04.30.06 - Volume 2, Episode #5 - Length 33:25
BrightSideBroadcast.com proudly presents Hans York. Hans York may have been born in Germany, however he is a true world musician. Influences from Samba, Bossa Nova and popular Brazilian music to traditional Irish music creates an engaging experience. Listen and discover the unique DADGAD guitar tuning that Hans does so brilliantly.
AAC 31 MB
MP3 30.6 MB
Hans York: Inside Out was there as a song. I knew that this was going to be the title of the album. I thought, I mean, it reflects a lot of what I’m thinking about the world. It’s like what’s inside wants to go out and it’s like, for every artist, they want to try to express themselves as good as possible and with as much honesty as there is.
( ♪ Inside Out – From the Album Inside Out ♪ )
Hans York: I thought, well, something is missing. I couldn’t really figure out what, but I knew there was a track missing, and I saw on the wall of the studio there was this baritone guitar, Danelectro, that was the company, and it’s basically tuned a fifth underneath a regular guitar tuning. So it’s kind of low and dark. While I took a break from mixing, I went out there and just took it and started playing and it was like, “Wow, that’s awesome.” So I asked the engineer and said, “Hey, can you just record that.” So I basically wrote a little thing right there which became Outside In. I thought maybe on the next album I could develop a real tune out of that. Right now it’s just like a peek of Outside In which separates the album. It’s kind of more like an LP. You know I grew up with basically having LP’s and I like the idea of the A side of an LP and then you turn it around and the other side. It’s a little different so I kind of liked that.
( ♪ Inside Out – From the Album Inside Out ♪ )
Hans York: I heard Brazilian music for the first time when I was back in Germany and I heard an artist called Evan Lenz and it just struck me completely. I was sitting somewhere at a friend’s house on a couch and, emotionally, it was just too much. I was like, “Oh my god, this is so beautiful.” After that I knew I had to go there. I needed to experience this myself. While I was still in Frankfurt, I got pretty much every Brazilian album that I could get a hold of and learned some songs, learned the language, and found that, for me, it’s one of the most beautiful languages to sing because it’s very melodic and it’s soft. It doesn’t have any kind of harsh sounds to it. It’s very soft. It is the only true world music for me. It has the African aspect, which is the low drumming and the groove aspect and that music comes from African slaves. The baroque and classical influence comes from the Portuguese who brought it over. In fact, in the ‘20s choral music was really like a big hit and came basically from Rio de Janeiro. It had a lot of classical influence and wonderful players. Then the other influence was like the indigenous music, the Indians. Maybe not as much, but it’s still there if you go a little further away from Rio de Janeiro, you go more inland.
Hans York: Then, when it really took off was when American Jazz hit the scene in the ‘40s or something like that. Bossa Nova came out of that, Tom Jobim, Astrud Gilberto, and they mixed everything together. It’s like if you experience a concert in Rio de Janeiro. I was once in this place – it was probably say 1,500 people – and they knew all the songs. From the first song, everybody sings the songs. That whole hall is basically singing every song and I was like, “Oh my god, I don’t believe that.” It’s just unbelievable. The artists then have a really nice relationship with the audience. They talk with them. It’s not so much removed. You know, sometimes when I see a concert here or back in Germany, it’s very removed. There was the artist, there’s the audience. There was not such a close interaction like I saw in Rio de Janeiro. Sometimes the artist would ask the audience what they want to hear and they would shout out a song and they would play it. It was wonderful. So certainly it changed my life.
( ♪ Listen to the Moon – Recorded Live by BSB ♪ )
Hans York: It’s a different tuning. I mean the standard guitar tuning is like E, A, D, G, B, E and what I do is D, A, D, G, A, D so that’s why it’s called DADGAD. It’s a tuning that’s used a lot in Irish music and Celtic music in general. That’s where I picked it up years ago back in Germany. I played with a harp player and so at some point I heard him talk about DADGAD and I said, “What’s that?” So he said, “Well, it’s a guitar tuning” and I tried it out. In the beginning it felt like I’m a beginner again. I had no clue what I was doing and I liked the idea of playing with a beginner’s mind. At the time I could play guitar very well, but it was all of a sudden like a complete new world where I could explore some things and I could just play something and it sounded really good because the tuning has a lot of overtones. You have three D’s in the tuning so it’s very rich and has a lot of overtones. It’s just beautiful. I switched back in the beginning, but now I’m just basically completely into DADGAD. Every once in a while on a live show, when I play solo show I take a standard-tuned guitar to play a couple of Beatles songs, something like that on it. Most of my own original stuff is all in DADGAD.
( ♪ Snowy Spring – Recorded Live by BSB ♪ )
Hans York: Certainly the Beatles – I would range them very high because they were for me the first ones that combined Rock ‘n Roll attitude with wonderful melodies and arrangements and beautiful vocals. I always loved harmony vocals. I love their vocals. Also sometimes from the lyrics, they fairly simple put very poignant and just hit it. I could relate to that very well. Then another artist that really got me at some point was Joni Mitchell, certainly as a songwriter and how the came from folk music, playing the dulcimer and all that, and later on she played with Jazz greats like Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny, all those guys, and Charles Mingus. She kind of tied everything in together, that was something I always loved because I have these different roots – I played rock music, I played jazz music, I love basically music; the genre is not so important for me. It’s just like… if I see somebody playing music with passion then I dig it. It could be thrash metal. If I see that people are really into that and they love what they are doing I respect that and can find something that kind of ticks with me.
I started fairly late. Guitar playing, I started when I was 16. But my uncle, he’s a jazz piano player, and so we had these gatherings at my grandma’s house where my uncle would just sit on the piano and play. He always encouraged me to just do the same thing – sit down and play soundscapes and just figure something out without actually knowing what I was doing. I did that really early on and I really liked it. At 16 I started playing guitar and from that moment on I never stopped. I kind of knew pretty much straight away that I’m going to be a professional musician. For sure my parents in the beginning, they were absolutely against it but they thought it’s not for real. I never stopped talking so at some point they just gave up and let me do it.
( ♪ When Rain Falls – Recorded Live by BSB ♪ )
Hans York: I was on tour in Scotland for three weeks and I just found out why I’m actually in the US. For example in Germany when you have a bigger idea or when you want to live outside the box everybody is telling you why it doesn’t work. Even your friends sometimes tell you that doesn’t work because of this, this and that. In the US if you tell them a bigger idea or you want to live outside the box people say “Yeah man, go for it!” If you only talk they lose interest, but if you actually do it they respect you, which is very inspiring for the arts in general. You have a lot of great musicians and great artists coming from the US. It’s certainly harder because art is not so much supported in the US as it is in Europe, but still the inspiration is there. I always liked that.
When I was 17 I had a full scholarship for the Berklee School of Music in Boston but at that time the exchange rate for the dollar was so high in Germany that even with the full scholarship room and board in Boston would just have been out of range. At that time I was pretty disappointed. I was 17 and I was myself already in Boston, being taught by Pat Metheny, Gary Burton and all the jazz greats, and all of a sudden I realized – well, this is not going to fly. After that I pretty much started playing professionally in Germany. I had to do something. At that time there were really no schools in Germany that would teach jazz and pop music, and I didn’t want to go classical. I’m never going to sit in an orchestra. I played classical guitar for a couple of years, but I was never so much interested in the whole thing of sitting there alone, by yourself, playing classical guitar and every little peeps and screech is going to destroy the whole mood. The competitiveness of all that; I’m very community-oriented and like playing with my friends. I was always looking more for a band, playing together rather than everything against one another.
( ♪ When Rain Falls – Recorded Live by BSB ♪ )
Hans York: The website is hansyork dot com, like new york dot com. Pretty much all my dates, all the calendar is there. There’s some music there, there’s links to stores. There’s my CD’s right now with CD Baby – also with Amazon – though I prefer CD Baby. They are really good to the artist and not so big – smaller, I like that. I’ve got two CD’s with iTunes right now, so you can also download it.
( ♪ What If – From the Album Inside Out ♪ )
Hans York: In Safety is Solace a friend of mine wrote the lyrics to that one. We talked about that whole issue with safety, especially after 9/11, all of the sudden safety became such a big word. Everybody wants to feel safe, but for me it’s always like this. There is no safety. Growing up in Germany with that culture…with Germany culture that went through these two wars I could see that if somebody tells you that you’re not safe that’s the beginning of you having to give away rights and that’s what happened here. You had to give away civil rights were people died and fought for decades and decades to get the rights. And within the last five or six years everything was taken away because everyone wanted to be safe, supposedly. I mean if somebody wants to harm us you can’t stop it, it’s just going to happen somewhere at any point. Tom, my friend that wrote the lyrics, captured that really well. When I saw the lyrics it instantly took me in between three and five minutes to write that whole song and melody and everything together and it was like, okay, that’s it. It was a soul song and I’m not necessarily a soul singer but I knew that in Germany a friend of mine He’s famous for his soul voice so when I was back in Germany recording the vocals for the album I called him up and said, he do you want to sing that song? And he agreed. That’s how I got him on the album.
( ♪ Safety is Soulless – From the Album Inside Out ♪ )
"At 16 I started playing guitar and from that moment on I never stopped. I kind of knew pretty much straight away that I'm going to be a professional musician." - Hans York
