We were down at Shorty’s Saturday for blues guitarist Geoff Atchison. Have you ever heard of him? Huh? No? He was voted one of the Top Ten Hottest New Guitarists (Guitar Player 2008). Which is kind of odd, being “newest” except perhaps newest in that he’s totally unknown in the United States. You see, he picked up, in 1996, the Albert King Award for most promising guitarist at the W. C. Handy awards, and for eleven years was a guest instructor at Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch.
Marty played with Geoff for several years in the early part of this decade. He had a cult following in the west and during that time developed a cult audience in the south but his main staple loyal followers remained in Australia.  About a year to two years ago, Geoff moved to the states to make a dedicated push to building his audience and now is about to move back to Australia, a lot of hard work not succeeding in breaking him out of that cult following.
Which is really–and I mean REALLY–too bad. Because he’s blossomed as a musician during the past few years. And when I say blossomed I mean instead that he’s taken one of those huge leaps that you hope to see a promising talent make, but rarely see happen.
When Marty was playing with Geoff, yes, he was great, he was an exceptional guitar talent, but it felt a restrained talent. A balance hadn’t yet been found between the technician and the heart.
But he’s since found that balance and loosed the restraints–and it was wonderful to sit at our little table the other night and watch him in that small restaurant/club, just a few feet away, playing on a stage barely large enough for four musicians (the kind of stage where the keyboardist always ends up playing off stage in the audience).  At the same time it felt peculiar that we would be sitting there in that small a restaurant watching him play and that it wasn’t a spill-over crowd.
It’s a pleasure to watch him play as he focuses on some far-away spot just above the audience; one has the sense of a secret two-way tractor beam, a strong reciprocal relationship between inspiration and creativity at work. And yet he’s not disconnected from the audience. He’s got the door wide open and is sharing it all with you.
That unleashing the restraints, in the way he manages it, takes quite a bit of maturity.
But now it all sounds very serious when in fact it’s a lot of serious musicianship in friendly combination with a very at ease stage persona. He regaled us with a story of his recently jamming on stage with the legendary Les Paul, who at the age of 92 is playing once a week at the Iridium in New York.
I had my little recorder in my bag and I thought of pulling it out because I wanted to keep some of this and take it home with me.
Even better…
On the way home afterward, Marty played for me the recordings of Geoff he’d recently done in the studio.
Wow. Marty has done an incredible job recording Geoff.
“Give me a CD of this,” I said. “I want a CD of this.”
So he burned a CD for me and I waited until today to put up this post so that I could have some music to go with it. And I hope you’ll take the time to listen because I simply like people to enjoy themselves and even though it’ll be a compressed mp3 on lousy computer speakers I’ll be surprised if you don’t find yourself thinking, “Who is this guy? I would really like to see this guy play.”
“Rule the World” is the name of the song I’m choosing to put up.
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