
Master guitarist
Pierre Bensusan has a lovely, lyric little masterpiece of a tune called
Nefertari.
Some of my jazz friends will say, "Oh yeah, you mean Nefertiti (the one Wayne Shorter wrote that he and Miles recorded), that's a hip tune." I'll have to say, "Yeah, Nefertiti is great, but this is a different queen and a different tune."
Nefertari, whose name means, variously. "beautiful companion", or "most beautiful of them", was the favorite queen of Pharaoh Ramses II way back in circa 1290-1250 BC.
She was uniquely loved by her husband, as, at his time, most royal marriages were made and kept solely for political reasons. Nefertari was 13 when she was betrothed to the 15 year old Ramses. From his numerous wives he is said to have fathered 100 children but Nefertari remained the favorite companion. She is oft depicted in paintings of the era as the same height as Ramses which was an unheard of violation of Egyptian representational protocol! Ramses built a temple for her and the god Hathor at Abu Simbel, and she is seen on the walls there as a companion of the goddess Isis.
Nefertari apparently took an active role in negotiating peace between the Hittites and her husband, and there are surviving cuneiform tablets from Turkey that contain correspondence from Nefertari with the king and queen of the Hittites.
Poems written by Ramses to her filled her burial chamber, and in one he says;
"My love is unique—no one can rival her, for she is the most beautiful woman alive. Just by passing, she has stolen away my heart."
She is pictured below playing
senet, a boardgame that, when skillfully played, insured smooth transition into the afterworld.

Pierre Bensusan has long been a favorite guitarist of mine. I discovered his
Pres de Paris record in a Santa Cruz shop in the mid-70's and was bowled over by his solo fingerpicked renditions of the Irish jigs
Cunla and
Merrily Kiss the Quaker's Wife. On those tunes, much like Martin Carthy or the bluesman Mance Lipscomb, Bensusan propels the beat with a dampened, often monotonic bass on the low strings while the intricate melodic line rides on the high strings. He makes liberal use of open strings in the melody and this gives the tunes a harp-like singing, suspended sound. His placement of open string notes is tastefully and expressively executed; without the excessive "open-tuning" drone style of most American "folk-style" players and, on the other hand, it creates a resonance that would would be lost in most "classical" guitar renditions which are stultified with precise clipped notes.
Inspired by Bensusan's example as well as similar ventures by Carthy and John Renbourn I went through 2 years of playing almost exclusively in the tuning DADEAD (sometimes used by the latter two) and concentrating on Irish/Celtic instrumental tunes and my own material before it dawned on me that I was digging myself into a pit of obscurity and would need to return to standard tuning if I wanted to interact at ease with other musicians. Pierre, plays solely in DADGAD - the "Davy Graham" tuning - but has the technique and versatility to, doubtlessly, adapt to any musical situation.

After not having heard much from Pierre in a while I was listening to a jazz station one night and heard an incredible piece: I thought "Who the hell is that? It sounds like Bert Jansch and Baden Powell got fused together!" It turned out to be
Bamboule from Bensusan's latest record at the time
Solilai.
Although he plays
everything in the "modal" DADGAD, Pierre has a fine ear for harmonic change and can carry off some original sounding voicings of "jazz" chords within the tuning.
Nefertari is off of his record
Altiplanos. Listening to Nefertari intently in the last few days, I wondered at it's time signature; it sounds completely natural but there was "dancelike" lilt about it like a gavotte - something from a renaissance court, or village courtship ritual. After an exhausting day of work at the library (yes, it can be very physical of late), I was looking online and found that there was a transcription of the piece in the Sept. 2006 issue of
Acoustic Guitar. Suddenly, miraculously, I no longer had to take that afternoon nap; I called up the library to make sure they had the issue, then jumped into the car and
tore back over there, bounded up the stairs to the 2nd floor Periodicals Dept. and made my copies. Lo and behold - the tune is mostly in 7/8 with some forays into 4/4.
Here's another Bensusan original from
Altiplanos,
La Dame de Clevedon. Here, as in Nefertari Pierre displays his organic sense of time - it ebbs and flows as a force of nature and it is laughable to think of it ever committed to mere paper!