(Guitar music)
(Applause)
When your roots are aligned with your passion,
the sky's the limit.
Life is filled with endless dualism.
Change versus stability, your brain versus your heart.
It seems like everywhere you look in life, there's some sort of dualism
to challenge you to balance in between them.
And these two elements can work one against the other,
but they can also feed one another.
And I believe that when your roots are aligned with your passion,
this can lead not to frustration or misconceptions
- as sometimes happens with dualism in life -
but to innovation and empowerment.
As for my roots, my father, David Sassi,
is the forth out of ten brothers and sisters.
My roots come from Iraq, from North Africa,
and also from Thessaloniki, Greece.
My grandfather, Yossef Sassi,
- I'm his namesake, may his soul rest in peace -
had two elements that challenged him throughout all his life.
They were his big loves, and he had to juggle between both of them.
One was his passion for religion, and for God essentially,
because he was a rabbi and he was a man of spirit;
and the second was his love, his endless love for music.
He played the lute and he also researched and learned,
and was also teaching the Arabic musical scales,
the "maqāmāt", and Oriental scales.
And this was the heritage that he left to his children.
The music from Turkey, Greece, Egypt, etc.
I have clear visions of my father, when I was two years old or so,
standing in the living room in his underwear
singing in Arabic, singing in Italian,
in a lot of multicultural plethora that I was exposed to,
during my upbringing.
This is a picture of me, by the way.
(Laughter)
Around that age,
probably looking at my father wearing his underwear
(Laughter)
just feeling happy and feeling privileged
to be exposed to this kind of rich multicultural experience.
And truly as I grew up, I found out that I love other types of music as well.
In my early teenage years, I was exposed to rock and roll and heavy metal.
You know stuff like--
(Guitar music)
So this was a different kind of music.
(Applause)
But the most interesting thing happened to me was around age 14,
when I first touched a guitar,
and two things happened:
one was that I knew I was meant for that, I knew I found my match.
This is what I wanted to do in life: to play the guitar.
As simple and as innocent as that: just to play the guitar.
And the other were the sounds that came out of hands, my fingers,
were sounds of--
(Guitar music)
They were kind of Middle Eastern;
they had all kinds of Arabic musical scales in them.
So, essentially my upbringing, my roots, merged into the music that I loved,
that was my passion.
This is why I believe that who we are is essentially a delicate balance
between where we come from along with the way that our heart beats.
And this has been proven to me
throughout all my years and also in my activities.
I toured the world.
I had the chance to play music
that bridged and united people together through music
and brought fans from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon,
from India to South America.
I've been able to make people happy throughout the power of music.
Enemies were dancing together.
Throughout this musical journey of mine,
I encountered a sincere genuine problem.
Actually a challenge.
I play 19 different guitar types, string instruments:
bouzouki, saz, oud, cümbüş, ukulele, charango;
from Armenia to Bolivia, if you have strings, I will find you
(Laughter)
and I will use you in ways I hope you'll like.
(Laughter)
This has challenges of its own, right?
You know, to hold 40+ instruments,
all the types, variations of those instruments.
I have a room at my place, a room at my parents' place.
People come to our living room, they sit on a guitar accidentally.
(Laughter)
But what I do in my live shows
is focusing and playing with essentially two, three, four types of guitars.
Sometimes I have to move in between them in the same song even.
One of them is the electric guitar, as you've seen--
(Guitar music)
OK.
And the other is the bouzouki, you know, the Greek mandolin.
(Bouzouki music)
And the third was the acoustic guitar, or the nylon string guitar.
(Acoustic guitar music)
I looked for ways that I can combine them, all of them in one instrument.
And then I thought, "What will I do?"
I've started to find all kinds of solutions.
They were all cumbersome and really not efficient.
So I thought like a child. I said, "What would my children do?"
When they want something, for example, one of them wants a cookie.
They don't think twice or how it cannot be done, they just do it.
They never stop, they keep going.
They'll take a table, they'll put a chair,
they'll put another chair on top of it, and eventually they'll reach the cookie,
because almost everything they do, they do for the first time
and almost everything they do, they want to do out of passion
because they really need it; they have a genuine need to get to those cookies.
And for me, this guitar was my big cookie.
So I went to a guitar maker with a lot of experience,
and I told him, "I want to built this guitar, take me to the Moon."
And he said
- and he came highly recommended because of his vast experience -
it cannot be done.
Actually he said, they will compete on shared resources in such a way
that the instrument will never sound good
and it will be for sure cumbersome and have tilt issues etc.
So as he was speaking, I was thinking to myself,
"I have cars at home, I came to a car manufacturer.
Well, actually I want to go to the Moon; I need a rocket engineer."
So I looked for my rocket engineer and when I thought about it, I said,
"The piano is a string instrument, essentially."
So I went to a guy that had experience in piano building.
Actually his name is Benjamin Miller, guitar maker.
Today he builds guitars.
Also at the time he was building some guitars,
but most of his experience to date back then was in renovating pianos.
So I figured: this guy knows about acoustics,
this guy knows about musical instruments, about wood choices, etc.
Carpeting.
So I told him, "Let's go to the Moon. If you will."
We came out to this quest, to this journey,
and we made all the designs, and after more than a dozen meetings
and a process that spanned almost half a year,
we eventually came up with a prototype.
And this failed!
(Laughter)
It didn't work.
And I was sitting there holding this corpse of a vision.
And you know what was the saddest thing about it?
That each and every word the guitar maker said,
happened.
It was cumbersome, it had tilt issues, it didn't sound good.
Everything, word by word, all his words were written in stone.
But few minutes after that, when I came back to my senses,
I picked up that prototype and I said, "OK, let's see.
Here, this choice of woods here was probably wrong.
And the angle of the necks, the ergonomics here.
The weights of the tuning forks."
So we made a lot of modifications, maybe close to 100 of them.
And this is how this guitar was brought into this world,
out of holding your failure in your hands;
because sometimes when people tell you, you're going to fail,
and you don't go to the quest, that's one thing;
when you go to the guest and you fail miserably, shame thee.
That's a whole different thing.
I want to show you a quick tour of the guitar.
You already heard some of the sounds that it produces.
So as you've seen, this guitar is an embodiment of my musical journey.
It's the East and the West. It's acoustic and electric.
It's the roots combined with the passion for modern music and contemporary music.
So I can play anything from, you know, stuff that is a bit more contemporary--
(Guitar music)
And I can play, you know, all kinds of rock and roll stuff.
I can also--
The guitar is a fascinating instrument, because you can play so many--
(Guitar music)
So many variations and with so many accessories and peripherals.
And essentially, of course, there is the bouzouki.
(Bouzouki music)
But something happened one day,
when I accidentally plugged the wrong cable
to the wrong jack here in the guitar.
And...
I heard something something like that--
(Guitar music)
This is how a guitar sounds through a bouzouki.
A sound that was never there before in the world.
It wasn't possible acoustically to produce,
because these two souls, these two different cultures
now share one body as we all do.
We are all connected; we know that, we feel that.
So now one can resonate through the other
and produce sounds that were not possible before.
I want to ask you a question.
Are there butterflies in the desert?
Well, I introduced this question to a lot of people,
actually hundreds of people on the Internet,
and I asked this to them.
I'll tell you the statistics.
Most of you think "there are no butterflies in the desert."
Some of you think, "Maybe, why not?"
Some say, a minority says, "Yes. Why not? Why wouldn't there be?"
So I studied it and I researched it a bit.
And not only do butterflies exist in deserts,
there are butterflies actually in each and every desert on our planet.
And furthermore, butterflies are one of the most diverse creatures
that there are in deserts all around the planet.
And you'd think,
what would a beautiful colorful creature representing freedom do in a wasteland,
in a place that has maybe no life in it or has very little life in it?
And this is exactly the dualism we're facing each and every day.
These are the misconceptions
that we are living about ourselves, about everything that we do in life.
We think, we cannot be butterflies in the desert, but there are actually.
Let me take you to another desert: the Moon.
Did you know that when you leave your footsteps on the Moon,
they are most likely to last there forever?
Because essentially there is no wind on the Moon,
so there's nothing to wipe it off the surface.
Except a meteoric collision, of course...
but still, that would probably stay.
But I think we don't have to go to the Moon
in order for our footsteps to resonate here and to the next generations,
because I believe our foundations, our roots, resonate in everything we do.
I know, my family, my father and my grandfather's do,
in everything that I do
and I'm hoping that my foundations, when the day comes,
will resonate, too, through everything that my daughters, my children, will do.
So I believe that foundations aligned with your passion
can essentially lead to innovation and empowerment.
So I encourage you to go out there
and be the butterfly you can be in your own desert.
Thank you.
(Applause)