GERMANY: BLIND GUITAR PLAYER JEFF HEALEY PERFORMS CONCERT WITH HIS BAND IN STUTTGART

Record ID: 390727

  • Title: GERMANY: BLIND GUITAR PLAYER JEFF HEALEY PERFORMS CONCERT WITH HIS BAND IN STUTTGART
  • Date: 22nd October 2000
  • Summary: VARIOUS, HEALEY AND BAND PERFORMING SMV, PAN OF AUDIENCE APPLAUDING AT END OF CONCERT WIDE SHOT OF STAGE AND AUDIENCE FROM THE BACK OF THE HALL
  • Embargoed: 6th November 2000 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: STUTTGART, GERMANY
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA46R9CSL6ENGMWYN0J9FL9Q6ZW
  • Story Text: Jeff Healey is one of the most recognisable and accomplished rock guitar players in the world today. The Canadian, who has been blind from the age of one, developed his own distinctive style of playing the guitar flat on his lap, a trait that has become his trademark.
    In 1988, after a great deal of success as a solo artist in Canada, the newly formed Jeff Healey band (with Joe Rockman on bass and Tom Stephen on drums) signed their first contract with Arista records in the US. Six albums later and after a five year break, The Jeff Healey Band is back in 2000 with the seventh album 'Get Me Some'.
    The Jeff Healey Band first burst onto the scene in 1988 with the launch of their first album 'See The Light'. This album gave them the hit single 'Confidence Man', which reached the top ten in the USA and the single 'Angel Eyes' which reached number five in the Billboard Hot 100. The following year they were cast in the Patrick Swayze film 'Road House' and contributed to the soundtrack of the film. This year sees the release of their seventh album, after a five-year break from recording and touring, during which the band members have all pursued their own personal projects.
    The band's star Jeff Healey first picked up a guitar at the age of three and quickly became recognised as something of a musical prodigy. By the age of six he was performing in public and at fourteen he was the principal music specialist at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
    Like many talented musicians he quickly became identified with a unique style, in his case, the unique trademark of playing his guitar flat.
    " I don't know what advantages there are, not being able to compare in playing any other style or holding it any other way. This is the way I've always grown up playing, I started with a tune to a chord and altering the chord with a slide and you know, just dispensed with the slide and learned normal standard tuning and continued from there".
    Besides the band, Healey has other interests, such as the record and production company that he founded to nurture new Canadian talent and joint projects with other artists such as the album 'Hell to Play' which he recorded with George Harrison and Mark Knopfler among others. Indeed, the artist who professes to have over twenty five thousand albums in his record collection, sees himself as very much more than just a frontman for a band.
    "I have no idea, I mean I do a lot of different things. I have been known and I'm continuing to be known more individually as a real eclectic musicologist, but the band itself, this band, is very much a blues rock band with a lot of different elements to it. I mean, you know, there's really hardly a song on this album that is really directly related to any twelve bar blues and yet, it's easily confused with the sort of improvisational quality that this band has."
    Known almost as much for his supple and often melancholic vocals, Healey's voice gets a good workout on the new album 'Get Me Some', with its mixed bag of hard guitar riff dominated tracks and the softer ballad like 'I Should Have told You' and 'Love Is The Answer:' The current single from the album is 'I Tried' is a cover of a song originally written by Diane Warren.
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