Foreword by Tuck Andress

I really didn't think it would happen this time. Sure, Dave Creamer blew my mind and changed my life during six marathon lessons in 1976, but that was a long time ago. Since then we became friends. We team-taught a one-week course and had a lot of fun hanging out, along with our wives Barb and Patti. We talked about things other than music. The few hundred pages of exercises and etudes he gave me, probably less than 1% of his prodigious output, found their way into a file cabinet. I logged another 50,000+ hours on the guitar and became well known as half of Tuck & Patti, where I was challenged to develop virtuosity beyond my expectations. 

I guess I was lulled into thinking I had become Dave's peer, despite seeing him play a time or two and being reminded why George Benson famously called him the "most fantastic guitar player alive in America" and why Miles Davis flew him to New York to replace John McLaughlin in 1972.

Then one day recently Dave asked me to write the foreword to his latest book. I should have known what was coming simply because Dave was so excited about it; he never gets excited. Why would he, having fully explored everything long ago? Plus he is the most deadpan person I've ever met (although one of the funniest). What could possibly rouse him to an almost childlike enthusiasm? 

The answer was Octatonic (eight-note) harmony. Even though he had already listed, categorized and intimately lived with every possible combination of from two to twelve notes back in his early 20s, and already spoke twelve-tone harmony like a native language by the time I met him, he told me he had never really explored the harmony of eight-note scales, simply thinking of them as seven-note scales with an extra chromatic passing note (e.g. the "Bebop" scales). Only much later had he discovered and fallen in love with the novel sounds of the harmony of those scales. During ten years of immersion in this new musical world, he wrote the definitive book on the subject. 

I had gone through my own period of systematic exploration of every possible musical structure a couple of years before I met Dave, so, even though my style evolved in a very different direction, most of the concepts in this book were familiar to me. Reading Section I, I began to congratulate myself, not just for understanding what Dave wrote, but for being able to imagine his thought process as he tried to find

the best way to organize and present this new body of knowledge. Every word made sense and was brilliantly thought out, like everything Dave does. It was scholarly, mathematically elegant and very clever. As always, he took everything to its logical extreme; it must have taken forever to create (especially since he did all the graphics and layout himself).
Still I couldn't figure out why he was so excited. It still just looked like dry permutations and combinations to me. I feared that the 750 pages in Section II would be a tedious exercise in multiplying every possible pattern by every possible scale, something I could have done with enough patience (or programmed a computer to generate), the kind of thing that is even less interesting to read than to write, a ridiculously long appendix to a short book. 

Then I began to play some of the musical examples, and was suddenly just as blown away as I was the first time I heard him play. Almost forty years of life experience were wiped away in a few moments!

Somehow I had lost sight of the fact that, even though I now thought of him as my friend, for over four decades Dave had been not only the most advanced guitarist in the world, but one of the most musical. I have never heard another guitarist play (much less improvise) at Dave's level of complexity with so much depth, beauty and transcendence. It's really difficult to work your way through something as cerebral (and technically challenging) as musical combinatory math and finally come out on the other end making truly satisfying music. Once the analytical mind gets started talking to the fingers, it doesn't want to let go and let the heart/ear lead the way. 

In fact Dave would have been completely turned off by the kind of approach I had naively anticipated. Despite his title "The Hidden Symmetry...," what really excited him was "The Hidden Music." I quickly realized that he was not simply multiplying out the obvious logical possibilities, but rather combining his musicality and his mastery at teaching to guide the reader through their own process of discovery, through the vehicle of examples and etudes that he found ear-tickling and exciting. Like Bach or Chopin, above all what he presents is music; the theory behind its creation recedes, becoming almost secondary. Dave was simply doing what he does, making amazing and sublime music out of unusual resources, full of rhythmic, harmonic and textural interest (and writing it down). 

Another significant aspect of Dave's uniqueness is his technique; much of the music he plays and improvises so smoothly, with effortless rhythm and phrasing, is inherently so difficult to execute, largely due to the unusual intervallic content of his lines, that it sounds like an exercise when anyone else plays one of his voluminous collection of written etudes or attempts to improvise in a similar style. This was part of what was so utterly stunning to me when I first saw him play. Both of his totally ordinary-looking hands moved in ways I would have said were impossible had I not witnessed it myself, yet it looked completely effortless and relaxed at any speed. Even though my style was destined to develop in a very different direction once I met Patti, I owe a lot of my own virtuosity to Dave's unspoken example that (with relentless practice) the impossible could become simply difficult and the difficult could become (or at least look and sound) easy.

Dave once explained that he had practiced very carefully to reach the point where he could never paint himself into a corner; from any note anywhere on the fingerboard played by any finger, he could smoothly get to any other note played by any finger, rendering any possible sequence of notes equally playable. Yet his motions look natural, fluid rather than robotic. 

How did all this happen? How does such a singular individual develop? The legend is that from the beginning Dave spent almost every waking hour playing the guitar, transcribing and developing his ear in some hyper-concentrated state seldom experienced by most people. There are stories of no one seeing him for weeks at a time other than his sister, who left meals by the door to his room a few times a day. Largely self-taught, he mastered bebop during his first two years, became bored with it then delved deeply into Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Along the way, with a Downbeat scholarship, he spent some time at the Berklee College of Music absorbing their systems of organization as well as all the other advanced texts on modern harmony, both jazz and classical, that he could find. 

Inspired by post-Coltrane outside and free jazz, he immersed himself in polytonal, atonal and serial harmony, becoming so proficient that critics raved and musicians would transcribe his improvised linear and chord solos in the 70s, analyze them and discover liberal use of eleven- and twelve-tone rows (and rows of rows) and complex intervallic patterns, including octave displacement and rhythmic variations, that revealed themselves as being as theoretically rigorous as they were freely improvised and ear-inspired. He wrote countless pieces of music which embodied this harmony. Apparently he studied

this language so intensively that he simply became fluent; ultimately, just like a blues player, he simply played what he heard, but he had learned to hear very different sounds than most of his contemporaries. 

At an early point Dave decided that he was unwilling to play any form of pop music, choosing to play completely non-commercial music with like-minded musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area and teach private students. Many of the best recordings of him are therefore ones made during lessons by students, including a cassette one of his students played for me in 1975.

At that time I was playing in soul bands and spending long hours figuring out Wes Montgomery and George Benson solos. I had studied 20th century atonal composers like Schoenberg, Berg and Webern at Stanford, and tried very hard to listen to Cecil Taylor and other post- Coltrane innovators, but found more intellectual interest than soul satisfaction. I was similarly intrigued but ultimately unsatisfied by the playing of all the most heralded fusion and "outside" guitarists. Their music spoke to my mind more than my heart. 

On this cassette, though, Dave offhandedly played a free-form improvisation that was stunning, hauntingly beautiful, the first time I had been deeply moved by atonal music. His vocabulary was unique. His phrasing was straight out of bebop, with totally idiomatic slurs, syncopation, accents and ghost notes, yet his lines were dominated by successions of big intervals, from fourths through jumps of over two octaves. Somehow these unlikely note sequences came rolling off his fingers with the same ease that most great soloists achieve only by sticking mainly with seconds and thirds. It sounded like bebop turned inside out, as if Eric Dolphy had become a guitar player.

It was immediately obvious to me that Dave stood alone at the pinnacle of advancement on the guitar, and I resolved to break a lifetime policy of avoiding guitar teachers and seek him out for lessons. I had already been through the recordings of all the most heralded fusion and "outside" guitarists, and I could tell that he was not just the best, but the only source for the knowledge he possessed. Not long afterwards I heard him play live (with his band Listen at Keystone Korner in San Francisco), which reinforced this conclusion. 

Some months later I arrived at Dave's home for my first lesson. The chairs were arranged so that the student faced him and he faced the TV, which was loudly playing a series of afternoon soap operas and game shows. He could glance over at the student, but it seemed that

most of his attention was on the TV. Knowing I was an advanced professional, he started by casually singing a completely confounding atonal series of 18 notes to me (accompanied by random soap opera music) and inviting me to play it back; I couldn't get the first two notes. I then spent 15 minutes studying his clearly notated version, including fingering and picking, of what turned out to be a twelve-tone row with octave displacement (all the intervals were minor 6ths and minor 9ths) which spidered its way across and along the fingerboard. I started to get the hang of it, admiring the musical pattern, his clever fingering and the extreme picking challenge. Then Dave played it, and it was like butter; each note flowed effortlessly and impossibly into the next. Abstraction was suddenly transformed into music. Not stopping there, he improvised a rhapsodic series of variations on it. 

Lessons went on like this, with me working my way through his exercises, and Dave, not looking away from As The World Turns or Let's Make A Deal, periodically saying things like "No, use an upstroke on the G#." He could easily sing anything he could play, and he caught every nuance of what I played. I have never witnessed such a finely tuned ear, and I came to realize that he was using the distraction of the TV to challenge us both to reach a higher level of focus.

As his playing became more polytonal, Ornette Coleman famously claimed that he heard every note simultaneously in all twelve keys. I'm not sure it was completely true for Ornette, but I saw a lot of evidence that Dave experienced this fully on his way to transcending the concept of key entirely.

It was similarly humbling to play through songs with him. I had worked hard on hearing my way through and soloing on difficult songs like "Giant Steps" and "Inner Urge," but to see Dave apply his unique melodic approach to these chord progressions while extending their harmony to and past the breaking point, was dazzling. 

I quickly realized that I had been thrown into the deepest water of my life. With every other guitarist I had encountered, I could see that there could be a path from here to there, even if a long one, if I chose to take it. But I was no more likely to be able to fit into Dave Creamer's shoes in this lifetime than I was to become a prima ballerina. 

Nonetheless, I could easily appreciate the "secret" of Dave's greatness. Given the unlimited musical and technical choices that his unique approach had made available to him, he had made an early conscious commitment not to play cerebrally, not to play licks or finger

patterns and not to try to impress anyone. His organizing principle was simply to make sounds that inspired him, which depended entirely on ear and musicality. Hence his ability and tendency to sing everything; the actual act of playing (as well as the enormous mental and technical preparation necessary) seemed almost secondary. I saw that for Dave what you can play does not matter; all that matters is what you do play. It finally comes down to musical choices, and these require linking one's soul directly to one's fingers via a finely tuned and constantly exercised ear. 

During that period I was going to see George Benson play as often as I could, on multiple nights of each annual week-long run at Keystone Korner. As I gradually became familiar with Dave's approach and vocabulary, I began to recognize the source of some of Benson's most ambitious and experimental lines, the ones that sounded like he was really stretching. It was much later that I learned that George had introduced Dave to Miles Davis and offered to manage and produce him (Dave ultimately decided not to go down either path).

It is interesting to read reviews of Dave's live shows during that period. They are unanimously positive, without qualification, even from some critics who were known for always including a barb or two to counterbalance their praise. They are all full of phrases like "magnificently inventive," "towering performer," "only guitarist I enjoy listening to," "astonishing guitar work," "brilliant," "unique approach," "touch that's incredible," "flabbergasts even the most casual listener with his technique, imagination, tone, rhythm, etc." 

Yet it appears that none of the reviewers actually grasped any of the theoretical and technical underpinning, nor could they begin to describe his style. Some cite musicians who influenced him, but conclude with phrases like "barely suggesting his influences" or "he sounds only like himself."

Of course being misunderstood (or simply not being understood) is common, almost a badge of honor, among musicians who blaze new trails. What is far less common is for their music to be universally loved at the same time. Many of the greatest artistic innovators were scorned by critics as well as their fellow artists at first, and often only reluctantly accepted later, or celebrated by either critics or the public, but not both. It is a testament to Dave's musicality that even critics are promptly disarmed and charmed into simply enjoying the music like everybody else. 

I believe that another part of what makes people like Dave's music is his attitude. He is unfailingly (and comically) self-effacing, a genuinely humble person seemingly not driven by ego or competitiveness. He surely grasps his exalted position in the musical pantheon, but I've never heard him talk about it. I never get the feeling that he is trying to impress anybody with his knowledge or technique; he just makes music he wants to hear. In this he reminds me of Art Tatum, the unparalleled jazz pianist, who, though universally loved by critics, fellow musicians and audiences, was so far beyond them all that ultimately his only option was to play to entertain himself, the only listener capable of fully appreciating his music.

It has been said that "Understanding has no meaning. Love alone has meaning," and that "Love is contagious." I think Dave is a beautiful example of both of these principles. He has achieved his unprecedented theoretical and technical advancement entirely in service of his goal of making beautiful, highly personal music and sharing his love for those sounds by helping other musicians to explore the same territory. This is love in action. 

I believe that history will accurately put Dave Creamer in the same category as Art Tatum, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, in that he singlehandedly both invented and perfected a new artistic language, and he was not predictable based on those who came before or equalled by those who followed, making him literally unique, a historical singularity.



But that doesn't mean we can't learn from him. I hope this magnificent book is as inspiring to you as his example has been to me.