“I am thrilled to play finally in Woodstock after all those years. I am looking forward to it. I feel great about coming to America. This is my second home,” says the extraordinary finger style guitarist Pierre Bensusan. To say that Bensusan is a master of the guitar is like saying Albert Einstein was good at math. When guitarist and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Larry Campbell tells you, “this guy is something else. He is just amazing,” you listen.
Bensusan will perform at St. Gregory’s A-Frame Church on Route 212, just east of Woodstock’s main hamlet, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 30.
He was born in Oran, French Algeria in 1957 moved to Paris when he was four. He started playing piano at the age of seven. “I started music with classical piano and moved on to the guitar. I taught myself, I had no idea of what I was doing. I didn’t even know how to tune a guitar. I had to listen to a record to find the standard tuning and then a friend came over and taught me how to change strings because I was breaking them,” Bensusan remembers. His early influences were from America, he loved bluegrass and studied French songwriters. “I listened to various things — Bob Dylan was a big influence but also the French singer songwriters of the day. I was singing a lot, writing my own songs as well. I was strumming and singing, then I heard the music of Pentangle and John Renbourn in England and that is what really kicked me to look at the guitar differently and I started to use the guitar to play instrumental music.”
He moved from guitar to playing the mandolin, where he was discovered by the legendary banjoist, Woodstocker Bill Keith in 1974 while Keith was touring Europe. “I started my career with Bill when I was 17.” In need of a mandolin player Keith hired Bensusan to play in his band with Jim Rooney. “Bill was my hero because I heard of him through his recordings with Bill Monroe and different people. I was totally thrilled and we toured together. Thanks to him I met my other big heroes, The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers in Amsterdam.” Playing music with Keith and Rooney was a brand new and exciting experience for this young virtuoso who lived, ate and breathed guitar. “One morning after breakfast,” Bensusan remembers, “Bill hears me playing guitar and he comes close and he says, ‘Wow what is this that you are playing?’ He was so amazed that he invited me to play solo guitar in every one of our shows.” Keith told Bensusan “okay, you are going to start the second set with three or four pieces on your own. He gave me my chance. He really believed in me. He was the man who put me out there.”
Claire Keith, Bill’s wife of 40 years, met Keith by taking Pierre to a Bill Keith recording session in Paris. Bensusan recalls, “Bill married a dear friend of mine, a French woman, Claire. Claire and I we were like brothers and sisters, like family really.” Claire Keith also reminisces about those early days in France. “He was an unbelievably gifted kid, just unbelievable. He happened to live in the same suburbs that I did in Paris. There was this club where every week we would go. He must have been 15 because I was 19, I had a car and he didn’t. We became pretty good buddies. I was driving him into Paris several times a week to the clubs. We stopped by some studio where this recording was going on. Pierre was there also because it was a French Bluegrass project,” which was where Bensusan met his Bill Keith. “Pierre was such a gifted kid he was so overwhelmingly visible. When you see such talent arriving everybody recognizes it instantly,” Claire says.
Bensusan was 17 when he signed his first recording contract in 1974 releasing “Pres de Paris” which won him the Grand Prix du Disque award for Folk Music at the Montreux Festival in Switzerland. “I invited Bill to play one song with me and it became a very popular tune which was aired on French radio every day for one year, ‘Sunday’s Hornpipe.’ Bill recorded the same song again on one of his records, Banjoistics in 1984. Bensusan and Keith kept in touch through the years and remembers seeing his old friend a few years ago when Claire and Bill went to see Pierre play at Saratoga Springs for the last time. Bill Keith passed away last October.
Bensusan’s most recent recording, Encore, was the winner of the Independent Music Award for best live album. Dubbed the “Mozart of Guitar” Bensusan released Encore in 2013. “Three years ago I wanted to celebrate my 40th year in the music business and I thought I should have a live record available because I do not have a live record. So in 2013, I had three months off the road and I started to listen to dozens of concerts. I listened to these tracks with Bill Keith, Jim Rooney and Leon Francioli on upright bass, who passed away just a month ago, a fantastic Avant Gard Jazz player. So I approached Bill and he gave me Jim Rooney’s contact information. I had lost contact with Jim for the last 30 years. And I said, listen my friends, we have some amazing music recorded live from that concert and the sound is very different. I sent them a copy of the concert and I asked them if they would give me please their authorization to use a couple of tracks for my record and they were so happy to be part of it.”
When asked about what Bensusan sees in his future, it becomes obvious that not only is this self-taught prodigy unique, he is an optimist and a humanitarian as well. “I worry about this world; the way this world is going. Some of the stuff I really don’t like. It worries me. The wars, the fundamentalism, the things that have happened in Europe and in America. I’m in tune with our world. I believe in transforming our emotions. I believe in transforming whatever comes our way. You have to be able to transform the bad as well, even the stuff that is very bad and put them into some kind of order that makes sense.”
Bensusan puts things in order with his music. “We could go towards chaos and we could go towards beauty and I think that at the end of the day beauty will always prevail. I am an optimist because every day I wake up and I’m happy to be alive.”
Bensusan is very much looking forward to playing in Woodstock, Saturday, April 30th at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock at 7:30 PM. “It’s good to play different songs every night. I try and surprise myself. I want to be on the road where I feel the best. The stage should be like my bedroom”
Bensusan plans to continue to change the world with him music. “Music helps and transforms. Some people hate it and they want to ban it. It is direct, it goes directly to your heart to the center of gravity of what we are.”
Pierre Bensusan will perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 30 at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, 2578 Route 212, Woodstock (half a mile east from the intersection with Route 375). Tickets are $21. To obtain them in advance, see StringTix Music Events on Facebook.
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