We weren’t a church-going family, but when I went away to school, I got a big dose of that stuff, and I would transpose them and try to play them. Those hymns that I was exposed to in boarding school.
The ‘classical’ thing you’re hearing is actually church music: the Church of England hymnal. “No, I really never studied guitar formally. There is also a classical sense to your playing, but you never studied classical guitar, did you? And Ry Cooder, who’s still sort of my favorite guitar player. I’ve emulated him as much as I can.” “Reverend Gary Davis was huge for me, as well as Joseph Spence, music of the Bahamas. It was a great time to be a guitarist and a developing musician it was so accessible and there were clubs with open-mics and a community of people that played and shared things and were largely self-taught.Ĭhurch hymns are really sort of 101 for Western music, and it’s a great foundation “Early on, I was very influenced by what my friend Waddy Wachtel calls the great folk scare of the early ’60s. How did you come up with your style? What did you pattern it after? It’s very complex, and very different from anything, with elements of Blind Blake and Reverend Gary Davis as well as an almost classical sense of structure and some jazz voicings. On his most recent releases, 2020’s American Standard and the three-song EP follow-up Over the Rainbow, Taylor focused on songs he learned in his childhood, including Moon River, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Surrey with a Fringe on Top, mostly performed as guitar duets between Taylor and the jazz great John Pizzarelli. That was 1970’s Sweet Baby James, recorded in less than two weeks for less than $10,000, with Taylor and his band, which included Carole King and guitarist Danny Kortchmar, recording songs as fast as he could write them.
When that album didn’t become a hit, Taylor returned to the US and started working on his second album. It’s almost impossible to imagine what all that must have been like for an unknown 20-year-old American. To get that deal, he auditioned alone with his guitar for George Harrison and Paul McCartney, both of whom played on the record, which was recorded in the same studio where the Beatles were cutting the White Album. Taylor’s self-titled debut album was released in 1968 on the Beatles’ Apple Records he was the first outside artist signed to the label. His compositions, including Fire and Rain, Carolina in My Mind, Sweet Baby James and Your Smiling Face, and interpretations ( You’ve Got a Friend, How Sweet It Is) are imbued deep into the American culture, some of the most-played and best-loved songs of the past 50 years.īut underpinning all of them is Taylor’s fingerpicked guitar playing, which is deceptively complex and completely unique – anything but basic strumming. Mention James Taylor and most people will instinctively think of his songwriting and singing.
0 kommentar(er)
