Some years back, Eugene composer/pianist/educator Paul Safar and his wife, on a family visit to Prague, were walking across that city’s famed Charles Bridge. Suddenly, a plangent sound rang out. “My ears perked up,” Safar remembers. They spied a street musician playing … something. “What is that instrument,” Wood asked. Safar peered closer. “I think that’s a … hurdy gurdy?” he replied. The sound enchanted him. “Something about it struck a chord with me — or struck a drone,” he says. “I put it in the back of my mind.”

Years later, seeking new musical horizons, Safar would return to that haunting encounter – which occurred, appropriately, on a bridge –  connect with one of its finest exponents, Catalonian musician Marc Egea, and commence a collaboration that blends their surprisingly complementary musical visions into a compelling, cross cultural musical combo. After earlier tours in Spain and Oregon, the duo alights in Portland, Eugene, and Springfield this weekend for concerts featuring their own fascinating original music, plus classical and traditional Spanish sounds, jazz, pop and more. 

The hurdy gurdy is only Safar’s most recent muse, the latest in a career-long series of creative combinations in a musical journey enriched by embracing diverse musical ingredients.

Classical Meets Pop

You could say that Paul Safar was born to classical music, but grew up on pop. His parents hailed from one of the principal fonts of 18^th and 19^th century Western classical music, Vienna, and “classical music was in their blood,” he says. “My dad played piano, my mom sang lieder, and they would host little musical soirees,” when Safar was growing up in Pittsburgh. “There was always music in the house.” 

Naturally, he started piano lessons at an early age, and soon was improvising and even writing a few simple pieces as a child and adolescent. In middle school, inspired by melodic pop from the Beatles to Billy Joel to Elton John, Safar started a rock band with a fellow school orchestra violinist. They called themselves The Pedestrians — because they weren’t old enough to have drivers licenses. (That friend eventually followed him to the Northwest, where they remain close.) By high school, he was a working musicians, playing piano at parties and bars.

After heading off to music school in Cincinnati and earning a bachelor’s degree in composition, he started teaching piano in Ohio as well as playing it — and continued composing. He’s continued excelling in all three ever since. 

“I’ve been so blessed to wear three hats — composer, piano teacher, and performer,” Safar says. “They all kind of inform each other.”

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Blossoming in Eugene

Composing continued to exert its pull on Safar, leading him to pursue master’s degree studies in the subject at the University of Oregon. He’s remained in Eugene ever since, teaching, composing, performing. In the early 2000s, a local singer called him up: she needed a piano accompanist for a jazz gig, and he’d been recommended. “We rehearsed, and we seemed to click musically,” he remembers — and in other ways too. Artistic collaboration turned to friendship and more, and Safar married the superb singer Nancy Wood, becoming her in house composer/pianist, and she his in-house diva and creative partner.

In 2005, they formed Cherry Blossom Musical Arts, an “art music vaudeville” company, initially to produce a delightful children’s theater piece based on a Swedish folk tale called Nisse’s Dream. Safar wrote the music, Wood the book, and they collaborated on the libretto. Dance and magic tricks enhanced the charming production, which sold out its entire run at the old Lord Leebrick Theater. It was one of the most exciting new musical developments I’d seen in Eugene in years. 

Cherry Blossom continued to stage productions, including a spectacular multimedia series called Visual Music, at Oregon Country Fair, Tsunami Books, and beyond, often featuring some of the city’s finest musicians, dancers, and choreographers.

Safar soon joined Eugene’s composers collective Seventh Species, and when Cascadia Composers formed in Portland, he was involved almost from the get-go. His compositions, including many featuring Wood, have always been among the highlights of those concerts, and Safar is a regular performer and attendee at CC events and others in Portland as well as Eugene, where he’s helped build a vital community around new music. His compositions have been performed by, among others, Delgani String Quartet, Fear No Music, and Orchestra Next, and he’s garnered acclaim and awards, including Oregon Music Teachers Association Composer of the Year. 

After the pandemic pause, craving live performance again, Safar started a monthly series at Eugene’s stalwart Tsunami Books, featuring his own original music and more. Only three people turned out for the first installment, but it soon became a popular event, especially the Beatles editions.

To his credit and his music’s vitality, Safar never left behind those Beatlish pop music inclinations. His ear for melodic hooks has helped make his music among the most accessible in Oregon new music circles, although he’s far more sophisticated than just a strong tunesmith. Sometimes I think Safar represents what might have happened if one of his early idols, another pianistically and melodically gifted son of a Viennese father, Billy Joel, had followed his own initial classical inclinations (which he later returned to, almost exclusively) instead of succumbing to pop’s siren call. 

Safar cites as influences the “lyricism and melodicism and conciseness” of the Beatles and Schubert, but also embraces the open mindedness of John Cage. “I can’t escape my background and love of pop and jazz music, but I love working on a piece more in the classical realm,” he explains. “Twenty years ago I used to think I was too scattered — in too many worlds, musically. I don’t anymore. As I get older, I’m finding my happy place as a composer is more of a synthesis, working with classical structures and with contemporary sounds and influences. I thrive on the variety.” 

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Hurdy Gurdy Stan

When the irrepressibly musically curious Safar turned 50 in 2019, he decided to celebrate by taking a month long trip to Europe — and also, naturally, by learning a new musical instrument. He wanted one that would lend itself to improvisation. Remembering that encounter on the Charles Bridge, he decided that instrument would be the hurdy gurdy. 

Why? It’s unfamiliar to most Americans, even those who’ve heard the Donovan song, on which it does not appear. (Hey, there’s no tambourine in the original “Mr. Tambourine Man” either.) “I personally love the sound and feeling of playing with the gurdy,” Safar says. But the unusual instrument also offered a needed counterweight to his natural compositional inclinations. 

“As a composer, I’m very harmonically focused,” he explains, that is, inclined to use the chordal structures familiar to any listener to Western pop or classical music. In contrast, traditional hurdy gurdy music, like much other non Western music, emerges from musical modes and drones rather than chordal harmonic progressions. “I can’t help being a Western musician,” Safar says. “But I also love drones. The gurdy reminded me of Indian classical music. Having that drone to improvise melody upon it, and then some rhythm upon it, was actually liberating.” It’s a similar path to those taken by musicians from Claude Debussy to Alan Hovhaness and Lou Harrison, to Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

Safar wanted to learn more. A little online research disclosed that one of the world’s top hurdy gurdists was living near one of his intended destination, Barcelona. Safar emailed him.

Marc Egea, in 2008, literally wrote the book on hurdy gurdy. The Catalonian composer and multi-instrumentalist began his career in a 1990s trio, then joined a folk group, going solo in 2005, collaborating with a variety of artists on various projects, and performing around the world. A full time teacher and music school instructor, he’s composed for symphonic band, choir, chamber music ensembles, electronic music and more, recording more than 40 albums with different bands and solo.

Safar’s note intrigued him. They became pen pals, and then Egea invited Safar to his house, where the Spanish virtuoso gave the American composer his first hurdy gurdy lesson. When he returned home, Safar began seriously studying the instrument, as well as Spanish. But the pandemic temporarily quashed any hopes of further collaborations, until late 2020, when Egea asked Safar if he’d be interested in a virtual recording project: a free improvisation encounter ‘twixt hurdy gurdist and pianist. 

“I would get up in the morning,” Safar remembers, “turn on my Zoom recorder and try to do a free improv, send him an MP3 [file] and then a few hours later in my in box there’d be his hurdy gurdy [recorded] on top of my piano [part], and then he’d do the same thing in the other directions. Hear the results. 

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Why Not Tour

Safar composed more music for Egea, and in 2022, returned to Barcelona. Over a copa de cava, Safar asked Egea whether he might be interested in coming to Eugene the following summer. “¿Por que no?” he replied. Why not?

That 2023 visit, Egea’s first to the US, resulted in duo shows in Oregon — the first time they’d ever improvised together in person, in the same room, at the same time. Audiences unfamiliar with the hurdy gurdy were happily surprised. “People can tell he’s a really fine player. And he does extended techniques — his gurdy can get some cool sounds that I didn’t know could be done on this instrument.” Hear their performance at Eugene’s Jazz Station.

Egea reciprocated with an invitation for Safar to perform in his native Catalonia last year, which drew enthusiastic audiences. “Now it’s his turn” to cross the pond, Safar says. Hence: this week’s mini-tour, titled Why Not ’25.

Like their live album, these Oregon shows will feature a mix of their respective original compositions, some traditional and classical Spanish music, jazz standards, and more — including a short free improv. Egea will play hurdy gurdy and flabiol, a traditional Catalan flute; Safar, piano and maybe melodica. There might be singing and other surprises — maybe even some Beatles tunes. 

Friday’s Portland show contains a bonus: Humanis Vocal Ensemble and renowned Eugene poet and peace activist Ingrid Wendt will join the duo for the premiere of “Lacrimosa,” which uses a poem by Wendt from her book The Angle of Sharpest Ascending. The collaborative concert embodies a loose theme of reconciliation and peace, appropriate to this stirring cross-cultural collaboration between like-minded, community-oriented musicians from different worlds,  who find that they have so much in common. 

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Paul Safar & Marc Egea’s Why Not Tour ’25: Thursday, July 31, 7:30 p.m. Tsunami Books, 2585 Willamette Street, Eugene. Tickets: call 541 345 8986 or at the door. Friday, August 1, 7:30 p.m “Intersections-Music, Poetry and Calls for Peace,” with Humanis Choir and Ingrid Wendt. Lincoln Recital Hall, Portland State University, 1620 SW Park Avenue, Portland. Suggested donation $15-$30 at the door, no one turned away. Sunday, August 3, 3 p.m. Richard E. Wildish Community Theater, 630 Main Street, Springfield. Tickets.

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