Martin Taylor Interview

by Rick Landers.

During his performance at the Inter-American Series of Concerts, Lectures and Films in Washington, D.C., in October 2008, Scottish guitarist Martin Taylor kept the show rolling with solo jazz guitar tunes that were technically complex, yet stylishly smooth and nuanced. Inspired since childhood by gypsy jazz legend Django Rheinhardt and his Quintette du Hot Club of France, jazz guitar has been the staple of Martin’s repertoire.He began playing guitar at the ripe old age of eight in his father’s jazz band and would later leave school at 15 to become a professional musician. A chance meeting with Django’s Hot Club violinist, Stephane Grappelli, eventually led to an invitation for Martin to join the group. Martin would grow as an artist under the wing of Grappelli and his guitar prowess blossomed while he gathered acclaim as one of the best jazz guitarists in the world.

Taylor’s musical accomplishments have been recognized by many and have included being honored with a Gold Badge of Merit by the British Academy of Composers & Songwriters. His achievements also include an honorary doctorate (Paisley University, Scotland) and his appointment by the Queen of England as a Member of the British Empire (MBE) for his contributions to jazz. Martin has been named Best Guitarist at the British Jazz Awards eleven times and in 2007 BBC Radio awarded him its Heart of Jazz award.

Martin Taylor’s talent has been conjoined in collaborations with such luminaries as George Harrison; Jeff Beck; Chet Atkins; Steve Howe; Dionne Warwick; Alison Burns, Didier Lockwood, Sacha Distel, Bryn Terfel, Yehudi Menuhin and Jamie Cullum.

In 1999, Martin established a three-day International Guitar Festival, Kirckmichael, Scotland that offered guests recitals, tutorials, concerts and other musical highlights from some of the best musicians from around the globe. Proceeds from the event go toward a non-profit Guitar for Schools project that provide musical equipment and educational tuition for local schools. He has also found the time to author The Autobiography of a Travelling Musician (1995) and co-author The Martin Taylor Guitar Method (2003) book that offer insights into life as a touring musician and music instruction, respectively.

Taylor’s 2009 heavy tour schedule is taking him to Australia, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom where he’ll certainly harvest a new crop of fans and admirers.

Modern Guitars sat with Martin before sound check at the Inter-American Series of Concerts, Lectures and Films where we talked about guitars, his career and his music. Afterward, we stepped out for a quick lager at a local D.C. brew pub before he grabbed his guitar for an impressive show that kept his fans spellbound and rhythmically bobbing their heads like jazz heads do.

Rick Landers: Let's start off by going back to around 1960. Your father handed you your first guitar. What prompted that and I assume you don't remember that do you?

Martin Taylor: Yeah, I do.

Rick: Do you? Well, tell us about that.

Martin: Before I got my guitar my dad got me a ukulele, the Hawaiian kind, red with a palm tree on it. I can remember it very, very clearly because I was actually so small, so young, that we were in the kitchen and my mom was washing me in the sink and it was one of those rainy English days. My dad was working as a mailman at the time and he came on his bike and he had a parcel under his arm and she said, "Oh, I think your dad's got a present for you."

He got this little ukulele thing out and I was just strumming away on it. It was great. Eventually my mom said, "Could you teach him something musical on it, teach him some chords?" He just showed me a couple of chords, like a C chord and a G chord, and I just picked it up straight away and I started singing along with it. Then my neighbor was given a small half-size guitar. My dad got me one of those and then I just started to pick it up as I went along, because my dad was a jazz musician, a bass player. His friends used to come around the house and play all these bop club records.

Rick: Gypsy jazz?

Martin: Yeah, a little gypsy jazz. They'd bring their guitars around and play. A friend of my dad's, Lenny, was West Indian, from Jamaica. Lenny played the saxophone and he would sit there playing old calypso. So, I just loved it. I fell in love with music. It just made me feel good. As soon as I could, I wanted to start playing it myself.

It's a funny thing, because when I think about my life so far, the only thing that's really come easily to me was playing the guitar. I had a natural affinity for it. Not other instruments, but stringed instruments. I could always get a tune out of stringed instruments. It seemed really to be what I was meant to do.

Rick: So, you moved then from ukulele to guitar at what point, or did you get tired of the ukulele?

Martin: I think it got broken. [Both Laughing] I think one of my cousins came 'round and sat on it or something. So, I started playing the guitar and when I was a little bit older, my dad had a friend of his whose name was Dick Bishop. He was my dad's best friend. He played guitar and banjo in a lot of dixieland bands in London, like Chris Barber. They were really well-known, because around about that time they were having a thing called "The Tramp Boom," sort of a traditional jazz.

Rick: Like hootenanny?

Martin: Like a revival, a bit like skiffle.

Rick: Yeah, Lonnie Donegan.

Martin: Yeah, he worked with Lonnie Donegan. In fact, I have a fantastic photograph of my uncle with him and Bill Broonzy.

Rick: Really? Cool.

Martin: Yeah, taken in Glasgow. So, he used to come 'round and say, "I've just come back from tour with Big Bill Broonzy." He'd have a record, so he'd put this Big Bill Broonzy record on as well. My neighbor, who was just a couple of years older than me, he just fell in love with playing guitar. But, he really moved more in the direction of blues, his name is G. P. Mayo, and he became a professional guitar player. He was in a band, a British band called Dr. Feelgood. You know that band?

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Martin: We started playing at the same time. Where I grew up, just outside of London in Essex there was a big blues thing. A lot of musicians lived around there. There were a lot of blues musicians that came from that area. G.P. Mayo and I started playing at the same time. But, I went more in the jazz direction and he went more into blues. He knocked on the door one day, he said, "There's a shop in the town, they're selling guitars. Why don't we go up there and play them."

Rick: Like candy.

Martin: Yeah. And he didn't want to play, but he said, "Oh, my friend plays the guitar." She gives me a guitar and I sat down and played "Sweet Georgia Brown" or something. She said, "Well, come back on Saturday when my husband is here, because he's a big music fan."

So, I used to go there every Saturday. I was about eight years old. He used to put me in the window and put the amp outside. I'd sit in the window with a guitar, a little eight year old kid playing the guitar and the amp was out in the street and, of course, it would bring loads and loads of people in. That was really the beginning of me playing for people and I used to go and do little odd jobs in the store, cleaning the guitars, changing strings and all of this.

Rick: So you weren't shy at all?

Martin: No, I was very shy.

Rick: Were you?

Martin: Yes, I was painfully shy as a kid. But, it didn't bother me to play for people.I was quite a shy, nervous kid. That all changed as I got older. I don't know how I feel about that really, because it never bothered me to play for people. It didn't make me nervous. It still doesn't.

Rick: Maybe the guitar is like an axe and you're protected.

Martin: [Both Laughing] Yeah, the guitar, because I grew up with it from such a young age, it's very natural for me to play the guitar and have the guitar with me. I don't actually like public speaking. Sometimes I have to. I was just best man at a friend's wedding. I start to sputter when I think I've got to get up and speak. I remember a number of years ago, I was given an honorary doctorate by a local university and I had to go up and give a speech after I had become a doctor of the university. I was so nervous about speaking. But, I can do that when I play the guitar. It's a part of me, really.

Rick: Did your father heavily influence you towards jazz or did you feel free to explore other styles of music?

Martin: I was heavily influenced by jazz, obviously because of my dad's record collection. He liked Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Fats Waller, and I loved it and I used to play along to it. I loved the whole idea of improvising. Also, growing up in the '60s all my friends were into playing Rolling Stones and that band in England, The Shadows.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Martin: Kind of like The Ventures.

Rick: Yeah, Hank Marvin and his red Stratocaster.

Martin: Funny, I know Hank, and all he wants to do now is play Hot Club. [Both Laughing]. Really, that's all he does. He's a complete Django freak now.

Rick: Is he?

Martin: Yeah. So, I understood the music and I liked playing it. Some of my friends the same age wanted to play blues things. Blues was fine because I had that kind of background as well and listened to that kind of music. But, you know, getting a rock band together, I got into it, but it kind of bored me.

Rick: What kind of music were you playing? Cover songs of other groups?

Martin: Yeah, very briefly I played in a band where we played things like Cream, some of those kind of things.

Rick: Yeah, '68, '69.

Martin: It didn't grab me like jazz did. With a rock band it was like I could learn how to do this and so I learned it. But, with jazz, to me it just seems like this is never ending. This is gonna go on forever.

Rick: Yeah, you just keep exploring fretboard.

Martin: And I didn't really want to play the same thing all the time. When we rehearsed things, you know, that's how we're gonna play it and I didn't want to do that. I was doing some improvising. They said, "Ah, stop doing all that jazz shit," you know? "You're ruining it." [Both Laughing]

Rick: Did you find it pretty easy for you to improvise? Was it something that just came naturally because it doesn't always?

Martin: It was funny, because my dad said to me, playing Django and saying, "This music is improvised. This bit is when they start improvising. They're making it up over the chords."

My dad wasn't a schooled musician, kind of a basic sort of dixieland bass player. Very good at it, but he didn't read music or learn about the theory of music. But, he said to me, "It's like this: you just make up your own melody as you go over that chord. Don't play the melody, but you can play little bits of the melody maybe, but make up your own little things in there." I just understood that. That's really what I did. And I think that's why I'm quite a melodic improviser, because coming from that background I'm not doing it from a point of view of playing around chords and notes in a theoretic way of doing. But, I just go, "I wonder if I can actually make up a melody that's as good as that or better than that?"

Rick: Do you mentally sort of sing along with the notes? How do you know where you're headed?

Martin: I think I probably did, yeah. I just had a natural ear for this kind of thing and when I played a note that didn't fit the chord, I didn't sort of, "Well, that didn't fit because that was a flat 9th which shouldn't have been in there."

It just actually, physically hurt me so when I played a note and felt that 'ugh', I knew it was a wrong note. I didn't know why it was a wrong note. But, it actually was painful to listen to.

Rick: It's a mistake you wouldn't make again.

Martin: Yeah, it's a bit like you don't want hit your thumb with a hammer. You're not gonna do it again. [Both Laughing]

Rick: This is a long question and you may have already covered it. You must have grown up with some Django given your father's love of the Quintet. How did you arrive at Stefane Grappelli's doorstep and were you immediately up to the task of joining him on stage, or did it take you awhile to kind of fit in with him?

Martin: Well, I first met Stefane I think in 1976. He was playing with Ike Isaacs, and Ike was kind of my mentor. He was a guitar player that I admired a lot. We used to play together, do a little gig together and it was around the end of his stint of working with Stefane. And I just went along with him and I met Stefane and he just said, "Oh, he plays guitar. He's an up and coming jazz guitar player."

Stefane just loved playing with young musicians. I think he got a lot of energy from working with young musicians. So when he heard I was a jazz guitar player he was interested in that. But, then it was a "Maybe we'll play together some time." A few years later, 1979, Diz [Disley] had an accident, broke his wrist and I was asked to take his place, because I knew the bass player as well who said, "There's this young guitar player..." and Stefane remembered. He said, "Oh, yeah. I met him once before."

Rick: Were you on the road with Diz at the same time or there was one point that you were working with two guitarists.?

Martin: At one point. At first it was myself and John Etheridge. In fact, the very first date we did was my first day I did with Stefane in the States was here. I think it was called The Riverside or something? It was a place down by the river.

Rick: Cellar Door?

Martin: No. It was called something like The Riverside. Charlie Byrd used to play there. I think it had been Charlie Byrd's club at one time. Between that time, before '79, I was working with Ike sometimes doing some gigs, and I was also working with Peter [Inn] the bass player, English bass player. He lived in New York for years. He worked with Lenny Tristano and Lee Konitz, Warren Marsh and he moved back to England. He started his own record label, Wait Records. I made my first album for him called Taylor Made. I didn't want to call it that. But I figured his wife wanted Taylor Made and I thought, "Well, I want to call it something else. At least my first record, we'll get that out of the way." It was done. I still get people come up to me and say, "I know a great title for an album..." [Laughs]

By the time I got to work with Stefane I went to France and Belgium to work with him. I was already playing on the radio. I already had my first album out. In fact, I had two albums out. No, I had three albums.

I had two albums with Peter and I made an album with Ike. I was just starting to get a little known, I used to play on radio and BBC. I had this opportunity to go and work with Stefane and it was just to do, I think, about five or six dates. The first date I was given, he had a very funny agent in Paris who was very vague and not really together at all, which wasn't a really good thing. Stefane used to always introduce him discreetly because Stefane would end up having to do a lot of the work himself. But,he liked him, they had been friends. And he used to introduce Michel to people and say, "This is Michel [Chourand]. He's my agent and I'm his manager." [Both Laughing]

When we did gigs Michel used to say, "You must go to so-and-so or such a place. I'll send you the map with the instructions." And he'd get a napkin and he'd write or draw a rough outline of a map of France and put an X on it, and that's where I had to go to. But, he taught me. The first gig was Nott in Brittany, actually I've got a house in France that's not very far from where I live now. So I went and I couldn't find this place at all. And it turned out it was Mont, he told me the wrong place. So the first gig I had with Stefane I didn't show up. So I thought, "Well, that's it. I'm fired. I'm finished."

The next gig was in Deauxville in Normandy and I worked my way up there and I was very apologetic and he said, "It's not your fault. It's Michl's fault. He's always making mistakes. Don't worry about it." And we did the gig and before the gig we just went in the dressing room first and just ran through. I knew all the tunes because I grew up with this music. I knew all the tunes. But, he had little arrangements he liked to do. When I started playing he was smiling and he really liked it. I think he liked the fact of having...I was only 23, barely. No, I was 22. I was just coming up to 23. And he says, "Oh, it's good because you've got this young blood." Stefane didn't like old people. He liked being around young people. At the end of this trip we went to Belgium and did a couple of TV shows and then he says, "Now I've got a tour of America in three months time. Would you like to come?" I said, "Yeah, great." And this was '79.

We came here and the first date was this club in D.C. So, I was here for three weeks with him in the U.S. and Canada. And when it was finished I thought, "Wow. That was great. I did a trip in France with Stefane. I did a tour of the States with him. Great!" I could go back and do my own thing and he said, "I've got a tour of the U.K. Would you like to do that as well?" So I said, "Yeah, great!" That was in October, November. I went and did that. We did a TV show in Scotland and then did a whole bunch of dates and at the end of that he said, "I've got another trip to the States. Do you want to come along on that one?" And I said, "Okay." That went on for 11 years.

Rick: Just gig after gig after gig with no planning?

Martin: Ten years later I was sort of saying to Stefane, "Am I in your band?", because I didn't work with him all the time. For the time I was with him I did all the work in the U.K. and all the work in the States. But, then I also did some things in France, Belgium, Holland and in Australia. At the same time I was still doing my own thing. When I came to the States I met Carl Jefferson of Concord Records and he asked me to make an album. While I was in San Francisco I went in the studio and made the album in three hours.

Rick: Wow.

Martin: We just went in and played. Because I didn't know anything. It was like "Well what can we play? I don't know." So we just came up with some tunes and we played. They were all pretty much one take, maybe two takes. At the end of it, after three hours, we said, "Oh, we've got an album." It was made in three hours. It was what it was. It wasn't a great album. It was what happened in those three hours is all I can really say. So that was good because working with Stefane, people started to get to know me and I started playing on more people's records and making some of my own records. Then I started to come to the States on my own.

It was a great thing working with Stefane. I used to sit on the stage as close as I am to you thinking about when I was a kid listening to those records and I'd hear Stefane play them, those records from the '30s. That seemed like a lifetime ago, you know. It wasn't until I met Stefane in '76, I wasn't even sure he was still alive. I didn't know and here I was playing with a living legend and I used to sit there and I used to think to myself, "You know, I've really got to remember as much as possible about this,"Because there were magic moments playing and offstage as well, some very funny times we had. "I've got to remember as much as possible about this because this is only gonna happen once," to work with somebody like that. For most musicians it never happens to them. And here I am right in the middle of it and actually becoming part of his life so that when books were written about Stefane, I'm in those books. They wrote about me in there so I became part of his life.

Rick: You were like the modern day Django for him?

Martin: Well, I was in a long line of guitar players since Django. But, what was good was he liked the way I played. I didn't play in Django's style and he wanted that. He always used to say that my playing was elegant and sophisticated and he liked that.

And Stefane would only work with musicians that he liked as people. Something that I learned is you've got to get on with musicians on more than one level because I've seen musicians that worked together in duos, guitar players. They get off the stage and one goes this way, the other goes that way. They don't like each other. I've seen a lot of that in bands; that one doesn't talk to that one, that one talks to that one. But, he doesn't talk to his wife.

Rick: The Yoko syndrome. [Both Laughing]

Martin: When I started having bands of my own I adopted the same philosophy. I got it wrong a few times. I didn't realize until halfway through a tour you suddenly realize, "Oh, this guy!" I like all the musicians I've worked with and musicians that I've hired myself, even though I may not work with them right now, it's only because I'm a different thing at the moment. And sometimes we'll go back and play still. We'll remain very good friends and meet up and I think that's very important with this music, which when you're playing with other musicians it's more than just playing the part. There's interplay and if there's some kind of bad vibes between the musicians you're working with you're not gonna make the best music.

Rick: The magic isn't there.

Martin: It's not gonna happen. It's deeper than that.

Rick: In 1987 you and Stephane were nominated for a Grammy for Together At Last for best country musical. How did the two of you celebrate that nomination?

Martin: Well, it was funny really. I could see how important that was but I don't think Stephane did. Stephane was very funny. He lived in his little world, because sometimes he would meet people that were famous musicians themselves. He didn't know who they were. I remember once being in the Detroit airport. We were at the baggage claim and Stephane says, "You sit down. I'll go and get your suitcase." I'm standing at the baggage claim waiting for the suitcase and a guy comes up to me, and says, "Excuse me. Is that Stephane Grappelli sitting over there?" I looked up and said, "God, you're Chet Atkins!" [Both Laughing] He said, "Yeah. That's Stephane Grappelli?" I said, "Never mind that. You're Chet Atkins!" I was so thrilled. He said, "Could I meet Stephane? I sure would like to meet him. Could you introduce me to him?", because he was a real southern gentleman. I said, "Yeah." He said, "Would he mind?" So I went over. Stephane was sitting there. I said, "Stephane, this is Chet Atkins!" Chet goes, "It's a real pleasure. Your records with Django all those years ago. I really would love to one day to get to record together." I said, "Stephane, you really should record together. It would be great, fantastic!," When Chet left Stephane said, "Who is that guy?" I said, "It's Chet Atkins. He's a very famous guitarist." "Oh, is he? Oh." "Yeah, very famous. Made records when I was a kid." Every so often for days afterwards Stephane would turn to me and say, "Who is that Atkins?" It became the theme of the trip. "He's a great country guitar player. He's influenced everyone." "Ah. He's good, is he?" "Oh, yeah, yeah."

And the same thing happened at the Blue Note in New York. George Benson came and said, "I'd like to meet Stephane." Same thing, "Who is that Benson?" He never figured out who a lot of people were. I don't think he really knew exactly what the Grammys were, or if he did, I don't think he realized the importance of them.

Rick: Quite a milestone for you, I would think.

Martin: Yeah. Absolutely. I was thrilled to be involved in that. Anybody in the music business other than Stephane knows how important the Grammy is.

Rick: There wasn't a celebration? [Laughing]

Martin: No, there wasn't. We used to celebrate things. But, he wasn't fazed by things. He wasn't overwhelmed by things. He just went along on an even keel. He wasn't overly impressed by things or in awe of things or people. And he was also a very, very private person

Rick: Was he?

Martin: I'd meet people who would say, "Oh, I knew Stephane really well," and I would say, "Well, you better than me, then," because he only let you know so much. And I was about as close as any of the musicians were to him. There were probably only about three or four of us that were that close to Stephane. There were things I found out about Stephane that I didn't know until after he died, which made a lot of sense to me.

He spoke to me about his childhood. He had a very, very tough childhood. His mother died when he was only six. His father went off to fight in the first World War and he was put in an orphanage. So that explained to me a lot of the insecurities he had. We used to joke about how mean he was. He didn't like to spend money, didn't like to part with it. But, I understood that because I've seen that before. People that have very rough childhoods. He didn't want to go back there.

Rick: Well, he went through the Depression, too.

Martin: Of course. He went through that and knew what that was like. And then there was also another thing that he didn't talk about. A couple of times he did mention but not in great depth. The love of his life was a lady called Gwendolyn. She was an English singer. Can't remember her second name. But, she was killed in the Blitz in London during the war. It was a very famous incident that happened at a place called the Cafe de Paris where I used to play in the '70s. It was hit by a bomb during the Blitz and a number of people were killed including a piano player called "Snake Hips" Johnson.

Rick: Ken "Snake Hips" Johnson.

Martin: Yeah. He was an American living there. She wasn't killed immediately. She was horrifically injured and it absolutely broke his heart. I remember in his flat in Paris he used to have this beautiful photograph of her. She was actually a stunning looking woman and he said, "Oh, that's Gwendolyn." You could see that he couldn't really talk about it. But, when he died they found a box of all his special...

Rick: Keepsakes?

Martin: Keepsakes, yeah. And how I knew about this was because in that box there was a photograph that he kept of him and me in a restaurant in Switzerland. It was a very nice photograph. That meant a lot to me that I was in the "special box". But, this photograph that everyone saw, Stephane commissioned an artist to paint an oil painting of that photograph, but he only kept it for himself. It was only for him to look at.

Rick: Of Gwendolyn?

Martin: Of Gwendolyn.

Rick: I thought you meant you and him.

Martin: No, no. [Laughing] That was very deep. He didn't speak about it. I was very touched.

Rick: Did he ever talk about Django?

Martin: Yeah, quite often to me he did. But in a situation like this, if you asked him, he would change the subject. A lot of people thought it was because of jealousy and there was jealousy between the two of them. There was no doubt of that; there was jealousy. But, it wasn't that. He just got fed up with being asked about Django all the time because the Hot Club of France. That group wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been Stephane. You know Django was the star

Rick: But, Django left sometimes, right? He just sort of went off...?

Martin: Yeah. Stephane told me once the very first record they made for Charles DeLaunay, it was booked to go in this little room and make this recording. When it came to the day, Django didn't show up, was nowhere around. So Stephane went around looking for him and found him in a billiard hall playing billiards and said, "We've got this recording. We're making this recording for Charles. We're making a record." Sonofagun. Because remember, that was new. It was new technology.

He said, "No. There's no future in that. That'll never take off. I'm not doing badly." And Stephane said, "You've got to come!" and he dragged him in and they sat down. He wasn't interested and they sat down, and I can't remember the tune they did. "Okay, let's go," and he played fantastic and he put his guitar down. "Let's have a listen," and they played it back and it was like magic. He heard himself played back and he was completely hooked by it. It was almost like vanity.

It was like looking at yourself in the mirror and from there he was completely hooked by it. He just loved doing it. He wanted to record. And Stephane told me they played around one microphone and when you were soloing you just got closer to the mic and then you moved back. And there was one mystery. I can't remember the name of the track now [Humming notes]. But, right at the very end, there was a sound. I said to him, "There's a sound. It sounds like a bongo drum or something," and he said, "Oh, no. I got in terrible trouble. Charles DeLaunay went crazy on me." What it was, they finished a "da da da da deeeeeee" and you hear this "bonk". Stephane went like that [Martin motions] and hit the microphone and DeLaunay for a long time didn't forgive Stephane for it and said, "You ruined it. You ruined that tune by hitting the microphone," and now I can't imagine hearing it without that "bonk" sound at the end.

Rick: Any thoughts of pulling together a band with a fiddle player and a flat-picker, maybe you on tenor banjo?

Martin: No.

Rick: And you know where that's coming from? I spoke with Tony McManus...

Martin: Did you?

Rick: He said, "We should make an album, the three of us."

Martin: Really?

Rick: Yeah.

Martin: They said that? Tony...

Rick: Tony McManus and Doug Baker.

Martin: Yeah, I would like to actually. Funny enough, a neighbor of mine who plays old-time banjo and I didn't realize this, but they look down on tenor banjos.

Rick: Oh, because they're not five strings?

Martin: "Oh, anyone can play one of those." Occasionally, I threaten to get a tenor banjo. I think if I was involved with anything to do with a tenor banjo, my neighbor wouldn't talk to me again. I'd be in big trouble.

Rick: You know, there's a big tradition of guys of your generation, great jazz players playing banjo.

Martin: I play banjo.

Rick: Frank Vignola and others who got their starts...

Martin: Yeah, but they're good banjo players. I was probably the world's worst tenor banjo player. I played because my dad played in Dixieland bands. He used to get me gigs and you'd have to play a bit of banjo on them. I don't really like that style of banjo. They came out with, it was a very British thing or European thing with Dixieland, very foreign with the "chunk, chunk, chunk" and I thought it was really, really ugly-sounding. And that's what they wanted. And I did it. I could do it really badly. I did have a banjo for quite awhile, but I never took to it.

I play the mandolin, though. I enjoy playing mandolin. I remember the first time I heard Tony McManus. I was doing the school run picking my son up from school when he was in like elementary school and they had a program called Folk Roots. I think it was on BBC Scotland.

I was sitting there outside waiting for him. I just put it on because it used to come on, sometimes would listen to it. I put it on and I just heard this guitar player with this fantastic sound. It was the sound that got me first of all. I thought, "What a fantastic sound that guitar player's got. I wonder who it is?" He started playing and I was just blown away. It was Tony McManus. And after that I just had to get everything I could from him. When I had my Guitar Festival, he was like the top of the list of guitar players I had to have. I'd say Tommy Emmanuel was at the top of the list. Nobody knew who Tommy Emmanuel was over there.

Rick: They do now.

Martin: He was incredibly famous in Australia. You walk down the street with him and people see him like a movie star. But, he wasn't known anywhere else. And then he moved to London, and my son, he manages me. I rang Tommy up and said, "Look, if there's anything we can do..." So James started getting him a few gigs and then Tommy came to some of my gigs and I got Tommy the gig when I was working with Bill Wyman. I got him the support act.

Rick: The warm-up act.

Martin: Yeah, the opening act. So got him kind of started there. It's always tough when you go to another country and try to establish. It doesn't matter how famous you are somewhere else. And that got him. We just gave him that little help in the beginning, James and I, and then he just absolutely went through the ceiling. He never stops touring.

Rick: Yeah, that's true. He lives in Nashville now, too.

Martin: Well, he's got a house in Nashville. [Laughing] I know the first year he had that house I said, "How are you enjoying the house in Nashville?" and he said, "I've been there for two weeks this year."

Rick: Oh, really?

Martin: Yeah, he works. People say to me, they go to my website and see my tour dates and say, "You work a lot," and I say, "Go onto Tommy's website. He's working constantly."

Rick: Yeah, your tour this time looks pretty tough. From here you're going to Japan, going to London, going to Spain. You've got a pretty heavy schedule for the next few weeks.

Martin: Yeah, I have. But, the thing about Tommy is what you see on stage is not an act. He's like that all day long from when he gets up in the morning.

Rick: He's caffeinated.

Martin: He doesn't need it. When he does a sound check, it's like a performance. The guy has just got so much energy.I don't know how he does it, how he keeps it going. It's not an act he puts on. He just wants to play every night. I said to him, "Your ambition is to play to every single person on the face of the earth," and he said, "Yeah, mate. Yeah." [All Laughing] I don't share his work ethic and I do work a lot, but it's not my main driving force.

Rick: Except you do have a what is a new mentoring program, right? What's all that about?

Martin: Well, I haven't started it yet.

Rick: But, you want to...part of your legacy then won't be just playing guitar and recording and production, but also nurturing new guitarists?

Martin: Yeah, it's not teaching in the conventional sense, really. What it is, my mentor was Ike Isaacs. I never had lessons from him, but we worked together and spent a lot of time together. And I just learned so much from him just hanging out at his house while he was cooking Burmese curries for me or watching the TV or taking a walk and talking about things, then sitting down playing. I just learned. I just absorbed everything from that without actually saying, "Well, then you do this and then you've got to do this and that scale."

I learned an awful lot and he said to me, "One day when you're older, the time will be ready for you to do this. It's not now. It's not going to be for quite awhile." I've never been a teacher. I don't do workshops or anything like that but I get a lot of people that have said to me, "I really learned a lot," sometimes we're not even playing, I don't even play the guitar. They'll say, "I've really learned a lot about...changed my idea about things." So I really started to think. And people started asking me would I give them lessons, which I don't, which I haven't done.

I started thinking now is probably around about the time to do it. I've been doing this for 35 years and I've got a lot of experience and I think it would actually be selfish of me not to share some of those. Sometimes when I'm sitting at home I think to myself, "When I'm at home I don't do anything. I could be doing something really useful. I could have guitar players come along who want to know aspects of how I play or what I'm interested in, I don't want someone to come along and say, "Teach me that version you did of "Georgia on my Mind." I don't want to do that. My whole thing is, "Why did I play it like that? Where did that come from? What is there in how I played there that you can then use in something else? What can you take from that?"

Yeah, you can learn to play it note for note, but that's superficial. There's more to it. I don't want to teach, "First you do this, then you do that," but "Why did I play it like that? What brought me to that? What am I trying to do? What emotions am I trying to get across?", because I've see myself as a storyteller when I play. It's all storytelling and things that you can do harmonically and rhythmically to create emotions in people, in the listener. There are actually kind of devices that you learn that you can do with key changes that you can suddenly...

Rick: Change attention or something?

Martin: It's like suddenly a cloud goes away and the sun comes out and you learn how to do things like that musically and harmonically. So it's really nurturing what they've already got inside them, you know, get the flame going. I don't want people to come and play like me. I want to nurture what they have.

Rick: Interesting. A different approach.

Martin: It's completely different. If anybody says to me, "Show me how to play your arrangement of 'I've Got Rhythm'," I'll just say, "No. Get a video. Get the DVD and see it. You can play the guitar. You can learn it from there." But why did I do it? What's the thought behind it? What am I trying to convey and how am I doing that? And then take that and do what you do.

Rick: You said that when you're back at home that you basically don't do a lot. In Scotland, the area that you're from, there's a lot of fishing or angling. There's a lot of things to do, bicycling.

Martin: Golf.

Rick: Golf is a big deal.

Martin: That's a great waste of time. I love it. [All Laughing]

Rick: So what do you do?

Martin: I play golf. Very, very badly, but I've got a house in Scotland right by Gleneagles, which is a very famous golf course.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Martin: There are a lot of golf courses around there. And I have a house in France as well, in Brittany, and I play golf both places. But, everyone I play with has retired. They still play better than me.

Rick: The house in France, is that more of a vacation home?

Martin: It is. The first year I had the house I was living there half and half. I was there every other month.

Rick: Did you have a recording studio in either one?

Martin: No. I did have some recording equipment once when I lived out on a farm, but I prefer to go to a studio and get someone to do it because I used to have a little setup and I'd record things. But, then I couldn't really play because I'm not very technically minded. I'm not very good with computers or anything like that. If I record something I just go to a studio and get an engineer to do it. All I have to think about is this. All I have to do is play the guitar. I'm very lucky, I mean, my son manages me. My wife takes care of the other things. My daughter-in-law's a lawyer, a music industry lawyer.

Rick: There you go.

Martin: I come here. Jim takes me wherever I need to go. Lana books the hotels. Herschel does the gigs. I've got all these people that kind of work for me. Not all of them get paid very well. Some don't get paid at all. But, I'm very lucky. So all I do is this.

Rick: Well, that earns you an MBE right from the Queen. How was that? How does that ceremony actually work?

Martin: Well what happens, you're nominated. You're put forward. Anybody can put you forward for it: a group of people can do it. They kind of petition it. They think, "This person deserves an honor from the Queen," for whatever they do. You can get it for charity work, your work in business or music, arts, sport. In fact, when I got mine, there was a guy who got one for services to beekeeping. He was the main guy in the beekeeping world.

Rick: The king bee.

Martin: He was the king bee! [Both Laughing] They put forward and it's all very secretive. Nobody really knows how it all works. But, then you're put forward like I would have been put forward to the committee that deals with music and the arts. I think the Arts Council were one of the people that put me forward and organizations like that. They're asked, "Is there anybody in your field who you feel..."

Rick: Has the merit?

Martin: Yes. The merit on the Queen's birthday. They agree on it and it goes to the Prime Minister. Then the first you hear about it or the first I heard about it was I got a letter from the Prime Minister.

Rick: Who was the Prime Minister?

Martin: Tony Blair.

Rick: Tony. Tony, like I know him. [Both Laughing]

Martin: Who is a guitar player, actually.

Rick: Is he really?

Martin: Yeah.

Rick: Oh, I'll have to interview him. [Laughing]

Martin: The thing is he knew who I was, as well. When I was signed with Sony, Adam Sieff who was the head of Sony Jazz was a guitar player in Tony Blair's band. They went to school together. And Tony Blair, he looked up to Adam as the guitar player, but Tony Blair ended up being the manager. He was destined for other things obviously. They write to you and they say, "I'd like to recommend to the queen that you get an honor. Would this be acceptable to you?" Some people turn it down for whatever reason, they don't feel they want it.

Rick: Or they have a protest or...

Martin: Yeah. So you just say, "Yes, I accept it." Then six weeks go until the Queen's birthday and you can't tell anybody. Although I did tell a couple of people. And on the Queen's birthday I was actually in Tokyo. So the first I knew I definitely had it, the phone rang in Tokyo and it was a journalist from Reuters who rang me and said, "Congratulations!" So then you have to go to Buckingham Palace.

Rick: And there's a ceremony actually with the Queen?

Martin: It starts off with people getting knighted. It's a very nice thing. And then all the different ranks, like a Knight of the KBE, a Knight of the British Empire, Commander, Officer, a Member, so I'm a few ranks down. But, if you're good, you can get an upgrade when you get older. [Both Laughing] It's possible I could one day get the big one.

Rick: Have you ever worked with George Martin or Giles Martin?

Martin: No I haven't. No, I've never worked with him. I've worked in a studio, in their studios in London.

Rick: Abbey Road Studios?

Martin: I've worked a lot in Abbey Road Studios and made quite a few records with Stephane at Abbey Road. We made a few albums together in that same studio, we did a couple of records with Yehudie Menuhin and one with the arranger, Frank Sinatra's arranger? [Martin calls out to an associate in the hallway] Name a famous arranger, a very famous one with Frank Sinatra. It's on the tip of my tongue. He did all the Sinatra albums, he wore a hat. I think he worked with Linda Ronstadt once.

Rick: Oh, Nelson Riddle. What about bagpipes? Is there any room for bagpipes in jazz?

Martin: No.

Rick: Okay. [Both Laughing]

Martin: We say that the definition of a gentleman is someone who can play the bagpipes, but doesn't. [Both Laughing] I did once work with a jazz piper, a guy called Rufus Harley from New York.

Rick: And he played with Sonny Rollins.

Martin: Sonny Rollins, yeah. He came to the Edinburgh Festival one year and a little goes a long way. Actually, in my family there were a few people who were pipers. An ancestor of mine was a piper for the Duke of Atholl, so I've got cousins who are pipers and very good pipers. I can appreciate it when I hear someone play the pipes very well.

Rick: A friend of mine plays pipes. I've got a place in the mountains and he brought his bagpipes down and when he plays it's reverberates and dogs started howling all over the place. It's amazing. It's beautiful though. It sounded beautiful.

Martin: Yeah, the highland pipes, they work outside and in certain situations. But you get the lowland pipes and the parlor pipes are very nice. And North Umbrian pipes, northeast of England are nice. They have a terrible instrument in Brittany where my house is in France called the bombarde. It's like the chanter thing.

Rick: One of the albums you came up with is called Masterpieces. It seems like an album where the experience was pretty special to you, and to Michael [Modern Guitars photographer] where you played a lot of guitar from the Blue guitar collection. Michael photographed the guitars for Chinery.

Martin: You didn't do the ones in the studio, did you?

Michael: No. I think Scott Boss?

Martin: That name rings a bell. The picture where Steve and I are in the studio with all the guitars, 60 or 70 guitars.

Michael: I did the "grip and grin" stuff for the Smithsonian and the stuff with you and Steve when you did the concert.

Martin: Yeah, at the Carmichael Auditorium.

Rick: Your latest CD, is it Freternity? Or was it Double Standard?

Martin: Double Standard is the newest one.

Rick: That's the one that I got recently.

Martin: Yeah, that's guitar duets.

Rick: You're playing the duets yourself?

Martin: Yeah.

Rick: How do you do that? Do you first study one section then another section and kind of throw them together or...how do they fuse together?

Martin: It wasn't one method. The first track I did, I thought, "Well, I'll ease my way into this," because I didn't know if the engineer would understand quite what I was doing. As it turned out, it was like telepathy. He was fantastic. So I did one of the bossanovas which meant I was just playing, it was literally just one guitar accompanying the other guitar and the lead stuff on the top. I started with that and just did the accompanying part and then the other part. But, then when I got into other things, I didn't want to play to a click. But, on some of the slower tunes, it was better to have something that held it together.

Rick: Tempo, or...

Martin: What I did was actually just put a part down which was actually just a bass line and then I would record one of the guitars over the top of that, then get rid of that. Then I'd bring in the other guitar, but sometimes I would play something on the other guitar that actually made me think, "Well, I could play some on the other guitar." So, I'd get rid of a section of that, put on another line. Sometimes it was like painting an oil painting, you know, moving the paint around.

Rick: Different colors...

Martin: Yeah, and going over bits and then as I got more and more into it and sort of the engineer, I even started just recording sections, just record an eight-bar intro and doing little section things because I was coming up with the arrangements as I went along. So, they weren't set arrangements.

When I was going in a number of people were saying, "Well, how are you gonna do it?" and I'd say, "Well, I don't know." I don't really know until I get in there. But, I mean I have done it before. I've recorded guitar duets myself before. I did it on one album with Stephane, we did together, and I ended up doing two tracks of just me doing duets. And I also did it on another album called Portraits and I did a couple of duets with Chet Atkins.

I think I did another two myself as well. I did it before, but having done this, by the last day of doing it, it took ten days to do. I really got into it and I started to realize how when I did the next one, which I'm gonna do in time. I'm gonna take it to another level, another direction. I've got other plans that I know I can do now.

Rick: Anything you'd like to convey or do you want to hold off?

Martin: No, not really. It's just a lot of interplay that I could do. There's one track I did, that "Drop Me Off in Harlem", I don't know if you've seen it. It's on YouTube. I did a funny film of me doing both parts.

Rick: I did see that.

Martin: I did it like big band.

Rick: At first I was going, what the...?

Martin: There's a big band section thing on there. I just improvised a chord solo and then I worked out a second chord part below, so it sounds like more than two guitars because it's two guitars playing these chords. I would like to do more like that. It's very interesting to do. I improvise one part, then find another part that will fit that improvisation. I intend to do more of that kind of thing because it sounds pretty wild when you do it. I did the album in ten days. I did five days, then went away for a couple of weeks, then I went back and did the other five days. It gave me time to think about it. And also the studio was about an hour and a half drive. I'd drive in in the mornings to do the session and then I'd take what I had done that day and take it home and listen to it in the car going back, think about it, and when I'd wake up in the morning, drive back in again. I'd put it in again and, "Right, I think I know what I'm going to do." I'd go in and I'd say to the engineer, "I'm just going to change something on that." It gave me time, the luxury of a bit of time, but not too much time to ruin it.

Rick: I've noticed in the last couple of years that jazz seems to be re-emerging. A lot of my friends, they have young sons now and they're not learning rock and roll, they're learning jazz. Are you finding that that seems to be the case all over the world?

Martin: I think so, because I'm finding a lot of mainstream music schools have big jazz programs. In fact, a lot of them have taken over from the classical side of things. It's far more interesting there. I think really what's happening now, at one time, people liked one kind of music and they had their allegiance to one form of music.

It was like supporting a football team. Now I find a lot of people that I know, their record collections, they'll have a couple of jazz artists they really like, but then they'll also have a couple of opera singers they enjoy, then they'll have like Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and maybe some orchestral music as well.

People don't seem to have that allegiance to one kind of thing and you can see that in a lot of venues, clubs that used to be just jazz clubs or whatever kind of music. Now even clubs like Ronnie Scott's in London that has been a jazz club for 45 years, now they don't just have jazz. Jazz musicians are, "Oh, jazz must be dying off," but I think it's actually very, very healthy. These places should be live music venues and I think it should cover as broad a spectrum as possible. That's the future for, not just clubs, but also art centers and centers for the arts and music. So I'm very positive about things.

I think the important thing about everything in life, you have to realize things change. I see too many people that get stuck in a rut, musicians can be terrible about that. "Martin, do you remember the days when...?", "Yeah, but that was then. That's gone." We found a place for ourselves at that time. Now you've got to find a place for yourself now. And for me, I was very fortunate that first of all, I played the guitar. Guitar is probably more popular than it's ever been. And acoustic guitar has just taken off. You wouldn't have thought that 20 years ago.

Rick: Piano was a huge thing before and now guitars have taken over pianos.

Martin: Keyboards kind of came up in the '80s. And people started thinking that if you have a band and pop music, you have a guitar, and what's that about? I play the guitar, there's interest in there. I play solo. I can also play with a group and I think an orchestra recently. I do something that is very specialized, very specific to me. Basically if you want to hear the kind of thing that I do, you come to see me. [Both laughing]

Rick: It's pretty grueling for a lot of musicians going on tour. Do you find it grueling or do you get pumped up when you're on tour?

Martin: I don't find it as easy as I did before, but that's just because in my mind I think I'm still 25. Then I'll think, "Why do I feel tired?" I'm just older. It can be grueling and you have to pace yourself. Airports are going to be a nightmare, as we all know. That's getting very difficult. At one time, I'd always choose flying above anything else. But, now I would sooner drive or get on a train. I try and find enough time to have a bit of breathing space. You have to kind of psych yourself up for it.

You have to be relatively fit. I wouldn't say that I'm athletically fit at all, but I have been. Physically, I've got a good constitution. I'm quite tough. But, I know some people who can't handle the road. I know some really good fantastic musicians, world-class musicians that you've never heard of because they didn't want to do that life. Some of them even just had other jobs. I work with a saxophone player back home who is one of the best saxophone players in Britain. But, he's also one of the world's leading pediatric consultants.

Rick: Really?

Martin: Yeah. He decided he didn't want to do all of that and I don't think he'd have gotten his car collection like he has just playing the saxophone. Or live in the mansion that he lives in.

Rick: Where do you go next after D.C.?

Martin: We go to Cleveland tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to San Diego.

Rick: That's a nice town.

Martin: Yeah, I love it there. I'm doing a gig with Mundell Lowe. We've been friends...he's fantastic.

Rick: How's he doing?

Martin: He wasn't well for awhile, but I was with him a year ago. We did a gig together and I told him I was going to be coming out and doing this and he says, "Oh, come and do a gig in San Diego. We'll do a gig together." I think he's about 85 now. He's great. He's lovely. I've known him for a long, long time.

He was a guy who didn't want to do the road thing. He concentrated on writing music. People used to give him a hard time and say, "You should be out playing jazz more," and doing this and he didn't really want to be out on the road. He wanted to take care of his future and be able to retire in comfort. So he got into writing music and built up his portfolio of music publishing. He's a guy I admire a lot.

Mundell is someone who has been a big influence on me and he probably doesn't even realize it, but he has. When we work together and we just hang out together and talk. From a musical point of view and also as a person, the way you lead your life. To me he's got his priorities right. He has a well-balanced life.

Rick: Is that what one day you'll convey to your students when you're doing your mentoring program?

Martin: Yeah, very much. It covers everything. It's not just getting up there and playing the guitar. I had a very big lesson from Mundell years ago. We did a gig together in London, just him and me and a bass player, an English bass player who played great. He was fantastic. It was recorded. BBC recorded it for one of their jazz programs. We played, and by the end of it, I thought, "Well, that was nice but nothing much really happened." The audience liked it.

It was nice, but there wasn't anything really special that happened. Mundell played great and I thought I played kind of nice on it. Then I heard the broadcast and it sounded fantastic and I told Mundell about that. I said, "I didn't think on that night that it was really...it was okay. When I heard the broadcast, it was fantastic. It was so laid back and thoughtful," and he said, "That's what it's about," and Mundell plays like that. He just plays laid back, thoughtful. Every so often some fireworks come out and he doesn't give it all away.

I said, "You've got to hear this guitar player," a French guitar player that I knew, a very special player. And I played him this track because I loved this track and I played it. And I said, "What do you think of that?" he said, "He gave it all away in the first minute!" [Both Laughing] Very interesting. He's a grown-up player. It's grownups music.

Rick: Yeah, he's really got an understanding of the performance aspects of it.

Martin: Yeah, and he probably doesn't know that he's influenced me, because he has. I should tell him when I see him.

Related Links
Martin Taylor
Martin Taylor MySpace
"Drop Me Off in Harlem" - YouTube (Martin Taylor Duet)
Michael G. Stewart Imaging Solutions

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