Tommy Emmanuel – The Guitar Wizard Who Steals Your Breath and Leaves Awe in Its Place (2007)

Venue: Dvorana Mediapark / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 10.03.2007
Attendance: 700
Ticket price: 22.00€

Finally! The great master of finger picking, Tommy Emmanuel, in Slovenia at last. What is there even to say, where do you find the right words, and does it even matter to say anything… once you’ve seen the man on stage! But let’s take it from the top.

Our resident joker Jernej handled the welcome, greeting us outside the MediaPark hall with four Unions to build up some courage, because inside the Heineken is outrageously pricey (2.5€), you only get 4 dl of it, and it hides in the shadow of a Union anyway. Jani, “dressed to the nines”, also showed up straight from Mario’s show, and with the crew complete we crossed the threshold of the hall.

At 20:10 Sašo Zver took the stage. A likeable young guy who delivered a lovely opening to this gorgeous, one-of-a-kind evening with Emmanuel. Sašo offered his own material, along with a few brilliantly and wittily reworked Slovenian evergreens, Zemlja pleše, Ne čakaj na maj, Maček v žaklju, Ko boš prišla na Bled… translated into the language of ragtime, proving that this young man has a seriously rare talent. The Slovenian finger picking master kept us company for about 20 minutes, and then, before saying goodbye, he took the special honor of addressing the crowd and asking them to welcome the great Tommy Emmanuel!

At 20:30 Tommy all but ran onto the stage, and his first contact with the microphone was a roar: “Sloveniaaaa!!!!” The crowd instantly answered with a loud response and the show was on. He had just three guitars for company up there. For Emmanuel this was finally, for the first time in his life, a stage in Slovenia too. In neighboring Croatia, for instance, he’s a regular, having played there four times so far, and the people there know him very well and rate him highly. And how could they not. The very approach, full of cheeky sparkle, positive spirit and laughter, broke down every barrier in an instant, and the crowd was with him from the very start, from the first bar to the last!

What an audience can especially appreciate, and it’s just one of this guitarist’s great qualities, is his special relationship with them. A genuine, friendly connection. It proved that there’s not a speck of snobbery in Emmanuel, and that he’s not plagued by any annoying bug that would demand drawing up a special rulebook on proper audience etiquette during his concert. He himself showed real respect for the audience. All he asked of us was that, at least in the first few rows, we not light up cigarettes. The crowd responded remarkably well, and on the floor, from the first row to the last, you practically couldn’t spot a single person with a cigarette in hand.

Now, in the first part the guy immediately made it clear that he’s not messing around. He showed breakneck speed in finger picking with the right hand of his extreme fingers, he showed incredible charisma, determination, self-confidence and unbelievable power. A little Americana, a little bluegrass, plenty of ragtime, even boogie, a trip through an extraordinary musical mix! He kneaded the guitar as if in a trance and coaxed out of it tones and tricks you don’t see every day, or rather that you don’t see at all, unless Tommy Emmanuel himself happens to be standing in front of you. Watching Emmanuel, there’s nothing left to do but let your eyes pop out on stalks, drop your jaw and forget to breathe. In a word, it’s pure madness!

The early part of the set included the songs Green Thumb, Endless Road, Blue Moon… He especially fired people up with a medley of Beatles covers in the order Day Tripper, When I’m 64 and Lady Madonna, which ended in a breakneck, I might even say devilishly wild stampede.

Then the mood calmed down and we got to hear the main theme from the film The Wizzard Of Ozz, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, which he approached with great tenderness, the strings sounding as if he were plucking a harp, and the song Stay Close To Me followed in a similar manner.

Then the man turned the atmosphere upside down and the excellent Mombasa hit the stage. If they hadn’t been already, all the skeptics in the hall were finally convinced why Tommy doesn’t need a single helper on stage. The percussion was the body, the neck,… he even drummed on the microphone, and of course he infused all of it with a splendid African ethno-folk motif.

This calmer part of the concert continued after Tommy’s blonde, long-haired, slender fiancée, and to top it off, 25 years his junior, came out and made full use of her natural gift of beauty: the singer Lizzie Watkins, for three songs. The two of them made no secret of their inspiration from country music. Together they also performed a cover of The Mamas And The Papas, Dream A Little Dream Of Me, and the song Togehter Alone.

Enough time for dreaming and romance! The man is alone on stage again and we’re witnessing a fresh bout of madness with an utterly fascinating version of Heartbreak Hotel, which he threw more fuel on in the outro by combining it with the The Police classic Roxanne, in which he sang the famous line: “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light!” And a jolting ragtime performance of Tall Fiddler was followed by what was surely the high point of the night!

That was the performance of the song Initiation, which Tommy dedicated to the Australian natives (the Aboriginal people). The song is meant to conjure up in the hall the very initiation ritual that the Aboriginal people perform, or used to perform back when the world was still young and innocent. These were truly moments of one-of-a-kind magic, the kind only the realm of musical art can offer! Normally a band needs ten people to sound like an orchestra. Well, Tommy needs no one for something like that. He can be an orchestra all by himself. The celebration, the ritual, the ceremony lasted a good ten minutes. The man, of course, asked only effects and the Aboriginal gods for help! He scraped across the body of the guitar with his fingers and nails, twisted over the neck, pounded wildly and lashed at the guitar, performing proper shaman-like moves as he went. In doing so he built a singular world in the hall, woven from rain, thunder, lightning, the warbling of birds of paradise and the babbling of brooks, with the tribal drums, of course, at the focal point! For a moment, magic took over the hall. And that magic is conjured up by one single man on stage. Incredible. Until you experience it, it’s hard to believe! And it doesn’t even matter. The hall simply fell silent, so convincingly and truthfully did it reflect the work of the artist on stage. A special moment of ceremony and magic at the concert!

The concert flew by incredibly fast and Tommy said goodbye with the song Those Who Wait. Loud ovations, the kind you don’t hear often in the Mediapark hall! The people demanded more! And the man came back and shared more moments with the crowd for three extra songs. After The Hunt, Tommy invited everyone in the hall to accompany a song we all know very well, and one whose airplay in the USA was banned for a while after the collapse of the WTC “twin towers”. It was Imagine by John Lennon! The incredible atmosphere, which lasted a full 2 hours and 15 minutes, thus got the best possible ending to the evening with Tommy Emmanuel.

Unbelievable! Even when you listen to the albums! No! You have to experience the man at a concert. That’s where he’s by far the most convincing and expressive! Such wit and energy, charisma, such a fun approach, such confidence and power. And the musician’s “nomadic” life carries a lot of weight here too. Tommy plays over 200 concerts a year in different corners of the world.

Healthy, genuine humor the whole way through, in which Tommy also delivered an important message to all of us. He said that when he was little, he wished he could play guitar all over the world. And it happened, because he believed and trusted in himself and was sincere in his heart. If you’re aware of that, you possess unbelievable power. As a great teacher who has reached his goals, he can surely be sacredly convinced of it. As for me, with quite a few fewer years behind me, I can for now only hope with all my heart that it’s just as the great Tommy says.

Let me sum up briefly! The recommendation of the day, which doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, would go: “Go see the master at work!” A lot gets said and written, but only when you see him live do you really realize: “It’s true what they say! The guy is one of the best guitarists in the world, and I can’t wait to see him grind those strings and that guitar again!”

After the concert, only one lone guitarist was left in the hall. Tommy Emmanuel. The rest of us wisely shut our mouths and decided we’d better head home quick and put away another plate of buckwheat žganci.