Copyright © 2003, Hector Pimentel Music Guitarist.
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Portrait of a Guitarist By Robert Masterson Excerpted
from: On a South Broadway Street in Albuquerque, a neighborhood known for its population of transients, crack-heads, and streetwalkers, sits a charming Victorian house, the home of guitarist Hector Pimentel. Pimentel is found in the living room playing with his accompanist, Raphael Columbía, who has recently emigrated from Cuba. The room is a jumble of antiques and computers, amplifiers and Japanese artwork, flowers, family photographs, music awards, santos and kachinas. Pimentel is dressed entirely in black, his eyes half-closed and focused on a distant place created by the gentle tones pouring from his gleaming, richly worked guitar. His right hand, the hand that caresses the strings to draw forth those tones, is smooth with long fingers and long, sharpened and lacquered fingernails. His left hand was rough and callused, its nails cut close and dull to the very quick. Still bleary from the previous night’s red-eye from Las Vegas (Nevada, not New Mexico), he slides easily into a chair to begin the interview. "What you need to understand," he says in his soft, richly accented voice, "is my faith in God, in my family, and in my music." Born into the famous family of guitar makers, the oldest of 12 children, Pimentel grew up surrounded by guitars. "I started playing when I was eight years old, really even earlier than that, and it is all I have wanted to do and it’s all I have done since. I remember being a little boy and practicing in my father’s garage workshop while he was creating an instrument and being surrounded by the beautiful wood, the sight of him shaping the wood and the light and the beautiful odors of the wood and the varnish and listening to the beautiful sounds of the chords we had made together." Those beginnings led to rigorous study with teachers such as Hector Garcia of Havana, Bob Brown and Earl Gallegos of Albuquerque, and Manuel Lopez Ramos of Mexico City. Originally a classical purist modeled after the great Segovia, the young Pimentel dedicated himself to capturing the clean, precise technique his art and his family demanded. His repertoire focused exclusively on the masterworks. It was not, he says, "a normal childhood." "It has been a rough life and a nice life," Pimentel says. "I’ve traveled all over the U.S. and the world. It is a humbling experience." He has performed for audiences composed of such luminaries as Robin Williams, Julio Iglesias, the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Vice President Gore and President Clinton. Not surprisingly, his guitars have been crafted by his father. "To be honest, yes, I have played other guitars," he says. "But it’s not the same, it’s really no good. The soul of the instrument does not really come through unless it is one of my father’s guitars." On the head-piece of the instrument he currently plays, a brilliant red heart has been inlaid, and over the heart is a golden ribbon emblazoned with the name Infañia. It is his daughter’s name, and the name of the song he wrote that won the 1994 Mic-Line Award for Best Instrumental.
As he has matured, Pimentel has broadened the range of influences from which he draws. He now lists Chet Atkins, the Gypsy Kings, the legendary Los Indios de Tavajaras, and the legendary rockers of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, as well as Mozart, Bach, and Chopin as influences. "I was very narrow-minded before. But now I have changed my way of thinking about the music," he says. "I have to remember that when it was written, classical music was popular music. What was rock ‘n roll then is classic rock now. What is classic rock now will someday be classical. That’s what I am doing now with the classical guitar; I’m changing the style of the music. I’m using the style of the Renaissance, the Baroque period, the Romantic period and playing the music of 30 years ago." Despite criticism from formalists and purists and his father (who hated it when his young son first plugged into an electric amplifier), Pimentel has nonetheless seen his first experiments outside the rigid boundaries of classical guitar become accepted by a wider audience…. When asked about where his vision will lead him, what kind of legacy he will leave behind, Pimentel is quick to respond. "I would like people to remember me as a revolutionary, a guitar revolutionary."
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