intelligence and an intolerance of plastic-coated popular culture or ‘art’ that merely follows well-worn ruts, makes chatting with him a little heavy. He speaks fast, as if there’s way too much to say in the time that’s available, but every now and then will come out with the most profound truth about beauty, or love, or value.

And when you listen to his music—not just listen, but actually sit inside it for a while and hear it—this all starts to make sense. Because Nigel’s music fully resonates with Nigel himself. It’s as if without the music you were never meant to understand Nigel in the first place. It’s like requiring The Doomsday Book in order to understand James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In the music you hear precisely the same intensity, brooding, loneliness, that same sense of reflection and regret, punctuated by moments of ecstasy and climax, of harmony and hope. Considering Nigel almost always plays alone, he has this extraordinary ability to play guitar—a seven-string—like it’s in dialogue with itself. He can play as though the guitar is multi-voiced, meaning that any one piece can summon

multiple emotions and ideas simultaneously. So a piece that is heavy and brooding can also hint at lighter and more frivolous themes.

Take a track like Flossy off his album Thrum, as an example. Despite its playful frivolity there’s a persistence to the composition that signals serious intent—and that then is highlighted by moments of ecstatic delight that bring the whole thing to a climax, reminding us that even in the most casual encounters deeper needs and desires are never too far from the surface.

In this, Nigel stands alongside some of art and literature’s greats. The Russian writer Dostoevsky, for example, was a master of dialogical word play, so that the reader constantly believes they are part of a conversation that existed before they joined in, and will continue long after they have left it.

Nigel does this on the guitar.

But this isn’t something you’ll hear with his CD playing in the background over dinner. Nigel Gavin isn’t someone you stick in a corner to entertain wedding guests. Nigel and his guitar demand—and deserve—the spotlight. His music requires many listens, and committed listening at that. Or you won’t break through those themes that are most obvious. The beauty of Nigel’s music is that, if you give it the time, you will hear voices you’ve never heard before.

‘I’m trying to look to a place that’s not here yet,’ Nigel says, with not a gram of pretension. ‘If I was playing electronic music, that’d be way out there—but because I’m playing an acoustic guitar it’s a sound that people are comfortable with, so people like my records. But a lot of people don’t really

THEVIRTUOSODAVID WILLIAMS talks with ... and really hears ... local musician Nigel Gavin, and discovers a true master.

Nigel Gavin’s extraordinary musical talent, his intensity, his slightly wacky story, and the whiff of isolation that hangs over both his music and his persona, all converge in this one sentence, that he throws out far too casually as we chat in the front room of his Mt Eden home: ‘I thought I saw a certain beauty in life, but no one seemed to share it with me—so I thought there was something wrong with me—maybe.’

He’s talking about his first heartbreak, when he was a teenager, and a girl with whom he wanted to share a vision of beauty but who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, join him there. That realisation pushed him to the extremes of despair, and Nigel says that if he had been the type he would have thrown himself off a ledge.

And while, in many ways, he’s moved on from that point, you get the strong impression that he’s very much still there. Not at the moment of heartbreak, but at that strangely lonely place of being able to see amazing beauty, in life as well as in music, but from a vantage others can’t find.

You can hear it in his playing. Not for nothing he’s been described as a musical genius, one of NZ’s musical treasures, a virtuoso. And there’s no doubt he is. But he creates and plays his music outside the so-called music industry, which may account for why you haven’t heard of him.

And he’s not the most accessible guy. His conversation is dense—his depth of experience, coupled with high

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listen to them. That’s one of the problems— everyone hears music these days but no one listens. Not many people can sit down, turn off their phone, not read anything, and just sit and listen to music.’

If they did just sit and listen to Nigel’s album Thrum, they would hear a track like Lucid, and note that it’s bookended with a bluesy, muddy theme that contradicts the name of the track. But they would also hear a somewhat playful interaction between two voices that are more hopeful, and which then break out in a moment of clarity that is stunning. But then the reemergence of the blues to close the track is Nigel’s way of suggesting that lucidity doesn’t last forever, and not even for very long.

On the track Nebuchadnezzar, they would get to hear Nigel as painter rather than storyteller. Many of Nigel’s songs take you on a narrative journey, some of which never resolve the dramatic tension. But on Nebuchadnezzar he paints a scene, possibly the same room as that in which the Old Testament king saw the hand of God writing on the wall. This fits with the theme of the piece, which sounds like a journey into madness. Much of Nigel’s music plays with discordance. He rarely allows the listener to sit comfortably, preferring to stir and disturb. The Mosquito is such a piece, as the name suggests. Showcasing Nigel’s incredible speed it also features a stunning bluesy breakout, but for the most part is frenzied and angular, like the uneven battle between the mozzie and the swat.

Kin Ship is far more subtle. There’s a sense of foreboding as well as joy in the piece, which is persistent in the way

that kinship is. But there are eastern influences in there too, which make you think that the kinship being toyed with is not a benign kinship, but something more radical, perhaps even fanatical. Whatever Nigel intended in the piece, the result is consistent with his overall approach—there are multiple meanings present,

and no one voice is privileged over the other. To really hear this music you must be a participant in the dialogue.

This is not incidental to Nigel’s avowed approach to music. He has argued for years that music should be intellectual as much as emotional, that it should never be predictable, that it should arrive as the result of hard work and rigid practice as much as through ‘inspiration’.

These are ideas not every musician would agree with. But Nigel follows a philosophy of head, hands, heart, which he describes as a Sufi-gnostic idea, but which has echoes in many faith and philosophical teachings. It’s the idea that music is as much about the intellect, as it is about emotion, as it is about craft.

I ask Nigel, where in his music would we see each element playing out?

‘Well, first of all we get your feet tapping or something, that is quite primitive, but it’s very important. But also, you feel something in your heart, that there’s some emotion in there. But at the same time you’re interested in it. You could go as far back as some of the Beatles’ stuff—some real interesting tracks. There was always something that was interesting. It was probably the producer that did that. It’s the

key change—you know you don’t get many key changes in modern music these days. You don’t hear much melody in modern music, so it’s probably a balance of that.

‘I think it’s also what we then call “cultivating your chi”, by having balance, and at the same time it’s what the Hindus would call our karma. I think your chi and your karma are the same thing.’

Nigel says it also comes out in the way he composes, and the way he communicates with other musicians.

‘It scares some people away because it sounds kind of hocus pocus—but it’s not. Music that appeals to me—I don’t care what the genre is—it should move you, head, hands and heart. I was saying how NZ’s very cynical—they worry if things are intellectual. I heard a comment about NZ music that they seem to avoid thinking about it much. They love the feel, and they love the dancing and stuff—but I like to have stuff to think about.’

Nigel was born in New York, where he lived until he was 12. ‘I might have been born yesterday, but I was up all night,’ he says playfully, acting coy about his age.

His girlfriends reckon Nigel mythologises his past, and it’s true that some stories have been told and retold in articles about Nigel—such as his circus life, and the ‘dark place’ that led to him heading to NZ, the birthplace of his father.

His parents divorced when Nigel was in his teens, after the family had moved to California. Not long after, Nigel hit the road, and never really came back. He worked construction in Alaska well before he was legally allowed to do so, then

returned to California, still a teenager, and joined the circus.

‘It wasn’t like I ran away to the circus. I had some friends, some chums whose mother had married a ring master. It was the early American circus where they do parades through the towns with all the animals, the horses, and the elephants, and the tigers. And I think you got 50 bucks a week, and they fed you. And yeah, so that was on and off for a couple of years, and that as an amazing experience, obviously. I didn’t have any [circus] skills at all, but I had the skills from Alaska, so I was tying knots, hammering big bloody spikes in the ground for the big marquees. They had a three- ring circus, so you’d have three or four people on sledgehammers in time, “Ting! Ting! Ting!” And if you

fell out of rhythm then the hammers would hitch up and immediately break. And I did some wild jobs. I used to put a sheet over my head and play a drum for a snake charmer, a woman who used to do belly dancing with snakes around her.’

Nigel would end up trading one life on the road for another. He became a roadie, and became exposed not only to the type of music that would define him, but also the instrument.

‘When the circus was down, when the trend of circuses was against it, and people started saying this is cruel to animals and stuff, the circus became more involved in show jumping and horses and stuff, so there was less work for me to do. So, some of us went and started getting jobs roadieing for bands, which is where I got my real hands-on. And I remember a very popular band in the area I was roadieing, and one time I was tuning a guy’s guitar and I was playing

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it and he heard me and he was like: “Oh man, I think you’re better than me, you’re fired.” And that’s sort of the end of my roadieing.

‘It’s a common thing, you know. There’s a real hidden art there, and you have to deal with musicians’ personalities. Unless they’ve been a roadie themselves they don’t appreciate it. I couldn’t imagine doing that to someone myself. When I had my own roadies I treated them like mates.’

Nigel was still a teenager at the time, and had never really played the guitar before. ‘I had romanced with it, visualised it. But the only time I had ever touched a guitar it was in such a bad state that you couldn’t pass the third fret without pliers—thinking that’s what guitars are. It wasn’t until I touched an electric guitar that I thought, That’s easy, I can do that.

‘I think about 14 or 15 is perfect [for starting guitar]. think that your tastes in a lot of things, in music, romance, and arts, a lot of it gets crystalised during that time—unless you intentionally go out and try to rob mere aspects of the “good ol’ music”, you know —”Oh yeah, I wanna hear those old Stones songs,” or something. I don’t have that in music, I’m not sentimental about music. A lot of people are.’

The birth of Nigel Gavin the guitarist occurred at the same time as he entered his ‘dark place’, and you could argue that from then on he would always be a musician whose thought and emotion was as vital as his technique.

‘So I was roadieing for bands and then getting hands-on experience and playing, and eventually started playing myself, playing around—this was still California. It was a dark place, I call it the cocaine years. I was getting high and wearing bad clothes and had bad hair, bad drugs, combined with a bad relationship.

‘I just threw my hands up in horror and said, No-one seems to love music—they love to be seen playing music, but I couldn’t find anyone who loved music. So that’s when I was either going to jump out the window, or do something different. And that’s when I found out that I had NZ citizenship if I wanted it.’

There wouldn’t be many immigrants to NZ who moved here because of a lack of love of music—but there would be plenty who did so because of a girl. And, as it turns out, this was the real cause of Nigel’s dark place.

‘There was a girl I adored who didn’t wanna know about it—that was kind of the first heartbreak, you might say. Your heart doesn’t open until it’s broken the first time. You can quote me on that—that did sound good.

‘So, what I thought was, I saw a certain beauty in life, but no-one seemed to share it with me, so I thought there was something wrong with me maybe. Teenagers, you know,

angst. I’m not the kind of person to want to kill myself, but if I was that would have been an early goodbye—the first heartbreak combined with love of music and not being able to connect with anyone musically. I couldn’t play horse shit, but that’s another thing. I didn’t know how to practise yet. I couldn’t play consistently. There were moments of brilliance but until you learn how to practise ... If you practise sloppy you’ll play sloppy.

‘That also brings out the meaning of life, you know? When you reach the bottom you go, Well what’s it all about? Most people have it mid-life, I had it as a teenager. My parents had broken up, my father was living in Japan, and my mother was living in California. They had different partners—I was pretty mature so I’d just live alone and flat and things. My older brother had already come to NZ, and my younger brother was living with my father. So yeah, it was pretty much like life said, Stop now, you know? All the stuff that you really like you can’t have it, so what’s gonna happen? What’s the meaning of life?’

Nigel would visit NZ a couple of times before finally moving here in 1991, eventually making his home in Mt Eden, among a community of gifted musicians who aren’t necessarily as well-known as they should be.

Among those who do know, Nigel is a musical genius, a guitarist whose ability goes beyond his playing. He’s one of those artists who can bring an audience into a moment they never knew existed, a moment of pure beauty, where conventions have been stripped back and familiar riffs have been set aside, so there is only the player, the listener, and the brand new expression.

‘It’s about listening,’ Nigel says, explaining that gift. ‘But this time it’s sort of listening inside. One of the things we used to say teaching is that first you develop a relationship with the instrument, then you develop a relationship with music, but then you have to develop a relationship with yourself.

‘Whatever you’re passionate about brings you to the moment, even if you don’t think it. Sports brings you to the moment. Romance, love brings you to the moment. Creating, adventure sports, bungee jumping, in the moment. I have this underlying feeling that even if people don’t admit to it, it’s a spiritual thing, that all our endeavours try to bring us to that moment, and that place, the ‘be here now’, instead of always thinking forward and back.

‘There’s a great quote by Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist. He said: “If you’ve got a great instrument, and you’ve got great music, the best thing you can do is get out of the way let the two connect.”

It’s a sentiment Nigel has clearly taken to heart. And head. And hands. /DW

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