Guitar wizard Adrian Legg performs Wed., July 11 at the NightCat in Easton.
Adrian Legg is one of the best guitar players you will hear playing in any concert venue anywhere. For Easton music fans, the chance to get to see the Englishman – who was voted Voted “Guitarist of the Decade” by Guitarist magazine and named Guitar Player Magazine’s Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitarist four times – in an intimate 60 seat venue like NightCat next Wednesday, July 11, is nearly criminal.
With his 1990 American recording debut on Guitars & Other Cathedrals, Legg found even greater success across the pond as a regularly touring solo act, headlining and sharing bills with fellow guitarists Richard Thompson, David Lindley, Eric Johnson (whose 2005 album Bloom Legg plays on) and Joe Satriani (on both his own shows and as part of his G3 Tour package with Johnson and Steve Vai, whose Favored Nations record label released two Legg albums). NPR radio listeners may recognize Legg for regular contributions to “All Things Considered,” as the popular public radio news show regularly uses a number of his varied guitar interpretations of its theme music.
Throughout his career, he has earned the highest praise from the media. “Legg is, above all, a guitarist of great power, invention and versatility,” observes the St. Petersburg Times. “Through fast-fingered picking, spontaneously layering parts and occasional ringing harmonics, he sounds like an orchestra.” Guitar Player heralds how he “combines a sublime melodic sense with a mighty right-hand groove, creating pretty music with rhythmically aggressive undercurrents,” while Acoustic Guitar notes that “the guitar is the most versatile instrument in the world, and nobody demonstrates this better than Adrian Legg.” But the Atlanta Journal-Constitution likely summed up his impact on listeners best when it exclaimed, “Mr. Legg’s compositions, with their narrative melodies and nakedly emotive tones, offer an antidote to the guitar-hero syndrome.”
For Legg, the fulcrum and essence of his creativity is in live performance. “Playing live is the whole point,” he stresses. “Everyone makes a journey, an effort; we all come together — me, the audience, the people who run the venue — to share this wonderful, universal, human emotional interaction. This is where music lives.
“Before we had all this mechanical stuff that’s what we did,” Legg notes. “We got together and did it ourselves, or somebody came and did it for us. Everybody is involved in some kind of effort for that to happen. So everybody contributes to the musical event, and everybody is engaged in it. It has a huge social value which I think is very important.”
Described by Audio magazine as a “kind of cross between Robert Fripp and Garrison Keillor,” Legg is a genuine entertainer who excels at not only painting pictures if not frescoes and telling stories with music but also wittily regaling his audiences with tales from his life and travels and his cogent and often oblique yet thought provoking observations on a spectrum of topics. It’s all part of his dedication to making his performances a full-blooded emotional experience. “If you haven’t shared a laugh with someone,” he insists, “you certainly can’t share a tragedy.”
So it’s no wonder that popular BBC radio personality Andy Kershaw says of Legg, “Quite simply, there is no one else like him,” citing his “dazzling technique and equally large dollops of spirit, humor, passion, eclecticism and spontaneity.” For his part, Legg appreciates all the praise, but views his mission as far more basic, and more than anything else an expression of his soul and humanity. “I don’t see what I do as particularly eclectic; I see it as perfectly normal. In terms of the music that has gone before me, I simply reflect my forebears like every other musician.” The results of that approach, however, are simply irresistible and unforgettable.
Tickets $25
NightCat
5 Goldsborough Street
Easton, MD 21601
410-690-4544
adjoining the Red Hen Coffee House
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