By: Craig Hunter Ross
With a career that spans five decades and multiple genres, it’s no surprise that guitarist Tommy Emmanuel is respected by players and music fans the world over. His unique finger style technique of playing with all ten fingers has dazzled and amazed even legends, so much so that Emmanuel was presented with the “Certified Guitar Player Award” by the great Chet Atkins, an honor earned by only four other guitarists before Atkins’ death in 2001.
Now as the winter of 2011 approaches and on the heels of his CMA Global Artist Award, Emmanuel has an early Christmas gift of music for all to enjoy with the release of his newest recording All I Want for Christmas. The collection includes Yuletide classics and standards as only Tommy Emmanuel can share, as well as an Emmanuel original, “One Christmas Night,” which is sure to become a classic as well.
Tommy took some time from a busy day of travel and show preparation in Paris, France to chat with Guitar International about his current tour and of course, the new Christmas album.
Tommy Emmanuel, Photo: Wikipedia
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Craig Hunter Ross: Good morning, or should I say afternoon to you Tommy!
Tommy Emmanuel: I am speaking to you today from one of the most beautiful cities in the world, where people talk like this [in his best French accent, laughing]
Craig: So a show tonight in Paris I take it?
Tommy Emmanuel: Yes, that’s right, at a beautiful place called La Cigale, which doesn’t mean the cigar. It means The Flamingo Club, I think…
Craig: Is it a theater or old movie palace type of venue?
Tommy Emmanuel: It’s a club that is very much like the theater style. It’s a beautiful club, and I have played here once before, so we’re glad to be back again.
Craig: Is that the type of venue you prefer?
Tommy Emmanuel: I don’t prefer any type of venue really, as long as it’s not a bar and all that. I like places where people come to listen, concert halls and that sort of thing. That’s normally the type of place I play. Here in Paris, I’ve played in several different places. I started out at a place called The New Morning, which is a really nice venue. It’s a well-known jazz club, and that’s where I started. It’s where Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton did their live concert DVD and album. It’s actually about two blocks from where I am sitting right now.
Craig: These shows you are doing right now as you travel through Europe… are they one man shows, or with a band, an ensemble?
Tommy Emmanuel: It’s just solo. I do have an opening act. A guy named Jimmy Wahlsteen, he’s from Stockholm in Sweden. Jimmy came to visit me last year in Berlin. He gave me a copy of his album; I looked him up on You Tube and thought he should be heard.
Craig: While we’re on the subject of venues, I have to say I took a recent peek at your Sydney 2000 Olympic Closing Ceremonies performance, which was just tremendous…
Tommy Emmanuel: Well thanks!
Craig: Can you share how special that must have been? I mean to be in your homeland, playing with your brother, on that stage, in that venue at that moment in time?
Tommy Emmanuel: Oh Craig, it was unbelievable! You know, that was one of the greatest spectacles of all time. I said to my brother before we went out to play, “Take a photo of this in your mind, because it will never happen again.” I mean there were 200,000 people in the stadium, another 30,000 athletes on the field and 2.75 billion people watching around the world. It was a pretty big gig.
Craig: Well I should say so!
Tommy Emmanuel: And because everything leading up to the closing ceremony had to be a complete surprise, it was literally a military style operation. We were all taken in buses and no one knew the location, no one was allowed to disclose the details. We really had to work together, the entire cast. They had recreated everything on this airfield and we had to rehearse all the timing. You can imagine the timing that had to work among thousands of people. It was an amazing thing to be apart of.
Craig: Taking a quick glance at your schedule, it looks like you’ll be in Europe most of the rest of this year and into the early part of next. But looking at February… can you tell me what “Tommyfest” is?
Tommy Emmanuel: “Tommyfest” is something we do every year, and this will actually be our tenth year. It’s in Elizabethtown, Kentucky at the Hardin County Schools Performing Arts Center. I do a series of concerts for three nights, and I do workshops as well. I’ll also bring in a different guest each night. I used to go and play there one night, then we sold out two nights, and then we sold out three nights, so I added workshops in the afternoons. My manager said it was becoming a bit like a festival and suggested we call it “Tommyfest.” We started it there, then we did one in Virginia, then Texas, then England, then Germany and Australia.
Tommy Emmanuel - All I Want For Christmas
Craig: I have to congratulate you on your new album All I Want For Christmas. It’s absolutely beautiful. As I have been listening through it the last few days, though it’s not snowing here yet, I just want to head outside with the kids and throw snowballs. It puts the listener in such a Christmas mood, and the joy of your playing really comes through on it.
Tommy Emmanuel: Well, thank you. I really tried to play those melodies and make the whole album in a warm way. I wanted it to be just as warm as could be.
Craig: What made you decide to do a Christmas album?
Tommy Emmanuel: My manager had been saying for years that people were writing and asking when I was going to make a Christmas album or do some Christmas music. I’ve listened to Christmas music all my life, and I love it. Having been a part of Christmas shows, I know all of the carols, etc. I just decide one day that it was time to do it. I got together with my friend John Knowles and asked him if he’d like to help me with a Christmas album. Well, in two seconds flat we had our guitars out and were playing “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph.” He came up with so many great ideas, with key changes and other interesting ways of making the songs work, it was just brilliant.
Craig: Is that you chuckling at the end of “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”? I just had a sneaky suspicion it was you chuckling, because you were having so much fun and probably nailed it on the first take.
Tommy Emmanuel: You got it! [Laughs]
Craig: It’s hard to describe, but on some of the tracks, especially “White Christmas,” your playing really almost paints a picture, creates a scene of sorts. I felt like I was riding in a sleigh, holding my wife’s hand with snow falling. Some of the pieces where you used the violin and string ensembles added such tasteful elegance.
Tommy Emmanuel: Those guys, and lady, are like the “A” list Nashville players, and I can tell you they really put their heart into this. They came to the studio in love with the project. These guys can and do everything. Classical, opera, country, you name it. But all of them came to the studio with a big heart for this project. They really threw themselves into it. In fact, the strings on “How Great Thou Art” were not written. They actually heard the track and came up with their own parts right there in the studio. That’s unheard of in this day and age. It was mind-blowing, the whole thing. It just seemed like destiny.
Craig: In your process of selecting the songs for the album, are these numbers that hold any specific special meaning to you, or were you just looking to record some of the more popular traditional favorites?
Tommy Emmanuel: It just seemed that they were the ones that we all agreed on or that I really loved the melody of. I’d been playing “Jingle Bells” and “White Christmas” for years with orchestras and stuff like that on Christmas shows and TV shows, but the rest of them I just wanted to experiment with. I think they came out nicely. Take “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” which is one of my favorite tunes, and “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” is such a beautiful melody.
Craig: And you have an original on there too, “One Christmas Night,” which, when you listen to it, has such an established Christmas carol theme to it. There are some familiar refrains in there…
Tommy Emmanuel: There you go, then I achieved my goal. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to write something based on my knowledge of Christmas carols, and I wanted it to sound like it had been around forever.
Craig: Closing the album with “How Great Thou Art,” not necessarily a traditional Christmas song, but certainly a traditional standard of the Christian faith… How did you arrive at deciding to close the album with that?
Tommy Emmanuel: Well, it’s the perfect message, and I have always loved that song. I thought it was nice the way it tailed off the album and left you on a real powerful note.
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