 |
||
|
A page for guitarists, playing various numbers of strings, who don't fit into a handy category.
Jack Bruce Jeff Beck John Goldie Preston Reed Davey Graham Ron Moore
John Goldie, Picked in the Past (Watercolour)
From The Sunday Herald, August 1, 2010.
Music, Chris Rea, Festival Theatre, Chris Rea’s ability to fill large theatres like this may be founded on a string of radio-friendly, easy on the ear hits but the core of this performance was the blues he embraced in his youth through That’s not to say that he’s ditched the hits in favour of the twelve-bar song form - as the son of an ice cream parlour owner he’s too canny a businessman for that. But while giving the customers what they’ve come to hear, Rea also gives them lots of what he wants to play – and that means much genuinely exciting, stinging and snarling slide guitar allied to a slightly curious, almost bashful showmanship that coordinates dance steps with his strumming action. It helps, of course, that Rea has a gravelly voice that could make the term “party political broadcast” sound alluring, although even he struggled to toughen the corny sentimentality of Til the Morning Sun Shines on My Love and Me. He also has a band that makes playing rockin’ blues appear akin to driving an automatic car, slipping almost imperceptibly from mid tempo to Josephine’s samba groove to Stainsby Girls’ roadhouse power. His own voice and guitar talent aside, though, Rea’s greatest asset here was Robert Ahwai, who gave a rhythm guitar master class and whose slinky counterpoint to Rea’s slow-moanin’ slide made Somewhere Between Highway 61 & 49 the sort of deep in the gut, bluesy thrill that sends you home to dig out the album and listen to it all over again. From The Herald, April 5, 2010.
Jack Bruce, Robin Trower & Gary Husband, Queen’s Hall, EdinburghThis was the Homecoming gig that mattered to the capacity audience at the Queen's Hall on Friday, the return of a hero, Jack Bruce, the Cambuslang boy who went off and literally conquered the world in rock music terms. Which Jack would turn up, though? Answer: quite a few of them.
He was Jack the Lad, pleading with blokes going out for a smoke not to leave and mocking his sixties anthem Sunshine of Your Love with peace signs. He was Jack the bass guitarist with the unique presence, playing with an economy that meshed brilliantly with Robin Trower's howlin', articulate, moody blues guitar and drummer Gary Husband's super- efficient combination of thunder and subtlety.
Most affectingly, though, he was Jack the Voice. To describe the Jack Bruce of Cream as a great singer now seems like a glib understatement. This is a man who has sung the words of Samuel Beckett, as well as buckets of blues and the resulting depth of character and sheer tonal range, already huge, appear still to be growing.
His gnawing away at "is this real life?" towards Just Another Day's coda was staggeringly effective and his singing consistently took the trio's sharply focused, hard-edged blues-rock into the realms of high art, even if he mischievously dismissed his stunningly re-imagined Cream song We're Going Wrong, delivered with superbly anguished bewilderment, as "a classic example of Scottish miserablism". The honorary doctorates and degrees conferred by his local seats of learning are the least such a talent deserves but how great, too, to hear it in such a simpatico band.
From The Herald, August 10, 2009.
Jeff Beck, Performing this week … live at Ronnie Scott’s (Eagle)The guitar hero’s guitar hero, Jeff Beck just gets better and better, forever adding to an exciting repertoire of sounds and techniques and finding new ways to express himself through hard rock, reggae, jazz fusion, soul, funk and techno. Working through all of these styles and more here with his superb road band, Beck remains essentially a blues singer. He may do it on a Fender Stratocaster and be playing an Indian number (Nadia) or even a Beatles song (A Day in the Life), but he’s singing the blues all right – with a passion.
From The Herald, December 27, 2008
Jeff Beck, Royal Concert Hall, GlasgowIt's 8.35pm and Jeff Beck goes to work. Not as a waiter in the Starship Enterprise dinette, as his all-white rig-out might suggest, but as the supreme being of the rock guitar instrumental.
This won't be about Beck proving he's the fastest gun in the west, although once or twice he does send his fingers up the fretboard in improbable haste while still making perfect musical sense. For Beck, strapping on his Stratocaster is about touch and finding myriad shades between administering the merest tap and applying a crunching kerrang. Nothing's overblown. There are no 20-minute solos. Beck may not sing - at least not on stage, where in fact, he barely speaks - but these are song-like portions of music, chosen to provide variety of context from the faintly nostalgic opener, Beck's Bolero to his edgy, itchy take on Nitin Sawhney's modern rock raga Nadia. His band are thoroughly versed in every arrangement subtlety: the powerhouse drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, who adds tablas to Nadia; keyboardist Jason Rebello, a discreet but valued presence who in another life might have been performing down the road at the jazz festival with former boss Tommy Smith; and Tal Wilkenfeld, who belies her girlish stature with muscly bass guitar lines that sometimes finish Beck's statements for him, sometimes bolster them in unison. A four-handed bass solo between Beck and Wilkenfeld is the one piece of shameless showbiz in a set that offers a masterclass in digital communication, not least on Angel (Footsteps), where Beck plays goosebump-creating slide guitar and A Day in the Life, where the Beatles' soap opera is delivered as a mini, multi-dimensional electronic epic. From The Herald, June 30, 2009.
John Goldie - picking a winning combinationJohn Goldie had a vision. It was no ordinary vision – this one came complete with a soundtrack. It happens often. Some might call it second sight. But Goldie calls it composition. Sitting with his guitar in hand, Goldie pictured a children’s playground that had been trashed in an explosion. The roundabout was still spinning but there were no children anywhere to be seen, just a bedraggled rag doll sitting, going round and round in time to the music that Goldie’s fingers found on his Martin acoustic. Eleven similar experiences later, the Airdrie-based musician had his latest album, Open 4 Closure, ready to record. It’s an album that’s opening new doors. A few weeks ago, Goldie, who has worked all over the world, doing solo gigs alongside some of Nashville’s greatest pickers, playing second guitar in jazz wiz Martin Taylor’s Spirit of Django band, working in theatre pits and on television shows with Motown stars, encountered his first folk club audience.
“I’d never even been in a folk club before that night in Leith and I hadn’t a clue what to expect,” he says. “But I felt right at home after the first number because I couldn’t believe how responsive the people were. They just seemed prepared to listen to whatever I wanted to play – even when I played my version of that well known traditional song, Smoke on the Water – and that was great for me because I’ve never fitted into a category.”
Smoke on the Water, which was the first tune he learned to play, has become Goldie’s ice breaker. Just before that night in Leith he played five sell-out concerts in Korea, where the Deep Purple classic is still a massive favourite, and given Goldie’s acoustic treatment, it had the Koreans going nuts. After the concerts they would come up and check to see that the lead from the pick-up on his guitar really did feed directly into an amplifier with no pedals, gizmos or any other electric tricks involved.
Goldie started playing guitar at the age of six, picking out Bob Dylan songs as well as Deep Purple riffs, and from then on, he says, he was pretty much in a little guitar world of his own. Records were bought and worn out as he dropped the stylus on to the guitar solos, learning them phrase by phrase in the time-honoured tradition. By his early teens he could hold his own with the guys three or four years above him in school who used to put on lunchtime concerts and parade their Brown Sugars, Freebirds and Allman Brothers numbers.
“Lanarkshire seemed to be full of bands back then,” he says. “You could hang out with musicians at school or in music shops and there were studios where people were actually recording their own songs, guys like Hue & Cry and the Big Dish, who were only a few years ahead of me and were great examples. Here were guys from down the road who were showing that it was possible to go off and be a professional musician – you didn’t have to be from wherever it was that the big names came from.”
Goldie’s first venture into professionalism, with a band kept busy with functions and social club gigs, almost stalled before it started.
“The guitar I had at the time was an old acoustic that doubled as a cross-bow,” he recalls. “The strings were about a foot off the fretboard, so I didn’t bother taking it to the audition and when the guys asked where my gear was, I lied and said my electric guitar had a warped neck and my amp had blown a speaker. These blokes were all in their thirties and they just laughed at this pathetic fifteen year old and told me to use the spares they had. I got the gig, played on a borrowed guitar for about two years and started saving every penny I earned to buy decent equipment.”
Thus began an odyssey that included taking a further education course in chemistry to appease his parents, who didn’t trust the idea of a musician’s life (“I’m not sure they trust it yet,” adds Goldie jovially), and has led to friendships with fellow guitarists including George Benson, Australian showman par excellence Tommy Emmanuel, and of course, Martin Taylor, who is the subject of an affectionate and deeply soulful tribute, An Honorary Scot, on Open 4 Closure.
Benson’s Breezin’ album was one of those records that Goldie wore out in pursuit of learning and he tells an insightful story of meeting his hero at a tribute to jazz guitar great Wes Montgomery in the tiny Zinc Bar in Manhattan.
“A friend of mine, Dave O’Rourke, a guitarist from Cork who now lives in New York, invited me to come and play at this gig he was organising,” says Goldie. “So I was sitting watching as the drummer and bass player, who turned out to be the jazz singer Betty Carter’s rhythm section, set up. I thought, Okay. Then Russell Malone, who at that time was working with Diana Krall, appeared, played a few numbers and was pretty hot. But then, everyone was pretty hot because this was the hard core New York guitar team.”
Goldie noticed that any time he went to the bar, he was given whatever he asked for and told that, because he was a visitor from Scotland, he didn’t have to pay.
“That wasn’t quite the truth but, anyhow, George Benson eventually got up to play and on the first tune, he was on a par with the rest of the players. On his second tune, he probably topped the best player in the room but on his third tune, he opened up this gear box that nobody else has and was just unbelievable.”
When he was sitting in his bedroom back in Coatbridge, trying to steal Benson’s licks, Goldie never imagined he’d ever meet him, let alone be having breakfast with him after the Wes Montgomery tribute – Benson took the entire crew out to eat after the music finally stopped and he’d quietly arranged to pick up the bar tab – or be asked to play for Benson when he appeared at Glasgow Jazz Festival a year or so later.
“I thought, He’ll never remember me from that night in New York, so when he walked right up to me in Glasgow and said, Hi, John, how’re you doin’? I thought either this guy has a fantastic memory or someone’s given him a script. But it was genuine and he’s the living contradiction to the ‘never meet your heroes because they’ll always disappoint you’ rule.”
For a time Goldie tried to have a jazz guitar career of his own, at a slightly more modest level than Benson’s, but he felt he didn’t have enough of his own thing to bring to the guitar, bass and drums format. He loved playing in Spirit of Django and still works on and off with Martin Taylor. But it was while working in a touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s company that he found his own voice as a composer and guitarist.
“We were staying out in the country and I was sharing a cottage with the drummer, who was a real night bird,” he says. “I’m completely the opposite and I’d get up in the morning and take the acoustic outside and play, and that’s where I had my first experience of this visual image with an accompanying tune come into my head. It just seems to be the way composition works for me, as a complete package, and I put a few things together on that tour.”
He sent a demo of these ideas to German guitarist and label proprietor Peter Finger, who was part of country blues picker Stefan Grossman’s acoustic guitar stable in the 1970s, and Finger immediately invited Goldie over to his studio in Osnabruck to make a solo album. Released in 2002, the result, The View from Here, was Goldie’s passport onto the world acoustic guitar circuit. It also marked the beginning of a productive relationship with Nick Turner and Mary Ann Kennedy at Watercolour Music in Ardgour, where some additional tracks were recorded.
A further album, This Time and Place, cemented both Goldie’s reputation as one of the major new voices of acoustic guitar and his relationship with Watercolour, and when he felt ready to work with other musicians on Open 4 Closure, he was able to trust Turner and Kennedy’s recommendations. Enter accordionist Angus Lyon and double bassist Duncan Lyall, who are busy as both musicians and record producers on the traditional music scene. Also, as anyone who has heard Lyon’s magnificent 18 Months Later album in partnership with fiddler Ruaridh Campbell will attest, these are players with open minds and imagination.
“There were sounds I heard in my head for certain tunes and when I described what I was after, Nick and Mary Ann said, We know the very guys,” he says. “And they were spot-on. I got together for a run-through with Angus and Duncan and told them, Just do your own thing because I don’t play your instruments, and they came up with exactly what I was looking for. I’d describe the trashed playground and the ragdoll scenario to them and they had the decency not to burst out laughing, which was nice, and everything fell quickly into place.”
This is an understatement. You’d never know from hearing Open 4 Closure that it was recorded in a day, with drummer Jim Drummond, cellist Pete Harvey and tuba player Andy McKreel fitting in as naturally as Lyon and Lyall. It’s a mixed bag, with funk, soul-jazz, Cajun and folk influences and Goldie going back to the blues playing that occupied much of his teenage years. Goldie’s theme for BBC Scotland’s comedy series Dear Green Place is also included and more soundtrack work would appeal. Such was the chemistry during the recording, however, that it’s continued and Goldie is in danger of becoming a band leader as well as a composer-guitarist.
“We’ve done about half a dozen gigs together since we finished the album and when we played the British Guitar Festival particularly, I felt real potential,” he says. “The guys were really going to town and they can bring their own material, too, although I wouldn’t mind learning it before we play it. When we played as a duo at Leith Folk Club, Angus said, Here’s a couple of my tunes, one’s in E, the other’s in F – but he didn’t tell me which was which.”
From The Herald, December 20, 2008.
Preston Reed - capturing the right spiritA New Yorker in Girvan may not have quite the same romantic ring to it as An American in Paris. Since moving to the town on the Ayrshire coast six years ago, however, guitarist Preston Reed has found the kind of inspiration and support that his artistic compatriots, including Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon from the jazz world, discovered in the French capital.
Much of this has to do with meeting his wife and manager, Catherine Maguire, in a beer tent at the nearby Kirkmichael Guitar Festival. Maguire, a Dubliner with little or no previous experience of the music business, has since applied a tenacious instinct to every part of Reed’s career, resulting in an increasingly busy round of tours, concerts and recordings. Yet Reed simply leaving America has also played a part in this success story.
"America can be a tough place to find work," says Reed, "and the support system, for me at any rate, just wasn’t there. Over here, I feel that what I do has value, and that’s important. Oddly enough, my audience in the States has grown since I moved to Scotland but other territories have also opened up, like Italy and Ireland, which keeps growing and growing. So this has definitely been the best move I could have made."
The best illustration Reed can give of his improved circumstances is his latest album, Spirit. Previously, Reed’s reputation was built on an extraordinary solo acoustic guitar style that involves the fingers of both hands playing percussively on the fretboard, much improbably fluent fingerpicking and the guitar being turned into a drum. One enthusiastic reviewer described the effect of Reed applying this technique to James Brown’s funk classic I Feel Good as "a well above average white one-man band."
To the outsider, such virtuosity might seem daunting. With Spirit, though, Reed got much more personal, much more approachable, more like a classic jazz guitarist. The two hands hovering over the fretboard style gave way to a more conventional approach and the music itself changed from the fiendishly well worked out to a largely conversational song form.
For Reed, whose career hasn’t been entirely devoid of lucky breaks – he made his concert debut at the age of seventeen, supporting beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, thanks to a friend of his sister – Spirit just wouldn’t have happened had he stayed in America.
"The story behind the album goes back to my meeting my friend Malcolm Cooper, who plays classical guitar and collects guitars of all kinds," says Reed. "When we first met, he was living in Manchester and after a concert at the Royal Northern College, he invited me back to his place to look at his guitars. The first guitar he showed me was a Yahama from the 1970s, a classic, hollow bodied jazz guitar modelled on the Gibsons that Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery used to play."
Reed liked the look of this instrument but because of the history involved with all the jazz greats playing something similar, he found it intimidating. So he strummed a few chords on it and put it down.
At the time, as Catherine will confirm with her eyes raised to the heavens, Reed was on something of a guitar acquisition drive. One by one, a 12 string acoustic, a nylon-strung Spanish model, a Fender Stratocaster and others arrived in Reed’s music room and found their way into his concerts with tunes specially written for each one. The odd one out was a hollow bodied jazz guitar he’d bought that didn’t quite have the ‘play me, play me’ drawing power of the others.
Then friend Malcolm, who by this time had moved to Edinburgh, invited Reed round to see his new house and there in the living room was the same Yamaha from before. This time, rather than being intimidated by it, Reed found that he couldn’t put it down.
"It just wouldn’t let me go," he says, "and after about half an hour, it began to feel wonderful and sound really good. Everything about it just seemed so right. So I said to Malcolm, You know, I’ve wanted to do something with a jazz guitar for a long time and the one I bought doesn’t have anything like the same magic as this one, would you consider letting me borrow it for a week?"
Malcolm made a better offer than that. He told Reed he would give him the guitar to keep if he promised to do something with it.
"He’s very much of the opinion that instruments need to be played rather than displayed," says Reed. "I know that something similar to this happened with Martin Taylor and an American collector but I just couldn’t imagine someone being so magnanimous with me over there. So, anyway, I took the guitar away and spent six months playing it and really becoming attached to it. Then at the end of last year, I had two months off the road and I decided that I should make a CD using just this guitar."
Everything about Spirit was a new adventure. Reed went over to Dublin to record in a studio he’d never worked in before with engineers he’d never met. And whereas, before, every composition would have been meticulously worked out before being recorded, this time Reed only had brief sketches of each piece.
"If the album sounds spontaneous," he says, "that’s because most of the music was spontaneous. I had chord changes to some of the pieces but the actual melodies all came together on the spot. It was quite scary, to be honest, and after about an hour on the first day, I was almost in tears because I couldn’t bring anything out. I told Bill, one of the engineers, I’m sorry, I can’t do this. But he was great, he wasn’t producing me but he got me to relax and try again and we became like a team after that. Maybe you have to scare yourself every so often to come up with something new and worthwhile."
Although it includes a jazz standard, All the Things You Are, Reed doesn’t consider Spirit to be, strictly speaking, a jazz album because he doesn’t improvise in the way that a jazz player does. He is, he says, a composer first and a guitar player second and when he plays them in concert, the songs from Spirit don’t actually stray very far, if at all, from the originals.
"Once I find my favourite way of playing something, I tend not to add new ideas to it," he says. "Because when I’m happy with something, that’s the way I want people to hear it. I tried All the Things You Are simply because I wanted to see what would happen. I’ve always loved jazz, particularly John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Pat Metheny, because they play in such a personal way and that’s what I feel I’ve done with Spirit. It’s much more personal and more intimate than my other stuff."
Since he recorded Spirit, the Yamaha guitar’s pull hasn’t lessened. Reed has never found practising a chore but he’s now playing more guitar than at any time since his teens. During the summer leading up to his debut performance at the Smithsonian, his mother found him a temporary job with the company where she worked in Sweden. Alone for much of the time in a foreign country and in a town where he knew nobody (a Swedish adventure came later, he confides with his hearty guffaw), Reed practised like crazy.
It was, he says, the summer when he rose above the bedroom guitar picker standard that he’d achieved through clandestine experiments with his father’s guitar and began to master the idiosyncratic styles of his early heroes, Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna, John Fahey and Leo Kottke.
"The way I work now is probably more disciplined than back then," he says. "When I’m off the road, I like to get up with a cup of coffee and spend a couple of hours playing tunes from the jazz musician’s Bible, the Real Book. Then I’ll spend a couple of hours working on new compositions and after that, I rehearse my concert repertoire thoroughly because I need to keep on top of that. So, it’s pretty full-on guitar, guitar, guitar most days."
Whether Reed wants to call his new direction jazz or not, he’s already finding a more sympathetic response from jazz promoters and the jazz media. One area of jazz that he would like to explore is having a singer add lyrics to some of the tracks from Spirit as he feels that they could have a life of their own as jazz songs.
"I was aware when they were coming together that a lot of them had a jazz ballad feel, and if having them made into actual songs means my music reaches more people, I’d be delighted," he says.
"It’s up to other people to decide if what I’m doing by myself is jazz. For me primarily what the new stuff I’m doing offers is a good live show. I’m not going out on the road with eight guitars any more. But I’m not going to ditch the two handed acoustic stuff because that’s what will have attracted most of the people to the gig. What we’ll have is the new stuff, where I can sit down and talk about the tunes, do the intimate thing, and then I can stand up and do the high energy stuff, the wow factor if you want to call it that. It makes for quite a contrast."
From The Herald, March 31, 2007.
Davey Graham RIPOf all the many thousands of guitarists who picked up the instrument during the 1950s skiffle boom, nobody took it on a bigger adventure or cast a longer shadow than Davey Graham.
If Graham had stopped after composing Anji, the piece he named after a girlfriend in France in 1959 and that went on to become the acoustic guitarist’s rite of passage (Paul Simon was among those who recorded it), he probably still would have become a legend. Anji, however, was just one milestone on a path that journeyed from the folk music of the British Isles through jazz, blues, Broadway show tunes, Eastern European traditions, Moroccan modes and down into the Indian subcontinent. Sometimes all of the above would combine in a medley.
On the way and to facilitate his musical experiments, Graham invented the DADGAD guitar tuning, which has become as prevalent among folk and traditional guitar players as the standard EADGBE tuning, a contribution whose value can hardly be calculated.
Graham had eclecticism in his blood. His father, Hamish, was a native Gaelic speaker from Skye and his mother, Winifred, born in Georgetown, British Guyana, brought the French language to the household as well as Oriental and Native American blood to the family lineage.
From the moment he first heard Lonnie Donegan, Graham was hooked. He could barely concentrate in school for thinking about the imagery that Donegan’s singing of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie songs conjured up and when he got his first guitar at the age of fifteen, it became an almost constant companion. He caught the travelling bug early, taking off at every opportunity from jobs as varied as librarian and crate humper for Paris and the Cote d’Azur, travelling on to Greece and being seduced by the sound of the oud, as well as the taste of Maajun (the sticky hashish confectionery) in Morocco.
Travelling as much in his imagination and musical appreciation as he did physically, he somehow developed the ability to hear a Thelonious Monk blues, a Charlie Mingus jazz rumble, a baroque piece or a slow air on the uilleann pipes and orchestrate it – and this isn’t overstating matters – for the guitar in a style that was completely his own.
His first recording, an EP with his sometime musical partner and bandleader, Alexis Korner, featured Anji, a composition all the more impressive considering he’d only been playing guitar for three or four years when he developed something so intricate. By this time he’d also got his first real professional break, accompanying Australian singer Shirley Abicair on a television series and in major concerts, and had already wowed television viewers with his rendition of Cry Me a River for Ken Russell’s BBC arts programme, Monitor. Through his regular solo residency at Nick’s Diner in Earls Court, Graham’s name began to reach record company executives and film producers (he turned up singing and playing the blues in the Dirk Bogarde movie The Servant) as well as awe-stricken fellow guitarists.
If his first album, The Guitar Player … Plus, confirmed Graham’s abilities with jazz and blues standards, it was his next two recordings that really established his reputation, firstly, Folk Roots, New Routes, which pitched Graham together with English rose par excellence, singer Shirley Collins, in daring settings of traditional songs, and in 1965, the classic Folk, Blues and Beyond …, which gathered traditional ballads, Bob Dylan, Leadbelly blues, Mingus gospel shout and a precursor to world music in Maajun into a collection whose original vinyl copies can now fetch hundreds of pounds.
Thereafter, Graham’s recordings were often patchy affairs, given to flashes of brilliance mixed with tracks that might have reflected his willingness to embrace contemporary songwriting by The Beatles and Joni Mitchell but didn’t always convince. For an example of what he could do, the 1997 release of a private recording from February 1967, After Hours at Hull University, is hard to beat. By now, though, he’d led a whole movement of guitarists, including Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, Jimmy Page, Archie Fisher and Wizz Jones, into previously unimagined realms of virtuosity. He was a hero, a legend, albeit also a fading star.
Part of what Graham referred to as the “ravage” that interrupted his career was due to his insistence on becoming a heroin addict. If being a junkie had, he reasoned, made Charlie Parker an even better musician, then he would try this, too. It didn’t hasten Graham’s end, as it had Parker’s, but he became unreliable and wayward.
In the 1970s promoters and audiences didn’t know which Davey (he’d changed the spelling from Davy around this time) might turn up. It might be the stoned, denim shirted bluesman who, if really inspired, could recreate his best magic. It might be the tuxedo-wearing, dodgy joke telling accompanist to his then-wife, Holly. Or it might be Davey Graham, the classical player, who could conjure Bach pieces from the guitar with extraordinary delicacy and fire but then literally punch out the stage lights.
Later, callers to his London number might be greeted by an answerphone “message” consisting of a recording of an Indian raga – played at its considerable length with no “beep” to speak after. This could have been because he’d disappeared to somewhere exotic or equally because he was busy, as reported, teaching guitar in the West Highlands.
Then, with the new century, came word that Davey Graham was back and reproducing his form of old – and when he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe, with Bert Jansch, in 2005, this seemed plausible. Though obviously nervous, he played a brief set that was typically eclectic, including a devilish Eastern European dance tune. But when he returned to Edinburgh for a full concert of his own a few weeks later, though still able to summon up his eccentric colonel in reduced circumstances persona, musically he was a sad shadow of his former self and subsequent visits didn’t exactly enhance his reputation either.
By his own admission, he found it difficult to live up to the legend but perhaps we should just be grateful that he created music worthy of his legend status in the first place because Folk, Blues and Beyond … even now, can still induce goose bumps.
Davey Graham, guitar pioneer, born November 26, 1940; died December 15, 2008.
From The Herald, January 20, 2009.
Ron Moore RIPRon Moore, who has died at the age of eighty-six, was a Glasgow guitar guru with a global constituency. His circle of friends, contacts and admirers included leading names in jazz, classical and pop music and through his former pupils he could point to his influence on Grammy-winning classical guitarists and session players who helped to shape George Michael hits alike.
The man who became a hugely respected Glasgow legend and whose music room played host to jam sessions involving some of the most prized fingers in the business was born in Huddersfield and during World War ll served in the Fleet Air Arm, occasionally entertaining his colleagues with his guitar on bases in Malta, among other postings.
At the end of the war he went to London and studied with Britain’s first guitar hero, Ivor Mairants, but on returning to Yorkshire, Moore found there were no paid outlets available locally for his newly honed talents. He played in restaurants in Manchester and around the north of England before, in 1954, deciding to try his luck in Scotland.
Arriving in Glasgow, Moore joined the house band at the Piccadilly Club in Sauchiehall Street, adding the occasional broadcast and session work with bandleaders Joe Loss, Lou Prager and Geraldo, and when the skiffle and early rock’n’roll eras heralded a boom in guitar sales, he opened a teaching studio in St Vincent Street.
It was his next moved that made Moore, if not a household name, then a household face. In September 1957, Scottish Television began broadcasting a lunchtime variety show, The One o’clock Gang. Fronted by Larry Marshall and featuring a cast including Dorothy Paul and Charlie Sim, the show proved an instant hit and every week from Monday to Friday long queues formed outside the Theatre Royal hoping to be part of the audience.
Sitting in the house band, a quartet led by drummer Tommy Maxwell, Moore became one of a select group of guitarists. Publisher, photographer and jazz guitar enthusiast Gordon Wright, who later became a friend of Moore’s, remembers running home in his lunch hour to watch Moore. “There was only really Bert Weedon and Ron playing guitar regularly on TV in those days,” says Wright. “So if you wanted even to see a guitar, Ron’s spots on the One o’Clock Gang were a must.”
Jim Mullen, the Glasgow-born guitarist who has worked with many of the top names in jazz (singer-poet Terry Callier calls Mullen “God”) and later played a significant role in Moore’s career, recalls watching his friend with envy. “Ron always had these marvellous arch top guitars from America that nobody else in Glasgow could lay hands on,” says Mullen. “But what I also admired about him was his melodic improvising style. It was very clean, nothing fancy harmonically, but he could often surprise you with the twists he took.”
The One o’clock Gang ran until December 1964, with Moore appearing alongside young emerging pop stars including Lulu, who later said that while hit records, national tours and playing prestigious venues gave her a thrill, she really felt that she’d made it when she appeared on the show. When the gang disbanded, Moore concentrated on teaching and playing gigs with his jazz trio. He also composed, both jazz tunes and classical pieces including his 1999 Clyde Suite, a series of four portraits of Scottish islands, which his former pupil, internationally renowned guitarist David Russell recorded on his acclaimed Message of the Sea album.
Also among Moore’s innumerable pupils were jazz guitarist Ian McHaffie, Gordon Sellar, who played with 1970s rock band Beggar’s Opera, and top session guitarist Hugh Burns, who acknowledges Moore’s crucial part in setting him on the right road as a professional guitarist and whose credits include the Jack Bruce Band and the distinctive guitar solo on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street as well as George Michael’s Careless Whisper.
Moore himself didn’t record until, at the age of seventy-nine in 2003, he was lured into Cava studios in Glasgow by Jim Mullen to record their CD, La Ronde, the title track being one of Moore’s own compositions.
A warm, friendly character with a gentle, ego-deflating sense of humour, Moore continued to teach at his home until quite recently and it was there that friends such as Martin Taylor would drop in for a tune or to give Moore a preview of their latest recordings. Taylor, one of the world’s most revered jazz guitarists, refused to release a record without Moore’s approval and such was the value he placed on Moore’s opinion that he consequently returned to the recording studio many times to change something or to make improvements on Moore’s advice.
“Once you were in that music room, it was difficult to get out again,” says Jim Mullen. “Because Ron never lost this fantastic enthusiasm that he had all the time I knew him. That’s what I’ll remember him for above all, his sheer love of the guitar and his reluctance to put it down once he’d picked it up.”
Ron Moore is survived by his daughter Karen, his wife, Margaret, and daughter Amber having predeceased him.
Ron Moore, guitarist, born June 16, 1923; died December 17, 2009.
From The Herald, January 2, 2010.
Site Last Updated - 31/08/2010 17:37:00
|
|
|
| All written work copyright Rob Adams. | ||
