A man with PLUCK

LITTLE ROCK — Michael Carenbauer makes changing guitar strings look as effortless as changing shoestrings is for the rest of us.

Carenbauer, director of guitar studies and professor of music at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is lauded for his versatility - he is talented at playing jazz and classical guitar.

His repertoire is a blend of technology and nylon tradition.

He studied with jazz great Pat Metheny, and he has performed in Italy, France, Austria, Mexico, Canada and Hong Kong as well as countless central Arkansas venues, includingweddings, receptions, the Afterthought, Gypsy's restaurant and even the Babies R Us grand opening.

He recently gave a presentation at the Guitar Foundation of America conference in Los Angeles about a computer program he has adapted to help guitar students learn to read music. He is likely the only full-time guitar teacher at the collegiate level in Arkansas.

Carenbauer, 55, found the guitar later than most of his students, not picking one up until he was a 19-year-old student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

"I went from never having picked up an instrument to playing the guitar eight to 12 hours a day," he says. "I've taken a most bizarre path,because the first 10 years that I played, I played strictly jazz, then I started to play classical. I didn't play classical guitar until I was almost 30, which is really ridiculous."

Carenbauer transferred to Bowdoin from Washington University, where he was an international economics major. He has a dual bachelor's degree in economics and history from Bowdoin, but it was there that he changed career paths in 1971.

"I took a sociology class and the guy put me to sleep, big time," he says.

"I looked for something else to take, and[noticed] they offered guitar. So I took a guitar lesson. And, I'm not kidding you, in like 20 minutes I knew that's what I wanted to do. It was weird. And I was in the perfect place for it because there was nothing else for me to do."

His parents were supportive, if baffled, when he told them he wanted to be a musician. They had never seen their son pick up a musical instrument.

"As a parent myself, I don't think I would have had the same reaction. I would have just said, 'you're nuts!' I was a good student and it wasn't like I didn't have other options," he says.

Carenbauer was a fan of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix at the time, and also enjoyed folk music.

The only jazz he had heard before leaving his home in Wheeling, W.Va., was the Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald albums his dad played at home in the evenings. No one in the family - save Carenbauer's grandmother, who played organ and piano during silent movies - played an instrument.

The brain is wired differently in adults than it is in children, he tells his students, so the later a person picks up an instrument, the more difficulty he will have mastering it.

"It was incredibly hard," he says of his own early lessons. "The guitar is kind of a weird instrument because you're not automatically part of a community when you begin to study; if you play the clarinet you'll be in a band or a marching band or something like that. The guitar is sort of a solitary instrument."

The guitar didn't leave Carenbauer lonely, however. It led him to some quite interesting company.

"I did get into a band that was mentored by a guy who played with John Coltrane," he says. "[He was] sort of a really avantgarde musician. We played at a jazz festival at Notre Dame my senior year."

When he graduated from Bowdoin, Carenbauer went to Berklee College in Boston for a performance degree. There, he studied with a then-19-year-old Metheny, who happened to be at Berklee at the invitation of another musician.

"Metheny would take very few students. I was in his guitar ensemble of maybe four or five guitarists," Carenbauer says. "We would play a lot of his early tunes. But these are tunes that he ultimately recorded, and continues to play.

"He's probably the biggest influence on the way that I looked at music and also approached the instrument. He was trying not to be like everyone else. He embraced other types of music ... folk music, world music, technology synthesizers."

After Berklee, Carenbauer completed a master of music degree in classical guitar at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

But he didn't spend his time studying and practicing the guitar so he could teach - he wanted to play. And he stays busy. Though he used to focus his energies on preparing for concerts, he has turned to more casual outlets.

"I'm not a formal guy at all, and I don't like the artificial environment of [concerts]," he says. "I'm more of an introvert, so I don't like being the center of attention."

In addition to his full-time job at UALR, Carenbauer played about 120 gigs last year. He can often be found in clubs and restaurants around Hot Springs as part of a jazz trio, The Real Thing.

"In Hot Springs, everyone thinks I'm a jazz guitarist," he says. "In Little Rock, everybody thinks I'm a classical guitarist because most of the time here I play solo stuff."

Antoine Seyer, owner of Little Rock restaurant Gypsy's, is happy to have Carenbauer play there as many weekends as his schedule allows.

"The reaction we get is great," says Seyer.

Playing in these venues is more lucrative than concerts, Carenbauer says, and there is abigger payoff.

"I have all this repertoire I've learned to play and this lets me keep in touch with it," he says.

He is frank with students about their prospects in the music business.

"I say, 'OK, how many people from Arkansas are in the National Basketball Association?' and they'll say maybe two or three. I'll say, 'do you know how many full-time guitar teachers there are at the collegiate level in Arkansas? One.'

"Music programs [usually] don't hire a guitarist because we're not part of an orchestra or a choir or something. We have a large guitar program at UALR. There are probably close to 20 guitar majors, so we justify our existence easily."

Terry Johnson, 64, retired from his civil-engineering job four years ago and returned to college to become a music major.

"I sort of hacked around my living room with the guitar for about 40 years but I didn't know how to read [music]," says Johnson, of Little Rock. "I played what I memorized."

That's not unusual, Carenbauer says.

"The typical guitar student is atypical of other music students. They tend to be self-taught," he says. "A guitarist will say 'Come on over and we'll jam.'" Carenbauer says most don't know the names of the notes and may not know what key their guitar is in, but will keep working until the music sounds right.

Studying guitar on a formal level - learning about making music and about how the guitar fits into the larger structure - is often a big transition for students and Carenbauer has devised innovative ways to help them make it.

"We have a music-reading class for guitarists - we're the only program in the country that I know of that does this. I've put all this music into a computer program and when they're learning how to read music ... [the program] shows what they're supposed to play and it shows what they played."

To get the software program Carenbauer adapted to work for the guitar, he set it up as if it's reading a MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) keyboard, a trombone or a flute.

Victor Ellsworth, chairman of the UALR music department, says the university is fortunate to have Carenbauer.

"He's become, in his worldof guitar teaching, an expert in using the Internet," Ellsworth says. "He's very eclectic in his educational background and in the style of guitar playing that he can do, as well as teach."

Carenbauer composed music a few years ago for the Quapaw Quartet of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. The piece incorporated a zheng, an ancient Chinese string instrument.

"Sometimes I think that we take all the wonderful things that Michael does for granted, but he's an excellent composer," says Ellsworth of Carenbauer's"Sextet for Guitar, Zheng and String Quartet."

Carenbauer's wife of almost 30 years, Lam Tze Sheung, created the artwork on the cover of the CD Michael Carenbauer: Music for Guitar and Strings. An artist, she has an exhibit at Little Rock's Gallery 26. At UALR, she is better known as Laura Carenbauer, a piano teacher at the university's Community School of the Arts.

She met Carenbauer in West Virginia while he was teaching and playing guitar in a band. She was a piano student and worked as a coat-check girl at the nightclub where his band played.

They were already dating when he played Bach's Chaconne in d minor for solo violin for her.

"He transcribed it to guitar," she says. "I'd never seen anyone play it with a [guitar] pick and he was very fast, so I was really impressed."

They play music together only at home, and only for fun, she says, joking that they didn't want to "wreck the marriage."

But she doesn't tire of listening to him practice for two to three hours every morning, just after breakfast.

"His music is versatile, so it's not like you're listening to one thing over and over. I enjoy listening to all different kinds of music, especially the way that he plays."

The couple moved to Little Rock in 1982, when Carenbauer joined the UALR faculty.

As a student, Johnson says he most appreciates that Carenbauer emphasizes music over guitar.

"The guitar is the vehicle, but the music is the focus," he says.

Carenbauer loves the instrument, saying that making music can transport him to a different time and place.

"It's the greatest thing in the world because you get to experience different cultures in real time. You can have a direct relationship with a composer ... it combines body, mind and spirit in a unique, personal experience."

It is something he hopes an audience shares with him.

Carenbauer is drawn to elegant Spanish music, to jazz with its spontaneity and the Bach movements that tell a story of spirituality.

"I don't know how you could play, and even hear, Bach and not almost understand Western Europe and what Christianity was about," he says. "I don't think I realized that until I played the Chaconne ... you experience the cathedral."

Carenbauer sees universal spiritual metaphors in making music and hearing it.

"I can be in awe when I'm listening, but there is an immediacy of being in the moment of playing.

"You strive for perfection and you know that you're not going to reach it. We're here for a reason, to glorify or whatever. I feel a very spiritual thing speaks very directly to me and to my background. I have a spiritual need to do something with my life through this music."