Guitarist Michael Hedges Goes Heavy Mental

“I kind of cringe when reviewers call what I do ‘wind chime music,’ before they’ve ever heard me,” said guitarist Michael Hedges. One of the brightest stars in the Windham Hill firmament, Hedges didn’t seem really annoyed, just eager to separate himself from the company’s well-known New Age identification.

In a phone conversation from San Francisco earlier this week, Hedges was quick to make clear that his current tour with acoustic guitar legend Leo Kottke (which includes a performance at the Universal Amphitheatre tonight) “is definitely not a Windham Hill tour. It’s a Leo Kottke-Michael Hedges tour. As a matter of fact, we were thinking of calling it ‘Strings of Steel,’ to give it a little macho touch. But Leo didn’t go for it, because he thought it would be too much work.”

Even a brief hearing of Hedges’ five recordings soon explains his dissatisfaction with the New Age labeling. Nothing in Hedges’ kaleidoscopic collection of snaps, taps, bangs and strums is remotely like wind chime music.

Hedges has found the association with Kottke especially interesting. “It’s a cool combination,” he said. “Leo was the first guy I heard who really did original stuff on the steel string guitar. But while he’s sort of rooted in tradition, I guess I’m a little more out on the edge.

Born in Enid, Okla., Hedges was playing piano, cello, clarinet and flute by the time he was in high school. Flute and composition studies at Phillips University and the Interlochen Music Camp led to a degree in composition from the prestigious Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.

“It’s true that I’ve had a pretty extensive education as a composer,” he explained, “but I like to think that my inspiration precedes my education. Even so, I do think in compositional terms, and I like to use what I’ve learned. I’ve listened a lot to atonal music, and even though the stuff I’ve recorded for Windham Hill has been pretty much in tonal keys, my head has been in another place, and I think that other place comes through a little bit in my music, too.

“When I first heard Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto, for example, in which he uses the string section, muted, playing parallel fifths in all kinds of different motion, it really impressed me. I took my guitar, tuned my strings in fifths and tried my variation of the same thing. So I guess you can call that a direct rip-off.”

But Hedges’ interests range in other directions, as well. On the current tour, he’s been opening his program with the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” in a style he whimsically refers to as “thrash acoustic.”

“I started doing ‘Pinball Wizard’ as an opener,” he chuckled, “just to dispel any notion that I might be a natural, New Age kind of guy. It’s done in a new sort of style for me--one that includes melody, but which has a Richie Havens kind of strumma, strumma, strumma sound.

“I go from ‘Pinball’ into another tune, ‘Ritual Dance,’ which is also a hard strumming tune, and, somehow, the term thrash acoustic felt like the right description. Otherwise, I guess, I could just call it heavy mental. “

Hedges’ post-tour plans call for a new recording, which he plans as an extension of “Aerial Boundaries,” his Grammy-nominated second recording. “And then,” he said, “I want to make a rock recording. I’ve got a studio full of synthesizers and stuff, and I really want to have fun with it.”

Typically, Hedges alluded to other, even more iconoclastic plans. His vision, like his music, bristles with an overflowing multiplicity of ideas.

“I do sometimes feel a little fragmented about the future,” he said, “because I’m not sure where it’s going to lead me. But I’ve got a good feeling about my listeners, now, and I think they understand that I don’t change just to be different, but just to keep myself from getting bored.

“My teacher, Pat Martino, has a way of putting it that makes a lot of sense to me. He says it’s like I’m living in this big house and it’s filled with a lot of rooms I want to explore.”