Who are you? It’s a very simple question, but the way in which we answers it tells a lot about our identities. Did you first say you were a man or woman? A professional? A son? A husband or wife? A Republican or Democrat? Did you mention your race or religion? How we see ourselves helps us make many decisions in our complex lives.
Sometimes, a trauma happens to us that makes us re-evaluate who we actually are. This month, we’re dealing with two artists that had life threatening problems that not only put their future into jeopardy, but for Pat Martino, his past as well. Back in 1980, Martino had a surgery in order to correct a brain aneurysm. Unfortunately, the procedure left him with complete amnesia; he lost all memory of his past, including how to play the guitar.
As to the necessity of the surgery, the problem had been a chronic one that finally caught up with the guitarist, as he recalls, “I suffered with it from the very beginning. I was born with the problem. The problem wasn’t the aneurysm, that was the crises, the crucial moment. The problem was arterial/venous malformation, and I was born with that problem. For around 20-30 years it was misdiagnosed.”
So, where does one begin to create a new identity? That’s the issue Martino had to deal with. He has learned to master the guitar again, thanks to his father who played his old albums for him while Pat was rehabilitating back home. Since then, he’s regained his life, with a new album, an autobiography, and a new view on life and what one’s identity actually is.
His recently published autobiography, Here and Now, was not even his own idea. Martino explains, “It had a great deal to do with one of the people who the book is dedicated to, Anthony Creamer. His name is mentioned after my father, my mother and my wife. Anthony was the investor of this. I met Anthony some time back due to the fact that he was the winner in a contest here in Philadelphia when the Millon Bank was initiating me as their representative for a full year in term as an artist from this area. That’s how I met him. Somewhere down the line, he said “I want to give something to you, just out of appreciation, as an investment on my behalf. I have $50,000, and I’d love to invest in anything you’d like to do.”
“I said “That’s a real generous idea. Let me give it some thought.” And I did. Between that and the next event, I performed in NYC at Birdland and one of the people who always stops in to say hello is Bill Milkowski, and we got to talking. The idea came up from Bill, “Why don’t you do an autobiography?” I gave it some thought, got back to Anthony Creamer and discussed it with him. That was our decision.”
“It was a compression of quite a number of flashbacks and descriptive feelings. I feel good about it. I feel that a lot of the inmost feelings that I’ve had over the years have been documented. Working with Bill Milkowski, in terms of interacting with him, was volcanic in many ways. He continually brought up quite a number of really important facets to be discussed.”
One of the beneficial results of going through the preparation of the autobiography was that it caused Martino to reach back into his mind to touch parts of his past. “It was a compression of quite a number of flashbacks and descriptive feelings,” he states. “ I feel good about it. I feel that a lot of the inmost feelings that I’ve had over the years have been documented. Working with Bill Milkowski, in terms of interacting with him, was volcanic in many ways. He continually brought up quite a number of really important facets to be discussed. Quite a number of things came to the surface. “
While Martino had a complete loss of memory due to his operation, he was still able to retain certain functions, such as language. Fortunately, he points out, “I had innate intuitive flashbacks that came piece by piece; at first very small,Very miniature. They began to re-emerge and make their marks. There were certain innate abilities (like reading and speaking) that remained with me.”
From there, while recuperating he was brought face to face with his musical past when he was forced him to listen to his old ground breaking sessions from the past. It was like being introduced to a complete stranger, but the stranger was himself. At this point in his recovery, the discovery of his past wasn’t perfomed by a medical professional, but by “my dad, when I was recovering in Philadelphia. I did that with mom and dad in their home. Dad always played the albums that I had recorded years ago. So, I was constantly bombarded with the sound of that. It was quite annoying to me, to be honest with you. The albums themselves, as it was mentioned in the autobiography, there were times that I would take an album cover and go in front of a mirror and correlate both images of me, as being authentically the same. He did the best he could to give me respect and credit to the sessions, and it was his desire that I could once again attain that ability in the future.”
Coming out of a period of complete darkness, and an essentially clean slate of “who you are” can be both exhilarating and intimidating. How many of us would love to change “who” we are and comletely start over. What this time of rebuilding his only life did for Martino was worthy of a book in itself. “That’s a long story,” he points out. “ It’s not a matter of learning about myself as much as awakening to myself. It has a great deal to do with identification. What I really identify as my true self. I don’t see that as a guitar player, or as a musician, or as an American or a Caucasian, or any of those things. I see all of those things as vehicles at my disposal to be able to utilize and activate on the basis of my intentions, and to move through social opportunities worldwide, with those intentions in the forefront, to make use of any opportunity within any given moment.”
What was also ignited in Martino was a spiritual resurgence, as he was able to see his physical and spiritual life from a deeper perspective. This began “when my reading materials started to become unboxed,” he remembers, “ because I literally left all of my personal objects in Los Angeles when I flew to Philadelphia in crises for the operation. When those were sent over and I began to unbox them, within there were all of the spiritual writings that were so important to me for so many years. That re-ignited a vast amount of re-information that I think was identifiable just because it always was a priority.”
From coming to a point of having no past, or at least a recollection of one, and reading books ranging from the Bible to Lao-Tzu, the most important insight that he learned was that “It comes down to the moment. The title of my book (Here and Now) was chosen due its relativity to a realistic description of how things are. They are here and now, and that’s it. As far as the future, and as far as the past, they are really just forms of mindless entertainment. When we think of yesterday and the past, it really doesn’t exist. In fact, it’s no more than a distraction to the here and now, and the same with the future; it’s just pondering what we seem to desire that we’d like to take place. But it never happens that way, so it’s just a form of entertainment. One of the major changes in my life were focal points that were more realistic than ever before.”
Of course, imbibing these teachings, and seeing where they fit into your life is not necessarily going to work for every person living in the modern American life. Martino points out that “It depends upon the individual and their priorities, and the ability to remain as neutral as possible is essential. Like any other apparatus in the human form, the eyes see, the ears hear, the heart pumps blood, there’s taste and touch. All of these things are services that the anatomy provides for the individual at our disposal at our times. With that also is the mind. The mind does only one thing; it thinks. No more, no less. There comes times when you shouldn’t succumb to that one and only function, when you have to turn it off for awhile, and step outside of it. When you can do that, you can transcend the illusion of time.” We all wonder why something traumatic happens to us. As the Psalmist wrote over 2500 years ago, “it was good that I was afflicted, so that I could understand Your ways. Who in their right mind wants to have something bad happen to them? Unfortunately, that is at times the only way we can get certain insights into ourselves, life itself, and our Creator.
As for his latest cd release, Undeniable (High Note Records), Martino taps into his dna and reaches into his early R&B days with the likes of Jack McDuff, Jimmy Smith and Willis Jackson. The disc has Martino leading a Hammond B3 quartet with the beefy tenor sounds of Eric Alexander, even though the six stringer has no conscious recollection of those nascent days. He recalls those days with Jackson “Just vaguely. I remember just flash images of Willis, but not really as strong as a complete memory. But I do get flashes of Willis, and certain members of the group.”
To Martino, the fact that this brand new disc is so similar in groove to his earliest material “ is quite intriguing, as It wasn’t necessarily intended to do so, it’s just that that particular instrumentation brought back many memories. They were conscious ones. To be able to go back to 1967, the album Strings! from Prestige Records was the first time and only time that “Lean Years” was performed and record ed. And (one this record) is the second time. There’s something about time in a circle. When it’s in a circle, it’s almost like it’s in an orbit. You do things that are cyclic, and this was the second appearance of that cycle, coming full circle, coming four decades later. I find that interesting. “
His earlier music has had a clever way of returning back to him, as he details, “ I have very little memory of the initial intentions with the (1968)album Baiyina on Prestige. In 1998, a gentleman from San Francisco contacted me, Peter Block. Peter is a flautist, and he asked me if I would be interested in participating as a guest artist in a session that he was doing on Mythos records. I said that I’d love to do it, because I wanted to be as active as I could be, and it was a great addition to what was taking place in my life at the moment. “
“So, I went to San Francisco, and I participated in this project which was called “Fire Dance.” It included Zakir Hussain on tablas and tambura, Habib Khan on sitar, as well as Ilya Rayzman, who played violin for the Moscow Philharmonic. That was the second time that I recorded with the Indian format, at least from the far east. That particular session consisted of Northern Indian ragas, improvised through.So, when I earlier mentioned a cyclic orbit, that was the second appearance of that particular environment and realm of topic, the raga with it’s odd time signatures. In that sense, the latest album Undeniable cyclicly fits as well.”
Coming full cycle in the article as well as with Martino’s music, it’s interesting to note that he sees his guitar playing in a different light as well. When he first came on the jazz scene in the late 60s, he was considered the latest jazz gunslinger in town. As with any line of work, he used to compare his playing with other artists, but through his loss and subsequent recovery of his identity, that has changed. “I used to feel that way as a guitarist, and as a musician, but I don’t feel that way anymore,”he observes. “ I think of my playing as a function, as an ability that is along the lines of all of the other many things that I do. Penmenship is another. I’m not a calligrapher, although I focus on it with the same amount of respect and devotion to it as guitar playing when it’s taking place. It’s the same thing to me in terms of the guitar instrument. To me, it’s like any other instrument; a pen, a fork or a knife. It serves a purpose, and I take advantage of that purpose when I’m in a situation where it’s of service.”
Martino will be serving a wothwhile purpose in for Southern Californians in the spring when he comes the Musicians Institute via the Jazz Bakery’s “Moveable Feast.” I will be coming into Los Angeles in March, and I will in the Musician’s Institute with Eldar Djangarov, just duets. We both enjoy interacting together. We have mutual relationships. He’s gifted beyond recall. He is a virtuoso.” As for Martino, you won’t just be seeing a guitarist, “… a person, a human being, a moment of awareness.”
Most of the times, when life throws us a curve, we immediately try to figure out the whys. Usually, the reasons either come much later in life upon reflection, or never at all. Pat Martino learned that the most important part of a difficulty in life is working through it to figure out the next steps of who you are during the process of dealing with the situation. We think we know who we are until something in life happens to strip our self-proposed identity away. Martino lost his life, only to find a deeper one again. Check out his musical story, as well as his written one, and observe a life of discovery.