The Inimitable "Swing" of The Colonel and the Governor ("上校"與"老總"無可比擬的〝搖擺〞)

How would you like to hear Django Reinhardt, Chet Atkins, B B King and many other blues, rock, jazz guitarists play together? That's what I got last night at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium, a venue I seldom go to except for the odd big-size seminars. Tommy Emmanuel (The Colonel) and Martin Taylor (The Governor) are in town. They just finished a tour of China. I don't know how they did there. But I'm quite sure that how ever it was, it must have been great unless the people there know as much about jazz guitar as say about a  phenomenologist like the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty but China having been open to the West for nearly 4 decades now, that'd be a most doubtful proposition.

The pair of guitar duo, one a tall, lank, talkative Aussie full of zest, the other a short, plump, slightly and laid back jock, played for us a great number of songs: some blue grass, some boogies, some swings, some blues, some rock, some fusion, some standards, some not so standard, some fiery, some meditative, some in duo and some solos, certain numbers written by themselves, some by others but if the latter, they'd always manage to re-arrange them with new intros, some extra flourishes, some improvised cadenzas, some extra percussions etc. and turn them into "their" music!



In their hands, the guitars are no longer guitars. They have become a guitar-shape extension of themselves. They have become their very unique personal "voices". Fingers flew. Fingers lingered. Fingers tremolo'd. Fingers rasped. Finger's brushed. The fingers do all sorts of things, even suspended in mid-air to allow the harmonics and the echoes to sink in. The surface of the guitar, the side of the guitar, the neck of the guitar, the bottom of the sound box were tapped, brushed and golped with fingers, or palm or a brush. It's simply unbelievable what they did with their guitars. Sometimes, one person played as if he had been magically split, Monkey King-like, into two. Sometimes the two played like a whole band! But whatever it was they played, it was great music. It's the first time I heard either of them. I know it shall not be the last. I bought their disc.

They and the music they coaxed out of their guitars are their own best introduction. So I shall not stop them from speaking for themselves. In what follows, "True", "One Day" & "Down at Cocomo's" (in which Martin Taylor makes his guitar mimic the metallic sound of the West Indies oil tank doubling up as drums and captured its lively calypso rhythm), "The Fair Haired Child" were all composed by Martin Taylor himself: mostly slow romantic numbers. Tommy Emmmanuel wrote "Angelina" for his daughter, another lovely piece. It was a great night. It was made great by their music. Bravo to the pair of artists. Long may they live to add joy to guitar and music lovers.