Guitar Duo Shifts Style, Becomes Worldbeaters

What a difference three years can make.

In 1989, Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah were just a couple of up-and-coming musicians, playing nylon-string acoustic guitars.

They had astounding technique and offered a divergent range of appealing Latin-based music, most often in jazz rooms and before small audiences. Their album sales were moderate at best.

“Back then, we were playing a very free-form style, very personal and yet complex, both compositionally and harmonically,” Strunz, 48, said from his home in Woodland Hills. “And while we’re proud of that music, and got a lot of support from other artists, it was very difficult to make a living from it.”

Today, the musicians are sitting near the top of the world beat market with their second hit album in a row.

“Americas,” an exotic, ear-pleasing collection released in May on Mesa Records, has been in the Top 5 of the Billboard magazine world beat charts for 19 weeks, and looks to eclipse the sales figures set by last year’s “Primal Magic.”

“Primal Magic,” Strunz and Farah’s sixth album and their Mesa debut, has sold more than 150,000 copies, held the No. 1 position on the Billboard world beat charts for 14 weeks, and was selected as the magazine’s “World Music Album of the Year.”

What brought about such a fortuitous change of affairs, which has enabled the artists to go from being a regionally known act to one with a national following?

Strunz, who with Farah appears Saturday at the Wadsworth Theatre, said the process began with a subtle but distinctive adjustment to their presentation that was first heard by the public at large on “Primal Magic.”

“We emphasized the rhythmic underpinning, employing the rumba, mambo and merengue, the Afro-Latin, Afro-Caribbean rhythms,” said Strunz, who started playing with Farah, 38, in 1980. “These are primal, eternal kinds of rhythms that we had been playing before,” but not to such exclusion. “This opened up a strong rhythmic groove that married well with the romantic, exciting guitar stuff we were doing.”

The rumba, the dance form that originated in Cuba, has proved an especially rich vein to mine for Strunz, the pair’s principal composer.

“It’s like the blues in jazz, the foundation of the Afro-Caribbean music,” he said. “It has great resiliency, has been around for a long time, and it has continued to evolve. I felt it was time to be part of new evolution of the rumba.”

When the duo--who have long been renowned for their exhilarating solo styles based on long, swirling runs and shorter, punchy ideas--and their band played a dance at the Flaming Colossus nightclub in Central Los Angeles a few years ago, they received a sneak preview of what might occur if they were to alter their style a bit.

“We had been playing jazz rooms like Le Cafe to about 30 or 40 people, when all of a sudden we were playing a world beat dance at the Colossus for 300 or 400 people,” Farah said, speaking via a conference call from his home in North Hollywood. “These people really accepted us, and were dancing to us, and at the same time gave a great response to the musicianship. That was very encouraging, and helped us to think along the new way.”

“It was nice,” Strunz said, recalling that engagement. “We could play our butts off, improvising freely, and people were still grooving, enjoying the complexity of our soloing because they were feeling the rhythm underneath.”

The fine-tuning of their style coincided perfectly with the advent of the New Adult Contemporary, or Wave, radio format, which embraced their variegated output as heard on “Primal Magic,” Farah said.

“Before NAC, we were just very good guitarists with no genre that fit us,” said Farah, a native of Tehran, Iran, who grew up in London before coming to Los Angeles to attend USC.

“We weren’t flamenco, we weren’t jazz, folk, Latin, Middle Eastern; we weren’t classical, so what were we?” asked Strunz, son of a U. S. Consular Corps member, born in Costa Rica and raised in Canada and Spain. “It was difficult to find industry support, and we fell through the cracks.”

The NAC and Wave formats, as spotlighted on KTWV-FM (94.7) in Los Angeles, played the world beat music that most closely defines what Strunz and Farah offer. “We’re delighted to be part of a musical movement and have a way to channel our work into the marketplace. World beat is a nice big umbrella, a colorful one, with an international scope,” said Strunz, who settled in Los Angeles in 1973 and was a founding member of the noted Latin-fusion band Caldera.

Since the release of “Primal Magic,” Strunz and Farah have traveled across the United States--”We’re strong in New York and San Francisco, but they still don’t know about us in Boston or Philly,” said Strunz--and appeared before 40,000 fans at a free concert at the 1991 Montreal Jazz Festival. In the United States, they’ve played in packed 1,000-seat concert halls at Stanford University and El Paso, Tex., and have filled the S.O.B. (Sounds of Brazil) nightspot in Manhattan on several occasions.

Financial success isn’t always a pleasure, Strunz has found. “It complicates your life,” he said. “The business of the band demands a lot of attention. You have to make more phone calls; there’s more office work. We all have desks with pens and computers,” he said with a laugh.

And though they are certainly appreciating their newly acquired fame and fortune, both musicians said that even without the money, the music still comes first. “It’s more about what you do with your time than what it brings,” said Farah. “A lot of people do things they hate, and they make money, and they’re unhappy. If you do something you love and you make money, it’s all the better.”

“That’s total fulfillment,” Strunz said.