Getting personal with the blues
By Angela Crompton - The Marlborough Express
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Australian guitarist Lloyd Spiegel is giving Marlborough music fans a chance to get into the groove before the annual Blues, Brews and BBQs festival on February 6.
Spiegel will be one of its main guests and people can sample his music tonight when he plays at Le Cafe in Picton.
"It's kind of a local gig – a close, personal show. I can tell my stories, become a friend to the audience," says Spiegel.
He is speaking on the phone from a friend's house in Havelock. Sitting on the veranda, looking out across bush-covered hills, it feels far from Melbourne where he lives and a world away from the Tokyo base he had a few years ago.
The 30-year-old has been playing music professionally for the past 18 years and highlights of that time include the stint in Tokyo, where he introduced many audiences to raw blues sounds, and earlier trips to the United States where musicians he played alongside included blues legend BB King.
Spiegel visited New Zealand for the first time in September last year, when he spent two weeks in Marlborough. "I fell in love with it ... the South Island knocked me right out!"
He leaves the top of the south this time to do shows in New Plymouth, Hamilton, Rotorua and Wellington.
It will be something of a "last hurrah" of the solo acoustic performances he has been doing in recent years.
"I need to be pushed; I'm in danger of music becoming boring to myself ... so this tour is partly a farewell to my solo show."
Returning to Melbourne next month, Spiegel will promote a new album he recorded last year with a percussionist and mandolin and violin players. All are classical performers so it was a learning curve for everyone.
"I have never played classical music and I don't read music."
The other musicians did not read or speak English and because their music language was foreign to Spiegel, the recording sessions were a bit of a nightmare, he laughs.
Rhythm and blues musicians like himself follow emotion, he explains. Classical musicians follow the laws of music. That meant improvisation was foreign to his hired backing band and if they had to stop in the middle of a take they needed to go back to the beginning and start again.
"I've never performed the same song the same way twice, but with my backing band I have to.
"[But] it's very exiting and it's giving my music a whole new edge."
Marlborough audiences will have to wait for Spiegel's next trip across the Tasman to hear tracks from the new album, Tangle Brew, but copies of his solo acoustic CDs will be on sale.
He likes the casual format of next Saturday's Blues, Brews and BBQs event and is looking forward to hearing what New Zealand blues players are doing.
Like Australians, New Zealanders have no direct links to the blues tradition which developed from the fife and drum sounds African slaves took to America.
"We didn't get blues in this area until the 1960s but it had been around since the late 1880s."
The late introduction allowed Australians and New Zealanders access to music which had evolved from blues rhythms and to re-inject it into other music. The Melbourne band AC/DC, performing tonight in Wellington, identifies itself as a blues-rock band playing to rock audiences, Spiegel says.
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