Magic Made in the Moment
Saturday night at 36 Handles in El Dorado Hills, where Euphemism’s Prism played its first quasi-post-pandemic gig, was the setting for the performance of some musical magic that helped me understand more deeply what I’ve thought of forever as a binary choice. Music is either a) live or b) recorded—I’m not counting music written on the page as “music,” though my bracketing of sheet music is arbitrary, I realize. Literate musicians do “hear” music through their eyes as they read it, but I’ll leave that avenue for later. Even a week before the gig, magic happened. I own an electric 12 string guitar built almost two decades ago, one of only 1,000 to have been built by a master builder. I’ve wanted to get my hands on another one, but they show up for sale but rarely, and finding one at a brick and mortar would be like a needle…