I remember that at the time thinking, ‘You’re playing that soppy music again!’ But I became fascinated by it and grew to love that music, and it’s one of the things that I listen to a lot now. She used to play all these Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett records. “She had a great love of music that also influenced me a lot.
“As a little kid I spent a lot of time at home on my own with my mum,” he explains. The youngest of three children, Taylor’s early musical influences unsurprisingly came from what he heard at home. I played that for a while, but noticed that the action started getting higher and higher until one day I picked it up, played a chord, and the guitar exploded! The neck came away from the body with an almighty crash and I was left holding bits of broken wood!” But worse than that, it made my fingers bleed! Then my father bought me a Framus electric from our local music shop. He tried to make it look like a Strat… but it ended up like a cross between a small canoe and a chair leg! “It was almost impossible to play, and should have put me off guitar playing for life! My second was made by a friend of my dad’s out of some old pieces of wood and some salvaged bits of various guitars. “My first guitar was a Russian classical-style instrument that my father bought at Pettycoat Lane market for a pound,” he recalls. If that sounds like the prefect start for any budding musician to have, things didn’t go totally smoothly for Taylor at the start. Apparently I made very quick progress, so my father decided to buy himself a double bass and let me be the guitarist in the family.” “Then, when I was four years old, I picked up my dad’s guitar and started to play it. In fact, to hear the British jazz institution tell it, his interest began before he was even born: “My dad was a big Django Reinhardt fan, so I was listening to the Hot Club de France when I was still in my mother’s womb!” Taylor exclaims. Martin Taylor’s obsession with gypsy jazz guitar started at a very early age.
0 kommentar(er)
