This Guitarist Changed Everything, But Nobody Admits It.

Who's the most capable  classical guitarist of all time? What a small question to ask. But apparently this is what everyone really  wants to know, so let's just roll with it. Obviously that question is  not a good one to start with. Music is not sports and it's all  about preference and taste and you shouldn't even try to approach it like this. And anyway, it's this guy. Not Bream, not Segovia, not Yepes. This is Kazuhito Yamashita and honestly no one at the top of these Hall of Fame lists  can

match this man's raw potential. It's not even close and fairly obvious too. Yamashita easily has one of the strongest  claims to be classical guitar's Paganini. Our Franz Liszt, a dominant virtuoso that  reshapes their instrument for generations. But it seems he didn't fully get to  be that yet, at least in the West. Especially in America he is pretty much an enigma. At best a figure of controversy and a lot of  people actually know fairly little about him. So who is he? What makes him relevant

and why the  heck do we not listen to him a lot more? Before you head into the comments,  let's examine the evidence. There is actually a lot to learn from  Yamashita, even if you prefer other guitarists. I think there is somebody  capable of matching his skills. Someone you probably weren't  thinking of, so stay tuned. Don't forget to like and subscribe  if you enjoy these videos. The 70s. The classical guitar had carved  its niche in Europe and North America. It was finally established in cons

ervatories. Concerts were packed, there were prestigious  festivals and celebrated competitions. The excellence of Japanese guitarists was  not entirely unknown in the Western world. Still no one was prepared  for what was about to happen. In 1977 Kazuhito Yamashita took  the European scene by storm. He was only 16 years old. He signed up for several of the most  prestigious competitions that year. And this is still baffling to this day. He dominated them, securing  the grand prize in all of the

m. In the eyes of every single jury,  this teenager without even a shred of institutional backing bested an entire  generation of established guitar players, many of whom learned from the  world's most celebrated maestros. It was just the beginning. Yamashita's subsequent achievements etched  his name permanently into guitar history. One of the most significant events  was his transcription and performance of Modest Mussorgsky's pictures at an exhibition. To put it mildly, even the  thought of a

dapting this dense, multi-layered piano suite to the solo guitar  was considered just absolutely ridiculous. A little pop culture comparison? Imagine a celebrated, dense, multi-layered book series being adapted to a clearly inferior  storytelling medium such as "the movies". That would be just unthinkable, wouldn't it? The classical guitar world had  its Peter Jackson moment in the early 80s. Let's just read one of the  early reactions to Yamashita's release. Yamashita hasn't just learned  how t

o play the guitar well. He seems to have taught the instrument how to do some things it's never had the  smallest notion of doing before. He gives you the distinct impression that he has  no holes, none at all, in his technique anywhere. I have never heard such speed, such control. Yamashita writes his own rules. It remains to be seen whether there's anybody  else on the face of the earth who can follow them. Bold words. The 1980 recording and edition of the  pictures was received with amazement

, but also with utter disbelief and skepticism. Nobody could really explain what was happening. The music went far beyond what was  considered possible on the instrument. We're going to base our analysis mostly on the famous live performance at the  1984 Toronto Guitar Festival. If you haven't yet, it's a must-watch. It's just an amateur tape, but the  most recent digitization is clear enough to observe everything that's happening. Yamashita had been performing the suite in  concerts already for

four years at that point, but for many North Americans, this  was the first time they saw him live. Anticipation was sky high. The guitar elite was in the audience  and everybody was there to find out if he was actually able to perform the impossible. Turns out he was. Compared to the well-known players at the time, Yamashita commanded complete  technical superiority. There's no doubt about this. Yamashita was a professional guitar player, but he  wasn't the only one who was able to play faster

, cleaner, and with a significantly  higher mechanical efficiency. Nobody really contends that  he was able to play faster, cleaner, and with a significantly  higher mechanical efficiency. However, even the craziest technique  is merely a tool for expression. And just playing fast and loud does  not make you a mature musician. This is really important and  people who have Yamashita pegged as a mere technician are missing the point. He used his almost limitless  manual abilities to perform not on

ly never-before-heard virtuosic feats,  but with these techniques he also pushed the latitude of musical expression on the  guitar into completely uncharted territory. He had unprecedented dynamic contrasts,  the most diverse tone colors and eclectic phrasing combined with extreme drive, intense  theatrics, and a seemingly endless stamina. It's really the fullest range there, from the smallest sensitivity  to the most violent outbursts. And somewhere in between all of  that, he is also able to j

ust groove. In a traditional, educational setting, musicians  first acquire a predetermined set of musical tools and solutions, and then set out to find, compose,  or transcribe pieces that fit these requirements. Yamashita, however, went full-on mind-over-matter  and reversed the usual transcription process. He set out from the source material  and developed entirely novel skills and techniques to create a true one-man  orchestra version of the original. Yamashita had more potential in his pink

y finger  than some other players in their entire hand. This is not even a metaphor, literally. Let's have a look at some of these  phenomenal techniques in detail. The first thing you notice when  watching Yamashita play is his complete freedom and fluidity in all  parameters, technical and musical. His entire body, every angle and lever,  can shift in fractions of a second. This is at least partially inspired by the fluid  transitions of classical Japanese noh theatre. When he's playing, Yamas

hita's nearly  always in this transitory mode. His finger independence and  coordination are basically perfect. He can use any combination of digits,  always perfectly synchronized at any speed. The idea behind this is simple in  principle, but very difficult in execution. By using additional fingers in, for example, a  scale, the individual fingers can move slower, but it's exponentially more effort to coordinate. Of course, Yamashita is by no means the  first or only player to notice this. Wha

t makes his approach truly  outstanding is him freely combining these advanced concepts all of the time. Playing a sixteenth scale at 140 bpm is impressive. Playing two scales at that speed concurrently,  one of them spaced in octaves, that's madness. Yamashita pulls it off seemingly with ease. Ever heard someone mimic an entire  balalaika ensemble on one guitar? A trill in first position shifted into a chord in tenth position and back so fast you  don't even notice the interruption. A well-main

tained melodic line walking  straight through violent rasgueados. Dedillo-tremolo is the rapid alternating  of one finger on one string, a technique perfected by flamenco masters and it's  quite challenging to stay fast and even. Yamashita's dedillo-tremolo would be  pretty praiseworthy on its own. His transcription, however, requires it to be done concurrently with three-part  harmonies and artificial harmonics. So when needed, he switches from index  finger dedillo to pinky finger dedillo on t

he fly, without interrupting the line while maintaining  full control over the additional voices. If it wouldn't be enough, on top of that,  throughout the entire 33-minute performance, he continuously and actively  monitors the tuning and intonation. He is flawlessly adjusting even minute deviations on the fly and even changing notes within  fractions of a second between movements. Every technical solution is tailored 100% to  an expressive intent or orchestration idea. He knows and understands

the  source material intimately. No two sections are approached the  same and he does not compromise. His transcriptions are incredibly meticulous. They're written with highly  detailed performance instructions, which is kind of funny because for almost  anybody else they're basically unplayable. In the sheet music, he even often  delineates the exact position and angle of the right hand string attack  to achieve a particular tone color. When there are two notes to be played  in that register a

t the same time, he will adjust the shape of his right hand  to maintain absolute tonal consistency. His attention to detail is immense  and let's not forget: he wrote this as a teenager at the start of his career! No matter how long this video will end up being, it will fail miserably at conveying  the entire range of Yamashita's output. At the moment, he is somewhere around 100  published recordings, among classical musicians that makes him one of the more prolific  performers, no matter the i

nstrument. And he is still going strong at 63 years old,  so we can assume quite a bit more to come. Things permeate slowly in the  guitar world and reading through correspondence from the time, most guitarists initially were  just overwhelmed by Yamashita's appearance. Some immediately feared their own career was getting evaporated by this  new and foreign phenomenon. He tore down so many limits at once that  people didn't really know how to deal with it. After the dust settled, many guitarists

, especially in North America but also in  Europe, started to refute the newcomer. Critiques emerged that were as much about personal  taste as about genuine stylistic differences. Unfortunately, not all responses  were well intended or fair. Don't understand me wrong, I don't  subscribe to every single stylistic decision that Yamashita has made,  but that's really not the point. Even listening to a few minutes of  his vastly diverse and inventive playing makes it perfectly evident  to me that t

he common criticism of him being just shallow, flashy technique  without musicality is simply unfounded. Less is only more if you know what more is. For many artists, a crucial impulse is to  explore the edges of the playing ground. Only then you'll be able to  meaningfully set boundaries. In the 40 years since Toronto, only a few other players besides  Yamashita have performed the pictures. These interpretations are highly  impressive in their own right, even just being able to get through the 

material at all requires exceptional skill. Yet to this day, none of these attempts were able to reach the energy and expressive  latitude of Yamashita's version. A guitarist that could keep up with  that would be the needle in a haystack. You would need to find someone with similar  mental fortitude and physical skill from a similar nurturing environment with the  perfect blend of discipline and freedom. There actually is one. Less and less people are aware of this  nowadays, but there exists

a guitarist who not only shares Yamashita's upbringing,  but also his extraordinary musical talent. It's his sister, Naoko Yamashita. Most of the recordings I have of her are  duos with her brother and listening to these it is immediately evident that  they are pretty much evenly matched. She's not playing the second fiddle here. Unfortunately, sourcing her only solo album  was not possible in time for this video, but I discovered an exhilarating performance  of Tarrega's Gran Jota on this 1982

duo album. Naoko's playing is just as virtuosic, limitless,  dynamic and vibrant as her brother's. Regrettably, she retired from performing in 1992,  a decision attributed to her marriage. In the late 80s, Kazuhito Yamashita  began to shift his focus away from performing these groundbreaking but divisive  mega-transcriptions and focused on new challenges. With his ability to absorb  vast amounts of literature, in a short time he just kept  releasing album after album. Many stylistic choices he m

ade  in conventional repertoire were received as controversial and he kept being  criticized as being simply too much to bear. I'd recommend to just listen yourself,  instead of relying on me or anybody else. Probably his most easily agreeable  recordings are the chamber music ones, there are several that are just beautiful  with flute legend James Galway, and his Boccherini guitar quintets with the Tokyo String  Quartet are simply brilliant ensemble playing. Yamashita also plays an important  r

ole in expanding the repertoire by commissioning and performing heaps  of music by East Asian composers. A bunch of it, by the way,  works by his wife Keiko Fujiie. The talent keeps running in the next  generation and Yamashita's daughter Kanahi keeps doing absolutely stellar  things from her base here in Germany. And just recently she was featured in  the Gendai Guitar Magazine in Japan, where among lots of other things she  talks about how learning music was never really a strictly formalized 

process in the Yamashita household. When we're talking about Yamashita not being  recognized as much as you would expect, this is of course only really  true for the Western Hemisphere. The Yamashita family continues to  be massively important in Japan and they're surely one of the reasons  why guitar is doing so well over there. What can we actually learn from  this overpowering musician? Obviously trying to simply emulate Yamashita's  playing style is doomed to fail spectacularly. It'd be lik

e telling someone that the best way  to learn soccer is to just play like Messi. As far-fetched as it might seem, there are still lessons we can extract  from musicians of Yamashita's caliber. These are not insights entirely unique to  him, but he serves as a great case study. First, beyond stability there is control  and beyond control there is freedom. What do I mean by this? Mainstream pedagogy is somewhat aware of  this, but it's applied only selectively, such as with initially planting  and

preparing arpeggios. Later on, students are told to  let go to improve speed and sound. This logic can be applied  to basically any technique. Once you've gained control,  you don't need to stop there. Deliberately releasing control or redirecting it to a higher lever can open  up entirely new possibilities. This leads straight to the second insight. Technical orthodoxy masks inadequate teaching. If I were to stop the performance video,  at almost any point we would see something where Yamashit

a is blatantly  violating the textbook approach. To criticize him based on that is of course  laughable, his solutions obviously work for him. Insisting on a certain technique  or posture just for the sake of it, when an individual unorthodox solution works  better, is not helpful and often even destructive. More than any other instrument, playing the  guitar is influenced by individual physiology, from the nail shape all the way  to specific body proportions. The difficulty lies in accurately u

nderstanding which approach will work best  in a particular situation. But more often than not, players  and teachers will be able to work towards an optimal solution if  they're encouraged to experiment. Like with his own children, a lot of Yamashita's  guitar education was through indirect osmosis in his father's chamber music ensembles, rather  than by having explicit one-on-one lessons. Both this and the general distance from  the Western institutional approach led to him heavily relying on

finding his  own unique way, by working from the music towards the technique rather  than from technique to the music. This is fundamentally difficult, but it  is the definitive way to gain confident and independent musicianship  in any genre, to be honest. Consistently, the greatest  results arise from this mindset. Even at the most basic level, we should  strive first to have a musical intention in our mind, and then make our body and the  instrument approximated as best as we can. Practice pr

ecedes theory. Theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. Kazuhito Yamashita is the living proof for this. Tonebase will not prescribe a one-size-fits-all  solution to your guitar playing. Instead, it offers you a rich and diverse  repository of masterclasses, live streams, workbooks, and sheet music, as well  as a community of fellow guitarists. All to enable you to choose  your own musical adventure. Follow the link in the description to learn more. Let us know in the comments what your  thought

s and experiences with Yamashita are. Don't forget to subscribe and  like the video if you enjoyed it. Cheers! See you next time.