On Saturday I went to see Thomas Leeb at CB2 in Cambridge (UK). I heard of him through the Cult of Lowden group (because he plays a Lowden), and I saw a video of him playing from his website, which suggested he was rather good, so I fancied seeing him for real.

So, how to sum it up?

Bill Bryson has an interesting bit in one of his books, where he's talking about Mount Washington having the highest recorded windspeed in the world - he said something like "It must be frustrating to go through a unique experience and try describe it to people afterwards. 'It was windy. Like really, *really* windy'..."

I now know what he meant. Thomas Leeb is good. Like really, *really* good...

There are plenty of people who are great players, but there are a much smaller number who are great musicians, who make music that you actually want to listen to. They had one of them on first, a guy called Amrit Sond - he was a good technician but there was very little music involved, and his techniques tended to be more towards the novelty "here's a sound I can make, let's string something around it" kind of thing. Similarly Eric Roche was a fantastic technician, but the technique seemed to be for its own benefit and not for the music.

TL is something else again. There's wonderful rhythm in his playing, but this isn't the rhythm of someone just doing guitar body percussion. Yes, that's an integral part of his sound, but the tune keeps going. Music-wise there's often jazz elements, but again there's tune in there which modern jazz loses. Technically he's using body percussion, tapping, artificial harmonics and bent harmonics all over the place, but it always serves the piece.

The easiest example is his cover of "While my guitar gently weeps". He went through it all once normally, then dropped into playing the melody softly in harmonics. 100% accurately and purely, like an organ. Whilst keeping a bassline going. Whilst softly chicken-picking the other strings to give an effect not a million miles away from brushes on a hi-hat.

I'll obviously be buying CDs! But I'm not sure it'd all come over on the CDs though. The appeal of a performance is always that you see someone doing all this for real. For TL, it's seeing him doing this on his own, on one guitar, and completely blowing away how you thought guitar tunes were supposed to sound. None of the "what's he using to make that sound?" kind of thing from recordings - you can see it's for real.

And not only that - he's also a thoroughly nice bloke too. Talking to him afterwards, I said I'd heard about him through the Cult of Lowden. "Oh," he says, "do you want to try my new one?" and hands me the guitar he's been playing the gig with to have a go on! (A lovely spruce-and-maple one, incidentally.) Well, if you insist... ;-)

Put simply, the man is a god. Go and see him as soon as you can. :-)

Graham.