Adding innovation to injury

Many musicians feel frustrated that they can't open the doors that lead to stardom. Xavier Padilla, a bass player with the Gipsy Kings, had a different problem three years ago. He literally couldn't open a door. He'd plucked, strummed, and thonked his bass so often during his career that, for four months, he could do nothing with his arms but let them flop limply by his sides.

Padilla wasn't alone. Given the number of people who compulsively play their instruments for eight or more hours a day, it's no surprise that hordes of musicians find themselves laid up each year. But it may well be surprising that many, including Padilla, emerge as better players. Injuries have an uncanny ability to improve performance by forcing new ways of thinking about music and new ways of approaching instruments.

In Padilla's case, the change has come with a new bass called a Torzal Natural Twist. Custom-designed and hand-built by Jerome Little in Texas, the neck of the bass has a slight inward rotation, making the instrument appear as if it were taken from an Escher drawing.

This design limits the angle of the player's left wrist as it moves away from the body, allowing a musician to play up and down the neck without flexing, stressing, and otherwise vexing his wrists.

"I actually dreamed of a bass with a neck like Jerome's -- I mean a dream while sleeping, not just in a figurative sense," says Padilla. "I thought such a bass was impossible in our real world, and I didn't give much importance to that dream. Then, about a year and a half later I saw Jerome Little's bass pictured in the Guitar & Bass Buyer's Guide, and I was simply blown away."

The twisted neck not only allows Padilla to play without pain but also allows him to use four fingers on his left hand while playing low notes, the ones found farthest from the body of the bass, where there is the most distance between frets. Even before his injury, like many bass players, Padilla only used three fingers in those low registers to prevent pain.

With his twisted bass, Padilla has no problem using four, expanding the range of music he can play. He is playing his new instrument for the first time in concert on his band's summer tour, which arrives at the FleetBoston Pavilion on Wednesday.

Finding a new style For some musicians, injuries prove to have a positive psychological effect even if they don't lead to new instruments. Acoustic guitarist Leo Kottke, for example, feels extremely grateful for the day in 1983 when he felt a sudden surge of pain through his right arm while performing in Denver.

"I was playing and then I looked down at my hand, and all I had was a bear claw," he said.

The initial feeling was psychologically excruciating. "It was like being hit by a couch that's been soaked in motor oil," said Kottke, almost certainly the most influential acoustic guitarist of the last 35 years. "In the very beginning, you lose everything. Your volume is gone, your execution is gone, and your internal voicing are utterly obliterated."

But, over the course of three years, Kottke learned to play without pain. He threw away the plastic picks he had worn over his fingers and revamped his style of playing. Kottke had wowed audiences early in the 1970s with his breakneck strumming. But he calls that skill a crutch that actually hindered his music. "I had only one way to play, and that was hard and fast," he said. "Once I threw away the crutch, I found there was a deeper way of saying things."

Before the injury, Kottke had been in a musical rut, putting out bland albums that he now considers uninspiring. But since recovering, and forcing himself into the study of harmony, jazz voicings, and compositional structure, Kottke has recorded much of his finest work. The process of recovery, by his own account, improved his tone, dynamics, and attitude.

"If the injury hadn't have happened, I would have run out of ideas," Kottke says. "I would have petered out. If you only grow one crop, it will kill the ground."

Trauma injuries can have the same effect, forcing musicians out of the boxes they learned to play in and away from the schools of musicianship they had grown up following. If a player suddenly can't hold a guitar the way everyone else does, he's probably not going to sound the same either. That may well make a mediocre player bad, but it can make an excellent player transcendent.

Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath cut off the ends of two fingers on his fretting hand in a sheet metal factory in 1969. To continue to play with his reduced finger strength, he started using lighter strings, tuned his guitar down a half-note, and created the dark, brooding sound that defined Ozzy Osbourne's band and launched heavy metal. Django Reinhardt lost two fingers when his home caught fire and went on to use the stumps that remained to create the fresh, smooth style that many still consider the finest jazz guitar playing ever.

Of course, injuries can also destroy brilliant careers; they have knocked out musicians who otherwise may have redefined their genres. Alice Brandfonbrener, editor of the journal Medical Problems of Performing Artists and a doctor in Illinois, says she has a database of 3,000 musicians she has treated. Most recover, she says, but many don't.

"They can't do the thing they love, and then they get depressed, and when you're depressed you don't get better," she explains.

"The physical and emotional issues can end up in a vortex that can take you down," adds Robert Blocker, dean of the Yale School of Music.

A growing awareness Many injuries aren't diagnosed soon enough for successful treatment. Musicians, like athletes, tend to resist acknowledging and caring for injuries early on, particularly since they sustain many of them in the heavy practice periods that lead up to important performances. Kottke initially declined to be interviewed for this story, comparing being known "as the guy who got hurt" to being like Monica Lewinsky, stigmatized for something of which one is not particularly proud.

Despite these problems, Brandfonbrener and other doctors working in the field point out that awareness has risen during the past two decades. Musicians are taught better playing posture and designers build more ergonomic instruments. Kris Chesky, director of education and research at the Texas Center for Music & Medicine, is leading an effort to ensure that education about potential injuries is built into the curriculum of every school accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music.

Still, ergonomic instruments don't appeal to everyone. A bass that costs more than $3,000 (as those made by Jerome Little do) and looks like it comes off the set of "The Jetsons" may not turn on many young bassists.

"A lot of young players today stand there with their basses hanging low like Flea [the bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers]," says Stuart Hamm, a rock bassist best known for his work with Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, who has had serious wrist injuries over the years.

Like Hamm when he was younger -- when he drank Jager instead of doing yoga before going onstage -- many young musicians worry more about looks than ergonomics.

"A lot of them," says Hamm, "are going to get hurt."