TOMMY EMMANUEL - CAMBRIDGE FOLK FESTIVAL
Ears can be deceptive There are times when hearing is not believing. This was never truer than listening to Tommy Emmanuel weave his six-string alchemy on Stage 1. He plays guitar better than his pinball wizard namesake. The Australian maestro was in top form and rarely, if ever, have I heard guitar played so wonderfully. Does Emmanuel have ten fingers on each hand? Was there a phantom second strummer hiding under the stage? No. Tommy is simply a master of his instrument – a Segovia of folk rock. His hour-long set flew by. It was an eclectic menu of guitar artistry. Some of his pieces were sonata like with changing tempi, now lyrical, now supercharged. His style is impossible to pin down. A touch of Flamenco here, a dash of classical gas there. One unnamed piece had a strong bluegrass feel. It was like a mad dash through Hillbilly country clinging on to a speeding Harley-Davidson. Again, one was astonished at the layers of sound this one man with two hands and the standard number of pinkies could elicit.
We were then treated to medley of songs by Merle Travis including his iconic 1946 anthem, ‘Sixteen Tons’ . Emmanuel riffed around the melodic lines with his usual demonic grace and gave us a snatch of his singing voice (to be fair, nothing to write home about but then you wouldn’t expect much if Nigel Kennedy started to singalong to his violin playing).
The gig ended with a Beatles tribute. Tommy turbocharged the melodies including ‘Imagine’, ‘I Feel Fine’ (we all did) and ‘My Guitar Gently Weeps’. He cajoled the audience to do the vocals and it was like some gigantic Karaoke with Jimi Hendrix providing the backing. Not content with being a genius of the guitar strings, he also used his instrument as a beat box increasing the tempo beyond what any whirling Dervish could accomplish.
Behind all this heart-stopping playing is a performer who exudes an avuncular charm, putting his audience at ease whilst playing a pepped-up Paganini. There were gentle moments such as the solo piece he wrote to celebrate his daughter’s birth and a lilting Celtic melody that transported his audience to some misty loch.
The gig ended, I was so happy to find, with the 1960s classic ‘Classical Gas’. Of course Tommy put his foot on that gas. There was nothing gentle or weepy in his guitar. But you had to hear it to believe it.
