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Sam and I went to see Tommy Emmanuel in Bellevue last Saturday night. In and of itself that doesn’t tell you much. It wasn’t just a simple concert though, it was an evening out.
Many might not know who Tommy Emmanuel is or what style of music he plays. We’ll get to that and when we’re done you’ll (probably) be a fan.
The first interesting part to this evening is the event Tommy was part of. Tommy was playing at the Wintergrass Bluegrass Festival, which was a three day event held in the Westin and Hyatt Regency hotels in Bellevue, Washington. You could purchase tickets for the entire weekend which got you into all the various shows. Sam and I just purchased single session tickets to only see Tommy but it was free to wander around the halls so we spent a couple of hours hanging out prior to our show. There were quite a few vendors selling various musical related items. There was a room just with (mainly) local instrument makers. Another vendor was selling used stringed instruments. The most expensive that we saw was a guitar from the 50’s that they were asking $18,000 for. The amazing thing to me is that all these guitars were just sitting there and you could pick one up and play it if you wanted. If I were the owner I don’t think I would be so trusting.
So. What exactly is Bluegrass? If you’re not familiar with the style it’s a type of roots music. Loosely defined, roots music encompasses early American folk, blues, gospel and country (just to name a few genres). Bluegrass originated in the Appalachians in the 1940’s and is almost exclusively played with acoustic stringed instruments. The fiddle, bass, guitar, banjo and the mandolin are all common instruments but other types of the guitar, such as the dobro are often included.
The really fun part of the festival was that musicians could bring their instruments and jam with others, and this was happening all over the place with anywhere from two to ten people hanging out in an area just playing together. I should have taken more video but here’s a short little clip of four fiddle players. I assume they were playing instruments from the vendor they’re standing in front of. I think what impressed me most was that we saw literally dozens, if not hundreds, of musicians playing together and they were all good. I don’t know a lot about how to play bluegrass but just listening to it, it seems like a very hard style to play from a technical perspective. There’s a lot going on with almost every instrument.
Ok, so Tommy Emmanuel is a bluegrass player? No, not really. Tommy is mainly an instrumentalist from Australia who plays the acoustic guitar. I’d say he incorporates many styles of music into his playing, blues, country, rock, jazz. Mainly he writes a song or chooses a song to cover and creates his own arrangement. Everyone argues over the “greatest of all time” moniker and usually it’s a completely subjective title. There’s no doubt that Tommy is one of the best acoustic guitarists around though. As he was introduced by the MC, he doesn’t consider himself to be in the music business, he says he’s in the “happiness business”. I was talking to a friend about the show and he said he didn’t care for Tommy because he shows off. I read reviews by people who say he’s smug. From a certain perspective I can see why they might say that, but if you listen to him he doesn’t come off that way. Sure he’s confident in his ability, and he has every right to be. He also seems humble though and thankful for the life he’s been allowed to pursue. He’s reached a level of technical proficiency in his playing where he doesn’t have to focus on what he’s doing on the guitar, or at least he doesn’t have the appearance of focusing on the guitar. He can focus on the audience and just have fun, and I’d much rather see that than someone who is technically brilliant but has to be focused on playing every note perfect at the expense of enjoying the moment.
TED talks are a bizarre phenomena to me. Maybe they started out with a theme but now it seems like anything goes. If you’ve got eighteen minutes to kill watch this TED talk and you’ll be a Tommy Emmanuel fan for life. The amount of talent the man possesses is amazing.
So, can Tommy play bluegrass? I assume Tommy can play anything Tommy wants to play. The band that played just prior to Tommy was the Jerry Douglas Band. I can’t tell you much about them and we didn’t have tickets to the show but apparently Jerry Douglas is a legend in his own right. Also, apparently Tommy and Jerry are friends and Tommy had members of the band play with him on several songs. Here’s where Tommy and the band go full bluegrass together. Here’s Tommy playing with a couple of the members, doing a version of The House of the Rising Sun.
BTW, Tommy joked at one point about how he had to give his pants back to the mummy after the show (forcing you to watch one of the videos….).
Most of the show was Tommy playing solo though. Here’s a lovely version of Amazing Grace. Here’s a version of Sixteen Tons, an old song from the 1940’s. Finally, a couple of short clips showing off his percussion skills, here and here.
If I had one criticism of the show it would have to be that it was simply too short. Tommy played the last show of the evening so it didn’t start until 9:50pm and he only played a little over an hour. I guess that’s understandable given the setting but I was certainly left wanting more.
No post is complete without a human interest story. Sam and I seem to attract characters who might be a little outside normal. Maybe because of my beard and Sam’s…Samuelness…people seem to find us approachable and we seem to always have random conversations with the most interesting folks. In this case we were standing in queue waiting to get into the theater and we struck up a conversation with a guy drinking a glass of water, but it wasn’t just a glass of water. He had mushroom extract in it and said his friend creates these mushroom tinctures. He pulled out a vial and I smelled it. Smelled like musty chocolate. He offered me some and I politely declined. I have no idea what kind of mushrooms were in it and we didn’t ask but I’d like to be able to drive home after the show, thank you very much… Anyway, interesting guy even though Sam and I both agreed from the way he was acting that maybe his mushroom potion wasn’t completely legal.
