When I returned to school in 2021, freshly buzzed from my 3 week ordination, Kru Than told me about how he watched the livestream of our closing ceremony. He told me how what I said (some pseudo-intellectual but lowk true bs about uncomfort in change, because that was my 14 year-old understanding of the style of Buddhist monks’ lecture) had really impacted him.
I felt respected in that moment—as if he saw me, a bad student who never practiced and never bothered to take the exam that would’ve been the culmination of his decade spent playing electric guitar, and him, for all intents and purposes a god wielding an instrument, as equals. But the feeling wasn’t foreign, it never was.
I’ve been through four generations of Kru Than’s space. Once a hut in a place I don’t even remember anymore, his room eventually got upgraded in (I wanna say) 2015. Remember when you could walk down the stairs next to the world language building? That persisted for a while, then they demolished that building and moved the instrumental music dept. to the CAB. Which, by the way, what a downgrade… and the music heads got worse every year too. And when they got rid of that, they relegated him further to the second floor of a literal construction shed in the elementary playground.
I remember being extremely cold the very first time I sat down with him. He always had the AC down crazy low.
I guess I got bigger better from the days of having to fully extend my arms to reach the first fret, and a few years on, I played my very first show with Ryan. It was a duet of the song Pipeline. Ryan naturally killed the show, and of course, I didn’t practice enough and fucked it up pretty bad. Such is showbiz. He congratulated us, beaming, and I felt that he was proud.
That kept me playing, and eventually we started Algorhythm. Ken was the original drummer, and Oscar Knight joined pretty early on to play piano. Kru Than would promise me these pandan Khanom krok deserts for a job well done, and they motivated me like nothing. I still miss them.
There was a time, shortly post-Covid, that I thought he would retire for good. I could tell he was always tired (he told me as much) and inferred that maybe teaching had started eluding his interest. He seemed to be having more fun woodworking, carving classical guitars, or whatever he was learning.
Yet, he still stayed, enough for me to see him get through his macho wrestler mask phase and move on to his green apron phase. If I had to guess why? He loved his students too much to leave.
We always joked that he spent most of his income on guitars—I’ve seen a few pictures of his house. But in all of this, I’d like to wager that he spent most of his energy, time, and love on guitars, and by extension, his students too. We often don’t get to thank the people that built us up the most enough.
For Kru Than, you introduced me to music
