Bob Burnett – What Is Man and What Is Guitar? (2021)
There’s a moment in Bob Burnett and Alan Jones’s film about Keith Rowe, What Is Man and What Is Guitar? where Rowe is spending time with Christian Wolff and reminiscing about times they played together. Wolff tells a story about a show he played with AMM where his guitar wasn’t plugged in, but he played anyway. “You don’t know what you hear, who’s making the sounds – especially when it’s dark,” he goes on smiling, “It’s a wonderful kind of feeling … Am I doing that? Are you doing that?”
Rowe, ever the good-humored agitator, responds, “Sometimes you hear this horrible sound and think, ‘God I wish they’d stop.’ And you stop playing and realize it was you!”
This moment of genuine affection and respect that’s colored by this irreverent humor is a thread that runs through What Is Man and What Is Guitar? So many moments in the film like this represent why Rowe is such a towering figure and why his ideas have inspired so many. The boldness and seriousness with which he approaches his work is combined with boundless generosity. Rowe touches on this at one point when he talks about the most important aspect of performing over the past 50 years. “To inspire others to do their work. I think it’s really important to give permission, but I think also to also inspire.”
Keith Rowe’s approach to his work has never taken any shortcuts. There’s a seriousness and focus that runs through his compositions and experimentations that elevate the ideas. Early in the film, he discusses this, using the example of running a contact mic over a piece of sandpaper, and matter-of-factly stating, “I should be performing that with the same consideration Clifford Curzon giving to the Mozart. Comparing your work to Mozart, obviously sounds incredibly pretentious on one level. I can see that,” he continues with a wry smile, “but it’s the way I’m going to do it. Like it or not.” He has always pursued his ideas in the ways that mattered to him and in doing so inspired generations of artists to push themselves to do the same.
What continually gets me throughout this film is how likable and how human Rowe is. As the film winds down and Rowe discusses his Parkinson’s diagnosis and the tremors in his right hand, the film points toward the inevitable. Rowe stares it down straight on, “There’s a fatalistic aspect of Parkinson’s that it will do what it wants to do. Whether I like it or not, it will have its way.” We often have a tendency to mythologize titans like Rowe, to think of people who have had such an integral influence on something as larger-than-life characters impervious to the ravages of time, but this moving portrait shows the realness of the colossus. What Is Man and What Is Guitar? shows that while his ideas have changed and progressed music in countless ways, Keith Rowe is simply a man.
309MB | 23m 57s | 1280×720 | mkv
https://nitro.download/view/377A21E04595025/What_Is_Man_and_What_Is_Guitar_(Bob_Burnett_2021).mkv
Language:English
Subtitles:None