Still, he prefers live performance to digital information. He quotes Vladimir Horowitz, calling recording “the postcard of the event,” and takes it further: “When McLuhan said ‘The medium is the message,’ younger people think it was an endorsement, not a warning. The cell phone phenomenon is a perfect example. It gets people off the meditative attention you need to be creative.”
Eddie Diehl (photo by Catherine Sebastian)
And thus his appearance, for the fourth year in a row, at the Woodstock Invitational Luthiers’ Showcase at just after noon, 12:45 p.m., on Saturday, October 26 at the Bearsville Theater with bassist Lou Pappas, qualifies as a genuine event. Last couple of years you’d look around the room when he played and see it filled with musicians; the whispers have gotten around.
“I’m not really a luthier; I’m primarily a restoration artist,” says Diehl, who’s now 77. “Since I play a D’Angelico, they made an exception for that, because I’m well-known as a rebuilder in the area.” A selection of guitars by John D’Angelico and Jimmy D’Aquisto, on loan from Rudy Pensa, will be featured at the Showcase this Saturday and Sunday, October 26 and 27, which among its displays has room for a startling array of fine hollow-wood stringed instruments including classical, flattop, archtop jazz, resonators and more.
“I do major restoration on expensive instruments,” Diehl says of how he makes his living. “It’s all grapevine. I’m at the mercy of – how is it? – ‘the kindness of strangers.’ I’ve learned to live on almost nothing and live by my wits for years. I have a fairly low overhead. I can go for weeks without any business, then get real busy. There’s no Internet, no website. Some people say I should; some say I’m better off without it.”
Baker Rorick, the producer of the Showcase, attests to the quality of the work. “(John) Sebastian, (Happy) Traum, Jimmy Vivino won’t let anyone else work on their guitars. In the City, the same work would cost you twice as much, by someone who was trained by Eddie Diehl.”
In his basic bio, he was born “Eddie P. Diehl, Jr. in Staten Island on June 16, 1936. Was raised surrounded by music. My mother played piano, my father ukulele. There was ample influence from classical, pop and jazz.” He was on the Ted Mack radio show at age 15, moved to Manhattan in 1956 and “played with the Nat Cole sing-alike Robert Harvel in ‘59. Others were Jack McDuff, Slide Hampton, Gloria Coleman, Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte. Later a short stint with Vic Damone. Then freelancing in New York with Bu Pleasant and Al Haig. Last steady work in the ‘70s was with the Billy Gardner Trio.”
Bart Thrall of Uptown Movies did an hourlong film on Diehl, he responds on YouTube to commenters who heard Diehl play, but wondered, how could we have missed someone who plays so beautifully? “You haven’t heard of him for two reasons: One is that the music business ‘never picked up on him.’ And second, he sometimes burned his bridges after he got an opportunity. His temper got in his way. These days he has mellowed and works in his shop. He says he is semi-retired. He has maybe three gigs a year. They are always packed. Old School players are hard to come by.”
“Every year Eddie and Lou Pappas come and do a set,” says Rorick. “It’s been one of the high points of the Luthiers’ concerts. He’s a master of trad/post-bebop swing, and one of our local living legends. Last year’s set, his brother had just passed and he dedicated the set to him, and he just burned, he smoked.”
Diehl cites an old African proverb: “‘One is born, one dies, the land increases.’ That’s the thing about jazz…I’m one of the people who think the word ‘race’ should have been eliminated a long time ago. There’s ethnicity and color, but there’s only one race: the human race.”
Onstage, with his beautiful 1934 D’Angelico archtop guitar, with the same Traynor amp that he has had for 40 years, he silkily spins out tales with no words, yet they’re clearly articulated stories.
“When I caught the tail end of the real jazz thing, after you’re done playing, you’re back down on the floor. The celebrity thing didn’t mean shit. Now people want to be famous just to be famous. The medium is more important than the actual message. I realized back then that I was going to find out stuff I wasn’t to learn in school.”
