Search - Scottish Guitar Quartet :: Landmarks

Loveliest of all instruments

P. Bryant | Nottingham, England | 11/12/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The guitar : loveliest of all instruments, and if anyone disagrees I'll fight them. It's so versatile. You can't play slide concertina. You can't open tune your clarinet. And you can't set fire to your piano on stage. Well, not round here you can't. But with the guitar - and it may be stating the obvious - flashier isn't always better. John Fahey wasn't half as technically proficient as Leo Kottke, but was vastly more influential. And Manitas de Plata could run rings around Hank Marvin with both hands tied behind his back (something I'd pay good money to see) but did he do "Foot Tapper"? He did not. See?

Fortunately, the Scottish Guitar Quartet (how do they think these names up?) know that, and although they could run rings around each other with their hands tied behind them (something I'd also pay good money to see) they mostly don't, they let their music breathe and float as well as zoom. These guys do not want to be from Mississippi, there are no blues elements in their music at all. I sent examples off to the lab to test for traces of folk music. They haven't reported back yet, but the results will be negative. No folk here. Their influences appear to come from the flamencoish Al di Meola/Paco de Lucia and of course the classical part of the guitar universe; they've got jazz written all over their musical cvs but this stuff isn't jazz, really it's universal music, it's been freed from genre, they're making it up as they go along, and it's invigorating. They've been going since Spring 2000 and this is their third record. They are Ged Brockie, Nigel Clark (also on Caroline Moreau's lovely cd, reviewed elsewhere), Malcolm MacFarlane and Kevin MacKenzie, they're all walking encyclopedias of the guitar parts one to twentyfive, but that's all detail, if you like the guitar, loveliest of all instruments, you could do a lot worse than this"