and was going to the methadone clinic and i remember my mom even had a wedding shower i remember that down the block at the neighbors it was a very short time later maybe two weeks later i think she found needles in the garage i heard her tell somebody and she kicked him out monty's case a lot of times he would end up in a jazz club somewhere and then it would it would end and he wouldn't have any money to come home and so somebody would take pity on them and uh the ones who would take them up were usually not the right people to do that that would get lenny in more trouble they'd use them they would use lenny use them up and throw away [Music] he trusted everybody they're very vulnerable and he told me one time that he was sleeping and opened up his eyes and somebody was standing over his head with the knife like this when he was blazing on acid mellow as lenny was he still had sort of a macho side like he liked to carry guns and knives and you know he always carried a little gun in his boot and in the other boot he had a little a knife and uh i used to have some bb guns and we used to take turns shooting out shooting the bb guns because he liked guns it led him into an underground life and ultimately was devastatingly the effect on it and i think that's one of the reasons he was never recognized he was never able to maintain the sustained kind of career concentration not the music the musical concentration was total but the concentration on career i don't think he was capable of it [Music] [Applause] long story [Music] it's one of those things this man is like it's like i was hanging out with guys that were doing it and at first i did it for inspiration you know i got the inspiration at first but in the end it turned against me it was a drag it was a necessity so after a while it worked against me if you use it every day and you make a pig of yourself then it ain't inspiring anymore then it's nothing but i have it it robs your soul after a while man it robs your soul it's like a seductress you know it takes more and more and more and more and more and after a while you're spending so much money doing it that you really can't enjoy yourself and it takes all your money to do it and you get to the gig and you don't even enjoy it because you're not getting off because you're not getting enough i need to spend 100 a day just to feel good [Music] when you're in a certain kind of condition and it's hard it's really hard to get from one moment to the next and the room tilts and you're down on your knees and you just can't figure it out and the walls are closing in on you and you're up against it it's not the blues it's not a bad weekend it's not that you can't pull yourself up by your bootstrap it's that you can't survive from one moment to the next unless you've had that experience you don't know why and you'll never know why somebody takes a pill or takes a shot [Music] he's such a great musician you overlook everything and just see how great he was and what he could be and that's that's where i sit but i i had this guitar made in uh in nashville tennessee and i had it patterned after a classical guitar and so it opened up a whole new thing for me as i had i hadn't made the neck a little bit longer yeah a little bit longer so that it's harder to play here it's like a longer stretch right g then i can and then i've got an octave you know you gotta have a lot of guys doing that now it's starting to happen it's starting to happen right yeah i'll expand on that all right shot there first yeah you ready okay uh [Music] do foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] towards the end of his life my dad was living in l.a and he was married to a woman named jewel and they had a daughter and it seems like he was he was fairly together he was trying to think more futuristically i think he was teaching and um thinking about music a lot composing [Applause] when we were in los angeles recently we went to lenny's grave and it was extremely painful and quite strange actually we knew he didn't have a tombstone but we thought he would at least have a number or something identifying where he was and it turns out that there's [Music] nothing the fact that lenny bros grave can be located and not located is anecdotal material for emily the daughter the fact that she has been behind this project and brought it to completion is very significant it's very touching so that even though lenny bros tombstone can't be found emily has raised his tombstone and raised more than his tombstone is raised a beacon raised the lighthouse so that anyone who's interested can find out who her father really was and where her father really is located so thank you [Music] okay we're here a gentleman by the name of lenny brew and his uh his wife jewel lived in this apartment [Music] and from information received from friends and relatives they apparently had some rather rocky marriage [Music] sometime in the morning of the 12th the victim lenny brew was found in the bottom of the pool which is on the roof of this building good evening everyone we'd like to uh we'd like to welcome you to the first set and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to have to tune up so we're going to do a little tune called a tuning tune [Music] [Music] when i play music that's when i feel close to god because i feel as the gifts from god and i'm using that gift to play for people you know i got the inspiration at first but in the end it turned against me it turned against me it wasn't inspiring anymore it was a habit when guitar players talk players talk uh we talk about the great ones we always start with at the top of the scale basically have you heard what montgomery is doing oh was that a fabulous recording and how about taro farlow isn't he his technique incredible in those gigantic hands and uh what about that thing charlie christian played that's still my favorite solo have you heard about this guitar player in canada his name is lenny bro i said no i've heard about him yeah well man wait [Music] [Music] all he wanted to do was play guitar he was kind of a shotgun shot guy those brown eyes oh it sparkled all the time very unpretentious there was just nobody [Music] he had fantastic humor personality he could sing he was great looking plus he was an incredible guitar player i i think boy man this guy should have been an absolutely major star because he had everything going for him he knew the guitar so well he had the great knowledge of the harmonies and he could play classical and jazz and many different styles a little genius he was a mess he was a mess [Music] in his case it was such a loss because he came up with a way of addressing the instrument technically that actually nobody had done before certainly and actually nobody's ever done since [Music] he wasn't prominent or successful things weren't polished things weren't the way they should have been in the traditional sense he was successful in the ways that mattered to him or that mattered to real musicians [Music] again as usual he was one track mine all he thought about was music it was just oh this was it i mean i'd wake up in the middle of the night before in the morning he'd be sitting on the couch like working out things you know and i'd go back to sleep i'd wake up he'd still be sitting there in the morning working out odd cord patterns and things [Music] he was trying to do some new thing with these little bell things you know and um it was so hard he kept doing it and you'd hear him kind of make these sounds and suddenly he i didn't want to interrupt him he didn't even know i'm standing there and he got done and he looked up and saw he goes boy that stuff is hard

Channel: Aramirez

Views: 85,384

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Id: DDNrlGq0PbY

Length: 40min 39sec (2439 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021