nothin Chris Cretella Keeps It Together — Barely | New Haven Independent

Chris Cretella Keeps It Together — Barely

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Cretella.

There’s a line ripped from the lowest string of a guitar, somewhere between a flutter and a machine gun. The notes rise and fall, like they’re trying to say something. A chirp. Another, interrupting. Now more and more, like hail from the leading edge of an approaching storm. The notes get sharper, more intense, and there are more of them, until it’s hard to imagine at times how one player is making all that sound. It’s the product of a lot of practice, of a rigorous approach to the instrument.

But then there’s the title of the piece: Blades, Meet Fingers.” It’s the first cut off Chris Cretella’s latest solo release, Just Trying to Hold It Together in the Face of Total Collapse, and as improvisational and spontaneous as the playing is, the blend of the serious and the ridiculous is no accident.

The album’s title comes from a bunch of loose concepts that hold the record together,” Cretella said on a recent episode of WNHH’s Northern Remedy.” A couple years ago Cretella was watching Peter Evans — one of the best trumpet players living,” Cretella said — and I was struck by the physicality of the trumpet, and how it looked sort of torturous to play at this high level that he’s playing at. It looked like it was exhausting, like a workout as much as it was a creative endeavor.”

On guitar, he said, it’s harder to get to a spot where it’s physically exhausting. You’re not breathing into it. You don’t have a piece of metal smashed up against your face. You have an amplifier, which is carrying all the weight of the projection for you. So I started thinking about ways to play the guitar that were physically demanding…. Each piece is an idea that is a technical endeavor on the guitar that forces me to have to deal with it falling apart.”

The musical problem,” he added, is how to have it fall apart but still try to maintain some control of it falling apart — even though it falling it is going to be inevitable. There’s a technical aspect that I just can’t physically maintain. As it starts to degrade, what do I do? How do I make it sound like I’m not just screwing up?”

Cretella’s sense of inviting difficulty extends to his guitar itself — heavy strings, hard to play. I used to be a mason’s helper,” he said. There’s something about a good sweat.”

Cretella started playing guitar as a freshman in high school, living in Oxford. His sister had a boyfriend who had a bootleg of a Metallica concert. Just the sound and the look of it all,” Cretella, I thought, that’s what I want to do.’”

His father was into Broadway musicals — Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber — and I’m pretty sure that Metallica at the time sounded to me like the anti-musical. It was a way that made music ugly, and unglamorous, and rhythmic.” Just what he wanted to annoy his father. But there was something positive about it, too, the energy in the music that hits me to this day,” Cretella said. There’s a physicality. You’re almost playing the guitar like a drum. It’s got that drive, that propulsion. You get the sweat.”

Cretella started on the guitar with Metallica itself. He joined his first band as a sophomore in high school, a metal band called Manifest. He started gigging at all-ages shows, and going to shows when he wasn’t gigging. And he started getting into other kinds of music, thanks in part to Dave Parmalee, who was the drummer in Manifest and is still a very active musician in the New Haven area. He listens to everything, and did at that age.” Parmalee introduced Cretella to the more avant-garde side of music, which led Cretella to composer and improviser John Zorn.

His music is varied to an insane degree. There’s elements of pretty much anything you could think of, but it’s all synthesized and put together in a very singular way,” Cretella said. He’s a genre unto himself.” And, he added, the energy’s there.”

After high school, Cretella became a mason’s helper for about a year and a half. We did walls, we did walkways, tiles, chimneys. For the longest time I was the guy that made the cement. We didn’t have a cement mixer. I was the cement mixer.” He carried bricks and kept my boss moving…. It got to a point where I would stand and watch, and anticipate what he would need.” He graduated to block work and repointing.

I’ve often thought maybe I should have stuck with it,” Cretella said. You see what’s done at the end. And building walls is like having a giant puzzle in front of it. You feel at the end of the way like you did something.”

He was also still playing with Parmlee, and they both visited New York City’s thriving improvisation scene and would try to re-create some of what they were hearing.

But he always knew he was going back to college. And then, on one job, he and another worker were carrying a large flue pipe up a plank. The other worker slipped, and the flue pipe came down on his hand and mangled the heck out of it,” he said. After seeing that, being a guitar player,” he said, he was ready to go back to school.

He enrolled at Southern Connecticut State University at 20 and became an English major. Southern had just started its music degree program and a professor encouraged him to switch. He was easily swayed,” he said.

And he was still playing with Parmalee, still working at improvising. At first it was idiomatic, more song-based, or riff-based,” he said. But then after a while, those sounds aren’t enough. So you start looking for more sounds. And the forms aren’t enough. You kind of hit the wall on that. Then the language, the scales, aren’t enough. So I think the progression was always trying to get past that thing.”

Meanwhile, musician and composer Anthony Coleman — on faculty at New England Conservatory — came to Southern to be a guest conductor. Cretella was already familiar with his work. We were working on a Louis Armstrong song,” he said. He had us play through it once. Then he said, all right. Everybody turn your stand around and play your memory of what you just played.’ And it was revelatory at the time — knowing his music, and hearing that, and thinking, we sound like an Anthony Coleman record.’ With less polish.”

Cretella connected with Coleman. He interviewed him for a paper he had for college. But I didn’t think of studying with him,” Cretella said, until years later. He was working at a Barnes and Noble, teaching guitar, and writing music for a band called Goose Lane. Creatively, he felt like he was in a rut. It was kind of sad sack,” he said, with a laugh. His wife suggested he call Coleman. Coleman suggested he visit him in New York. He started visiting him quarterly for composition classes. Coleman then suggested he apply to New England Conservatory in its improvisation program. For two years he studied at NEC in Boston while continuing to work at Barnes and Noble full time.

It was crazy,” he said. I don’t know how I did it.”

His time at NEC allowed him to build a network of musicians that he loved to play with. I don’t really care about playing gigs with someone that wouldn’t want to go out and have dinner with,” Cretella said. And when he assessed his peers at NEC, he found that so many of them are putting out such great art, at the highest level — and then they’re really good people.”

NEC stressed that you create a voice” for yourself, Cretella said, rather than simply learning a style. You create your music.” As guitarist and teacher Joe Morris stressed, you come up with a way that you play guitar, so that if someone wants you on the gig, they can’t hire someone else, because they’re hiring your way of playing the guitar. They’re not hiring a guitarist.”

Cretella played, and wrote music, and played and wrote. And in time, found his voice, and a set of ideas that he kept coming back to, again and again.

It was things spinning out of control,” he said. Starting with an idea, repeating it, and letting it feed on itself.” Some fell apart. Others spun out into some other form. I tend to think a lot about the development of the thing as I’m improvising, so rather than it being another person to feed off of, it’s the idea that I’m feeding off of.”

HIs approach, and his voice, have now sustained him through 14 records, solo and with others. He plays with musicians frequently in New Haven’s improvised music scene, and travels to play as far as Europe. It’s the result of years of dedication to his instrument, and to finding his own way to play it.

But it’s also possible that it started with a Jerry Lewis movie — Cracking Up — that was on HBO when Cretella was a kid. In one scene in particular, Lewis is just trying to get across a room, from the door to a couch, but he keeps slipping. The floor’s too slick to walk on. The furniture’s too slippery to actually sit in.

I think that’s a big thing in my music — that scene in that movie,” Cretella said. The comedy of these tightly controlled things falling apart…. I think ultimately there’s something funny about it” — things falling apart, he added. There’s something funny about juxtaposing that with rigorous practice of some sort…. I like the idea of smashing a highbrow concept against a lowbrow concept, or a very serious thing against a not at all serious thing.”

When I was in college,” he added, I always wanted to start an art movement that was a fake art movement, and then when I died you would realize it was a joke, but it would be deadly serious the whole time. That kind of stuff gets me. Hits me right here.” He tapped his heart.

Chris Cretella’s recordings — including the latest release, Just Trying to Hold It Together in the Face of Total Collapse are available through Bandcamp. For more information, visit his website. Click below to hear the full interview and live performances with Cretella on Northern Remedy.”

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