Feature: Finding Pat Martino

6 November 2008. By Barry Gibb.

When Pat Martino awoke from surgery to remove a brain tumour, he had forgotten that he was a world-renowned jazz guitarist. He made a remarkable recovery from the amnesia and returned to playing seven years later.

‘Martino Unstrung’, a documentary film funded by a Wellcome Trust Sciart award and produced by director Ian Knox and neuropsychologist Paul Broks, explores the guitarist’s musical rediscovery. Watch the trailer:

Pat Martino may not be a household name, but in the world of jazz his guitar playing is legendary. Indeed, the opening sequence of ‘Martino Unstrung’ is in a New York guitar store, with a jazz fan in a near gibbering state of excitement, exclaiming to camera that his whole world has flipped from one of tears of hopelessness to bliss because he has just seen Martino: “it’s like finding da Vinci!”

Born in 1944 and playing at a professional level since his early teens, Martino saw his career take off in the 1960s as a sideman and then leader. He created a prolific back catalogue of vinyl and gained an enviable following of fans and friends (including Les Paul, inventor of the electric guitar, and film star Joe Pesci, who appear in the film). To counterpoint this success, however, Martino’s mental state was declining, to the extent that electroshock therapy was sought as a treatment for his darker episodes.

Neurosurgeon Fred Simeone removed the real cause of Martino’s mental problems in 1980: a bleeding ‘bundle of worms’ the size of an apple in the left hemisphere of his brain - a tumorous growth, or arteriovenous malformation. But the surgery also took a slab of Martino’s identity - including the knowledge that he was a world-class guitarist. ‘Martino Unstrung’ explores this profound loss of identity and Martino’s long journey of personal - and musical - rediscovery.

Usually a director of fiction, Ian Knox didn’t set out to make a documentary about Martino, but was inspired to do so when, in 2004, he went to hear the guitarist who had ‘forgotten more music than most musicians learn in a lifetime’. Knox says: “I went along, the gig was amazing, absolutely fantastic. And in between sets, when I was downstairs in Ronnie Scott’s, I spotted him sitting in the Green Room bar and I just stuck my head in…” A couple of beers later and the idea was born.

Neuropsychologist and author Paul Broks joined Knox on the project: “The very fact that he [Martino] had this abnormal collection of blood vessels in a particular part of his brain would have affected brain function, it might well have shaped his personality, his musical ability even, in ways that we can only speculate wildly about.”

Indeed, scanning technology reveals Martino had lost a large portion of his left temporal lobe during surgery, removing regions associated with memory and emotions - and only narrowly missing areas associated with musical interpretation.

Martino rediscovered music on a primitive computer while confined to a locked ward at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital. The computer’s 127k memory contained a music program, which he began to play. It was an epiphany. After 17 years of silence, he took up the guitar again, studying technique, via tuition videos, from a great teacher - his former self.

“What he had probably lost was memory that he was a player, motivation to play, and semantic [fact-based] memory for music; when he did pick up the guitar again to play, it wasn’t with any great confidence…maybe by discovering the music, he rediscovered himself,” reflects Broks.

Filmed in the USA in 2006 and 2007, the film departs from contemporary, graphically intensive approaches to science, opting instead for a lighter, more poetic visual touch. The city itself becomes a metaphor for the physical and emotional landscape of Martino’s brain, an approach more artful and abstract. Broks comments: “The idea was to use images of the city and images of machinery impressionistically…Ian would say, ‘go out and find me some brain imagery’, so I would wander round the streets, round the park and look at things that might have some connotation of brain damage or brain function.”

Screenings of ‘Martino Unstrung’ will be announced later in 2008. Our Sciart and Pulse funding schemes were amalgamated and relaunched in 2007 as the Arts Awards.