No Strings Attached for Guitarist Bensusan : Guitarist Bensusan Hits L.A. With No Strings Attached

What can you say about a performer whose first recording, released when he was 17, won a French Grand Prix du Disque? For guitarist Pierre Bensusan, a French Algerian with remarkably diverse musical roots, the prize helped launch a 15-year career of performances in every part of the world.

Tonight, at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, Bensusan will make one of his annual Los Angeles-area appearances. Playing solo this time out, his program will be a typically eclectic collection of mostly original pieces ranging from jazz-based swing and Irish melodies to brisk sambas and exotic North African rhythms. In a period in which “World of Music” has become a new category, Bensusan is one of its true veterans. “I am touched by the fact that I seem to be included in it,” he said last week in a phone conversation from a tour stop in Mississippi. “But I think some of my strengths are stronger than others. For instance, I do not feel I am a very strong jazz musician.”

Listeners who have heard his stunning variations on “Night in Tunisia” have felt otherwise. And his reviews, which are generally effusive about his ability to focus the many colorful global aspects of his style into his improvisations, suggest that his personal evaluation of his jazz skills may be a bit too modest.

“No, it’s true,” he protested. I haven’t worked at skills and improvisation hard enough to do it as well as I like. But I love jazz, and I hope to do it better and make it a richer part of my style.”

Born in what was then French Algeria, Bensusan and his family moved to Paris after the Algerian war of independence, when he was 4. “Although I am a Jew,” he explained, “my background is from an Arabic country, and this has had as much of an effect on my music as the fact that I am also French.”

Add to that the fact that Bensusan is remarkably receptive to the sights and sounds of a world he often views with philosophical whimsy. His pieces--many of which reflect the diversity of his travels--have titles like “Nice Feeling” (with a pun on the city in which he lived for several years), “Santa Monica,” “Montsegur” (in the high Pyrenees mountains) and “Milles Vallees.”

Along the way, Bensusan also has found time--years, actually--to put together a remarkably personal instructional manual titled “The Guitar Book.” A kind of Zen master approach to guitar playing, the volume is a fascinating testimony to his view of music-making as a total, full-life experience.

It was a long time in the works. “The first four years I worked on it,” he said, “I forgot about almost everything else--about reading, about writing music. Then, for the next two years, it became easier when my wife worked on it with me. She is a dancer and choreographer, and she has given me a lot of very important ways of explaining what I do and how I do it.”

The book is filled with a diverse compendium of ideas, exercises, philosophical fragments and the like. Bensusan provides chord charts to many of his pieces, he suggests finger-strengthening methods, and throws in, for good measure, the recipes for many of his favorite dishes.

“I think it may be a patchwork, in some ways,” he explained, “because it has so many things in it, but that was the only way I could do it.”

With his book selling at a steady, comfortable rate, a newly reissued album, “Solilai,” on CBS Masterworks, and an ever-beckoning string of concerts on the horizon, things are going well for Bensusan. Although high financial costs have obliged him to abandon, for the moment, the luxury of traveling with a group, few of his worldwide collection of fans object to hearing his playing and singing in the Pristine purity of a solo performance.

Acknowledging that it’s been a long, strange, but endlessly colorful trip since he won the Grand Prix 15 years ago, Bensusan views the pragmatic worries of his continuing career with a practicality that has helped make him one of the brightest stars of world music.

“I spend half of my life touring and the other half doing other things,” he explained. “There is much to be done, and it is not all playing music. I have no manager to coordinate things for me, and that’s the way I want it to be.

“Why? It’s the way I look at things. I feel that if you are not able to be a slave for yourself, don’t expect anyone else to be one for you--so I do it all myself.”