Leo Kottke is a veteran musician with a distinct personal style on his instrument and particular ties to Milwaukee. UW-Milwaukee sponsors the Leo Kottke Guitar Workshop every summer, and the guitarist’s approach playing inspired an unusual curricular track at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts music department.
Kottke has been playing in Milwaukee for as long as anyone can remember—longer in fact than he can remember. “I don’t,” he answers when asked if he can recall his first time in town. “Would have been a long time ago, I think.”
But he does recall speaking at the Guitar Workshop on three occasions. “To everyone’s dismay, I do like to talk,” says the laconic guitarist. His instrument does most of the communicating during his solo concerts, but he is also known for his dry self-deprecation and for spinning amusing tales between songs. His relations with UWM began with a fan on the faculty, John Stropes, the Peck School’s director of guitar studies. “He notates my stuff and that’s how it started,” Kottke explains. “He also created—there were others involved of course, but I only know John—the first BA for finger-style guitar. Unique in academia.” Kottke also received an honorary doctorate in music from UWM.
As the name suggests, finger-style means literally plucking the guitar strings with fingers or picks attached to the fingers, rather than plucking individual notes with a single pick. But finger-style is especially associated with the folk-blues-country playing traditions that inform much of Kottke’s work.
“Oh, it chose me,” Kottke says of the guitar. “I know that because I played violin, then trombone. I loved them. But they were goofy marriages. The guitar is some kind of surprise, all the time. It’s home.”
He had a brief stint in a ’60s garage band. “I played in The Blackwells for one night at the Domino bar in St. Cloud, Minn.” he says. “The Blackwells fired me the next morning—not the next day, the next morning!” From there it was on to the folk revival scene at a Minneapolis coffeehouse called The Scholar, the place where, a few years earlier, an unknown called Bob Dylan played his first gigs. “It was bad, meaning I was,” Kottke recounts. “There were some good spots, but it takes time to learn performance, and The Scholar gave me that.”
Kottke’s music evades easy pigeonholing. His roots may be in the ’60s folk scene, but while most guitarists of that ilk were content to carry a tune, the model of great classical music guitarists with astonishing prowess stood before him. Nowadays, his CDs can sometimes be found in the classical bins of record stores, but Kottke’s repertoire has little to do with Andres Segovia or John Williams. Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he was sometimes heard on freeform FM rock radio, but aside from a magisterial rendition of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” and recordings made in the ’00s with Phish’s Mike Gordon, the links to rock in Kottke’s music are only vestigial roots in the blues.
Ranked as one of the 100 greatest guitarists by Rolling Stone, John Fahey was the artist who provided Kottke with a template for unconventional tunings, a deft hand at maintaining simultaneous bass and lead lines and the possibility of matching the skill set of a Segovia with a repertoire compounded from the roots of folk, blues, ragtime, country and bluegrass juiced by exposure to thorny modernist composers. Think Béla Bartók with Kansas City blues syncopation.
“John gave me my whole working life,” Kottke says of his brilliantly idiosyncratic if not eccentric mentor. “And he was my friend, whoever he was. Zoot Simms said Stan Getz was a great bunch of guys; there was only one John, but he was elusive.”
Kottke’s own story involves overcoming partial hearing loss at a young age and, in the 1980s, tendinitis aggravated by his vigorous style of guitar playing. “There’s no thought to these musical things,” he says when asked if those maladies made him wonder whether he should continue to pursue music.
For him, music “isn’t a deliberate endeavor—and it’s hardly an endeavor. And it’s not passion, I detest that word, leave that one to Elmer Fudd. But it’s probably some kind of nuts. Something like obsession.”
Leo Kottke performs at 8 p.m., June 9 at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts’ Wilson Theater at Vogel Hall, 123 E. State St. Shana Morrison will open the show.
