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Chasing the light

Last wednesday I woke up to a shocking news. As I just opened my eyes, I heard FB msg alert on my phone. A friend of mine was messaging me 6 am in the morning:

“Hey Mahyar, I was so sorry to hear Paco de Lucia died. I was planning to see him…” What?!!!! Paco died?!!! I jumped out of my bed to open the news on the laptop… couldn’t believe my eyes.. I suddenly felt empty and broken.. A mix of headache, dizziness and throat clenching pain..

It is hard for someone who has not experienced this situation  to understand why I from Iran may be in love with a 66 year old man from Spain who doesn’t know me and for all I know could have had strange habits, and little care for my love, if he ever knew me. But I was in love.  For me Paco was the beacon of perfection.. The unreachable..  The unbeatable. The god.

Like many of his admirers, Paco was one of the reasons I fell in love with the guitar and certainly the reason that I love flamenco. When I was a young boy learning guitar, I naively aimed to reach his famous ‘picado’ speed. As a student, I remember one year that I spent my invaluable “Norouz” holiday of 13 days sitting in my room and practicing day and night, while everyone else was having a good time vacationing. Needless to say I failed to reach his speed, but perhaps I learned to appreciate that great things cannot be achieved in a matter of days. It was a humbling experience. What I did to mitigate my pain was to write a computer program that played Paco’s melody faster than Paco. The melody sounded really bad on the computer.

As a newbie, Paco’s magic to me was his unbeatable speed. But, as I grew up and matured, I learned more about music and grew further appreciation for his later works. Those that did not only have a killer technique but also complex harmony, rhythm and musicality.  But, aside from this appreciation, Paco had become like family to me: I grew up with his music and appreciate it differently at different stages of maturing just the same way that one appreciates parents and what they do for them differently at different stages of  life.

His death felt horrible. But I am glad that he died relatively young and functioning so that the aging didn’t have a chance to make him less than perfect. In a way his early death was the only way to immortalize his mastery over the guitar.