Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Velden am Wörthersee / Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Austria
Concert date: 08.10.2015
Attendance: 80
Ticket price: €32.00 (advance) / €37.00 (day of show)
A packed October program full of big-name blues acts from the European and international scene made it clear in advance that we’d be visiting Bluesiana a lot this fall. Less than a week after Ian Moore’s gorgeous lyrical fairytale, another chance came up to visit this wonderful lakeside club in a wonderful corner of Austrian Carinthia. This time we went to catch the guitar wizardry of Ryan McGarvey and his band.
What can you say about Ryan McGarvey? He’s won a whole shelf of prestigious awards, both as a guitarist and as a vocalist. The Weekly Alibi named him best blues act of the year several years running. At the tender age of almost 29, he can already boast of working with giants of the blues-rock scene like Joe Bonamassa, Jef Beck, Eric Clapton… He’s released 3 albums so far, the latest, The Road Chosen, in 2014.
Bluesiana is slowly pulling itself back up after the forced bankruptcy that hit it at the end of last year, and even though the crowds don’t quite reach the numbers of previous years, it’s still the same warm, heartfelt living room, packed with good music and incredibly friendly staff. Once you feel it, you’re hooked. And you feel it the moment you step through the door. If you don’t believe us, come see for yourself.
We’d already seen Ryan McGarvey at Bluesiana this year – he played here just 4 months ago, at the start of June (http://en.rockline.si/podrobnosti-reportaze/val-kitarskih-emocij-v-bluesiani-2015-8188). Ryan himself proves that Bluesiana is something special for the artists too: the fall tour had already been announced by the time of his June show and the dates were pretty much packed, yet he still squeezed in another gig at Bluesiana. So his fall tour ended up with 28 dates in 32 days across 9 countries, which not everyone could pull off. Well, Ryan showed he has no trouble with it whatsoever.
Ryan doesn’t overcomplicate things before a show. A short soundcheck is enough to get everyone on stage tuned and in sync. He usually only shows up on stage a few minutes before the set. There’s little time for planning, and it looks like Ryan simply surrenders to whatever feelings are running through him at that moment. The setlist is put together on the fly, it’s different from show to show, the song order is shuffled, and you never know which of his three favorite guitars he’ll walk out with or when he’ll swap them. His walk onto the stage is routinely calm, but the moment he grabs the guitar and steps up to the mic, his whole demeanor changes. At the first notes, Ryan completely locks in with his instrument and literally dives into it. All that’s left is the music, the emotions and the magic of the moment Ryan has caught in his guitar. The guy literally falls into his playing as if there were no audience at all, just him with his thoughts, his feelings and his instrument. The guitars were moaning with pleasure as Ryan’s fingers roamed over the strings, sometimes with gentle grace, other times with refined roughness. His two sidemen, Sam Miller on bass and Logan Miles Nix on drums, keep watching him intently the whole time, waiting for the right moment to join in. Despite the heavy dose of improvisation, there are no mistakes. The three of them work like a well-oiled team, each adding their own piece to the perfection of the whole. Sam Miller, with his calm precision on bass and barely noticeable movement, stands opposite the energetic Logan Miles Nix, who waits tensely for his moment to unleash all his pent-up energy on the drums, his whole body following the rhythm of the song. And right alongside them stands Ryan, balancing between Sam’s calm and Logan’s energy, and creating the magic of a concert fairytale with his guitar and voice. Priceless.
The concert was split into two parts with a 20-minute break in between. We mostly heard the hits from the latest album, though Ryan also dipped into his previous two records. The peak of the night was without a doubt Ryan’s instrumental Mystic Dream from the album Forward in Reverse, which can’t be left out of any show and which Ryan, with his improvisation and playful guitar work, can stretch from its original 7 minutes to more than 15. Along the way he throws in every trick he’s picked up over more than twenty years of playing guitar, and even the audience waits on the edge of their seats to see what he’ll slip in this time. The song features a proper playground of guitar effects, tinkering with the tuning pegs and Ryan’s nimble playfulness. Ryan also unveiled a new song called Break My Heart, from an upcoming album due out next year. Ryan rarely does covers in his shows, but this time he treated us to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant song in the encore, reworked in his own way and fitted to his voice.
A Ryan McGarvey show is always a night of superlatives. We’re lucky around here that Ryan likes coming back to Bluesiana, so we don’t have to travel too far to catch him. And judging by the hints, Ryan McGarvey will be back in Europe soon, probably as early as spring 2016. You absolutely can’t miss him then.
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