IT’S ALL ABOUT PICKING THE MUSIC
Australian guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel says song more important than his playing
As with many a musician, guitarist Tommy Emmanuel was very young when he decided what he wanted to do with his life.
So young, in fact, that he doesn’t remember consciously thinking about it or making the choice. There was no epiphany he can remember. But it’s not a stretch to say he was pretty much born into it.
He was only six when he began playing his first professional gigs, part of a family band that toured Australia in station wagons and performed Ventures-likes surf music.
“I was the youngest,” says Emmanuel, in an interview from a tour stop in Toronto. “There was mom and dad, my two sisters and three brothers. We travelled around Australia playing little halls and theatres and we also played on the street and that kind of thing. We took the hat around. We were trying to scrape out a living.”
The band eventually won some competitions, which led to TV appearances. That led to bigger gigs and more attention.
In 1966 Emmanuel’s father died, marking the beginning of the end for the family band. This might have led to young Tommy and his siblings having a “normal” childhood. But it wasn’t to be.
“My mother said, ‘Do you want to just stay here and have a normal life and go to school, or do you want to go back on the road?’” he says. “We said ‘ We want to go back on the road!’ So my mother took us back on the road. But that didn’t last long.”
Still, by that point he was a seasoned veteran and, by the age of 11, instinctively knew he would be a lifer when it came to music.
“I can tell you that I always knew this is all I ever wanted to do,” says Emmanuel, who will play a solo guitar show at Mount Royal University’s Bella Concert Hall on Thursday, May 18.
“I was always clear on that. I did a lot of different things because I knew I needed experience and
I was hungry for knowledge and experience and I’ve always been that way and I still am. I took jobs that were not very well-paying jobs and were hard work but were with people I could learn a lot from.”
For the past half a century, Emmanuel’s career has reflected that hunger and search for knowledge. A musician’s musician, he has done everything from play studio sessions for sleepy adult-contemporary Aussies Air Supply to lead guitar for soulful New Zealand prog-rockers Dragon. Along the way, he established a formidable, technically dazzling fingerpicking style that has helped place him among the foremost guitar players in the world.
His technical prowess has been sturdy grounding for a career that has veered from jazz to country, bluegrass and pop. But his ambitions have always gone beyond guitar virtuosity.
He was only seven when he first heard “Mr. Guitar” — Chet Atkins — on the radio. As a teenager, Emmanuel wrote to the American guitar ace. Atkins became a friend and a mentor and, in 1997, the duo recorded the Grammy-nominated The Day Finger Pickers Took Over the World.
“Chet was definitely an inspiration and influence for sure,” Emmanuel says. “But he also pointed me towards being a songs person and being an entertainer and being on the lookout for all the good songs and arrangements and trying to make everything you do interesting. I learned a lot of that from him and other musicians as well. I watched people like Buddy Rich and Oscar Petersen and people at that level.”
Emmanuel’s latest album, Live! At the Ryman, was recorded at the historic auditorium in Nashville and features everything from his own perceptive originals and rollicking blues, to a Beatles medley and an elegant instrumental version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. He even throws in snippets of Classical Gas.
But while his performances will always feature virtuosic guitar playing, Emmanuel says the playing never overwhelms the songs.
“I’ve never been that interested in just studying guitar players,” he says. “During the ’70s and ’80s, I mostly listened to singers and songwriters: Carole King, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Diamond, Elton John, Billy Joel, Eric Clapton. That’s the music I listened to because it was setting the world on fire and everybody was loving that music.
“I wanted to know how to write a good song. That’s what I wanted to learn. You learn from people who do it on an international level, on a level that moves the world. They are the ones I want to learn from.”