Strung Together: Virtuoso Tim Sparks Intertwines Musical Cultures

By Tom Johnson
Contributing Writer

    To find a thriving acoustic music scene, a fan merely needs look all over the state of Minnesota.  Whether it is here in the Fargo/Moorhead area, Minneapolis or Duluth, there are scores of talented musicians playing acoustic music. And while most people might overlook the small town of Frazee, Minnesota during their search for great musical talent, in doing so they would be overlooking one of Minnesota’s great musical assets in Tim Sparks.

    Sparks is a guitar player who has been playing music professionally for over thirty years. Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at an early age Sparks taught himself the music that he heard around him, like traditional roots music, country blues and gospel, which is the subject of his latest CD Sidewalk Blues.

    At the age of 18, he started his journey on the road as a traveling musician, playing guitar in a funk band during the pre-disco era.

    “Everyone in the clubs wore big fedoras, pastel colored clothes, feather boas, and high-heeled boots, and that’s what the guys were wearing,” he said.

    After traveling around the country, he landed in Minneapolis. 

    “I really liked the scene in Minneapolis because the West Bank was such a cool music scene in the 70s,” he said.

    After years of playing five to six nights a week with multiple groups, Sparks decided to concentrate on solo acoustic guitar. From there he started to discover his love of complex music and the art of translating it to solo guitar arrangements. 

    “I’ve always wanted to make music that is a synthesis of different streams of music that you can translate to solo guitar,” he revealed.

    His first big musical project was Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite for solo acoustic guitar, which earned Sparks the National Finger Style Guitar Championship in Winfield, Kansas in 1993.

    Then, while on a trip abroad, Sparks found a love for European and Mediterranean styles of music, particularly the music of the Balkans. In 1997, he decided to relocate to Frazee to work completely on his solo guitar arrangements.  “When I moved up to Frazee, I only wanted to concentrate on arranging and recording,” he recalled. It was during this time that he recorded the albums Guitar Bazaar (1997) and One String Leads to Another (1999) off the Acoustic music label.

    On Sparks’ album Guitar Bazaar he recorded “Romanian Folk Dances,” a composition by Hungarian composer and early-20th century pianist Bela Bartok. The recording of that arrangement got the attention of John Zorn, a legendary avant-garde saxophonist and composer who also is the founder of his own label, Tzadik Records, out of New York. 

    This led Sparks to work on recording and arranging traditional Jewish melodies and original Jewish music on guitar, which has kept him busy. “I’ve done three albums under my name and five albums total for Tzadik in the last 10 years,” he said. The last was an album called Masada Guitars, which featured interpretations of John Zorn’s compositions and featured the talents of Sparks and two other cutting-edge guitarists, Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot.

    Sparks’ new album is a collection of songs of his youth. “After Masada Guitars I wanted to revisit roots music,” he said. The songs on Sidewalk Blues are tunes that Sparks has always had in his repertoire and now feels that he is at a place that he can arrange them for guitar and do them justice. 

    “This record is something I’ve always wanted to make, but I needed the hindsight of thirty years to work on guitar to complete it,” he said. “I started playing some of these songs in the early 70s, but they were simpler arrangements… after years of playing them, I reached a point where I realized I had a record here and that I had good arrangements of these songs.”

    The album, Sidewalk Blues, is full of very complex guitar arrangements of 1920s American music. Some of the arrangements are so complex—like in the case of his arrangement of Louis Armstrong’s “Potato head Blues”—he has transcribed the melody, solos, accompaniment, and the bass line into one arrangement, using only five fingers and the six strings of a guitar. 

    In his arranging of this album he feels that it has made him be more of a creative guitar player. “If you are composing on the guitar and you ever run into a road block, you can write around it,” he said. “But if you write only what you can play, it doesn’t force you to learn new things.”

    The song selection in the album is a varied compilation of forgotten American musical gems. It weaves from one beautiful, well-thought arrangement to another. Whether it is country blues guitar, stride piano arrangements, work songs from the field, or gospel music from the churches, all are translated onto six strings.  Sparks believes that “there is a cultural ecology just like there is a natural ecology, and when you have species disappearing they are gone forever. Human culture is a fragile thing, and I am just trying to keep it alive because it is an important part of life.”

    With this album and a new one soon to be released for the Tzadik label, Sparks is constantly staying busy and pushing the envelope of advanced solo guitar arrangements. He will be having a CD release party here in Fargo at the Ecce Gallery on May 7 at 6:15 p.m.  With regard to the release party Sparks said, “I think it is going to be a great concert because I am to be playing from two bodies of work that I have been working on over the past few years.”

    There is going to be limited seating for the show, so make sure to get your tickets early on. You can also catch Tim here in town on May 2 at the Plains Art Museum for the Art of Guitar Gala at 8 p.m., or this summer at 10,000 Lakes Festival in Detroit Lakes. To learn more about Tim Sparks’ music and upcoming shows, go to his website at Timsparks.com or Myspace.com/timsparks.

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INFO:

Who: Tim Sparks
When: Thurs, May 7, 6:15 p.m
Where: Ecce Gallery
Cost: $15 cover/ $10 students

When: Sat, May 2, 8pm
Where: Art of Guitar Gala—Plains Art Museum
Cost: $90