Sean Levitt In Memoriam

I met Sean in New York City in the late seventies. I had heard him play his jazz guitar numerous times on the streets, and was an immediate fan. Sean truly was great. Sean was one of the greats who went through life noticed by some more for his roughish ways than his superior talent. Once after we had become friends, he asked if he could borrow my classical guitar while he spent time in rehab. He said he would be several months. I loaned it to him without a doubt in my mind that he would return it to me. A few people started to tell me that I would never see my guitar again, but I would say, "Oh sure I will, Sean will return it".

Months passed then there was a knock on my door and it was Sean, and my guitar. Sean had just returned from rehab, and needed a place to stay, so I invited him to stay at the loft I was renting. Sean was a man of his word.

One day when I came home Sean was playing flamenco guitar, after all he was a gypsy who grew up in the Gypsy camps in Spain as well as the big city's New York and L.A. At age eleven he recorded with Chick Corea! He was playing a triplet technique that I had been trying to get for years. When I asked him to show me how to do this, explaining that I had been practicing this for a few years unsuccessfully, he asked me to show him what I was practicing. I showed him, and he told me that I had the mechanics down, but then showed me the trick to relax and rotate my wrist properly (like I was holding a ladle, stirring a soup) to execute the technique. Within moments I had mastered something that had been eluding me for years.