BERMUDA GUITAR– FESTIVAL 2011Adam RaffertySt Andrews Church– Saturday May 28Joy Barnum, Mike MacPhee and bassist Gary Skelton opened the concert for Adam Rafferty with a set of five well performed songs.The talented Joy and her group have been well covered in the media recently with the Amnesty International concert and other events, and your reviewer proposes to concentrate on the guitar portion of the evening.Adam Rafferty is a unique guitarist in that he can play two melodies and percussion at the same time on an ordinary steel six string guitar, but that’s not it.He interprets the music physically, bopping a la Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, but that’s not it.He is also a performer who likes to share musical and other jokes with his audience and have us laugh with him, but again that is not all.What he’s doing musically is blending the raw emotions and the techniques of black Delta bluesmen of the early 20th century with the delicate, almost minimalist understatements of the mid-century Chet Atkins’ white Nashville sound, while adding a layer of percussion, and using it to interpret late 20th century black music.The music which Adam plays is largely drawn from the period roughly stretching from 1965 to 1983 which covers the rise of the great musician performers such as Herbie Hancock, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder.The music is characterised by strong percussion, early electronic mixed with traditional jazz instrumentation, a steady groove, huge danceability and subtlety of delivery by the singer.The music that Adam played consisted of nine pieces and included two originals, ‘Rolling with the Ashes’ and ‘Ciao Bella’.The other seven pieces were ‘Superstition’ (1972) by Stevie Wonder, ‘Chameleon’ (1970) by Herbie Hancock, ‘I’ll be There’ (1970) by Hal Davis, ‘Billie Jean’ (1983) by Michael Jackson, ‘Spain’ (1971) by Chick Corea. ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ (1954) by Bert Howard and ‘Mas Que Nada’ (1963) by Jorge Ben.‘Superstition’ was first up. On comes Adam, lanky and loose and bearded.From the first notes of the bass riff, he captures the excitement of this music.One realises that he has assembled the music into three basic parts, dividing them between the strings of the guitar and separating them by assigning different fingers accordingly.A bubbly but generally damped bass riff is played on the middle strings (numbers five, four and three) by his middle and index fingers.The bass is offset by two other elements.First, the clear ringing sound of the melody played on open treble strings (numbers two and one) using the middle and ring fingers.Second, the thumb pick is used sparingly to pluck the bass (string no six) and to also provide the occasional cymbal sound.Since these elements all work semi-independently one can only wonder how Adam ever invented and developed this technique, let alone applied it to specific pieces.It’s totally original. It’s not even ‘literal’ in the sense that every note in the music appears in his transcription.This would be impossible. Adam’s is implied music. It’s not all there but he’s made it sound so.You can’t exactly see Fernando Sor riffing away here, but perhaps Robert Johnson. In his master class the following day he gave a clue: you have to love the music.You break it down into top, middle and bass. You transpose it so it’s comfortable (‘open strings are your friends’).But that’s only the theory. It would be interesting to see the technique applied to other areas of the repertory.This was a fascinating evening. Many thanks to the organisers of this festival for bringing such a variety of talent to our shores.