The latest in our member feature series comes from Tom Medhurst. His intro:
I’ve been playing for about 14 yrs now and over the last 3 or 4 years I made the jump from rock to jazz. I am now part of a jazz duet in Berkshire, who play popular music from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. We released our first album “Songs for the Summertime” in April of this year which has been played on a number of radio stations. I recently played with Paul Kissaun (previously a member of the Flying Pickets) on stage (probably the most fun I’ve ever had as a musician!) and have recently just finished a stint in the recording studio putting together some demo tracks for a press-kit, so we can start promoting ourselves in the new year.
http://myspace.com/idlewordsjazz http://www.idle-words.co.uk
1) What is the favorite guitar that you own and what is it about that guitar that makes it special?
My Peerless Port Town is by far my favourite guitar out of the 7 I own. I bought it in Farnham in Surrey a couple of years ago. I’d never bought an arch-top before and didn’t really know what I was looking for in one. I tried pretty much every arch-top in the store (probably around 15 of them!) and this had the nicest tone and it felt great! Everything about this guitar screamed jazz and I was hoping it would inspire me and help me become a better musician.
It has been with me through so many nerve racking times. Going onto a stage to play jazz, in-front of real jazz connoisseurs, when you’ve been playing rock for over 10 years is an extremely scary thing to do. Jazz fans take music extremely seriously.. I would go as far as to say that jazz fans are probably more passionate than fans of any other genre! These guys really know what they are talking about and their acceptance of me into the elite world of jazz guitar was the single most important thing to me.
This guitar is like a box of memories of my achievements and more humbling moments, which I could never part from!
Tom Medhurst with his Peerless Port Town
2) What’s your dream guitar?
Now I’ve been playing my arch-top for a couple of years and other musicians have allowed me to try theirs; I am starting to understand what it is that I need in a guitar. My dream guitar would obviously need to be an arch-top or a Selmer and have a warm and muddy single humbucker.
I don’t often play on the top octave of the guitar (unlike when I played rock and lived above the 12th fret!), but when I do have the need, it is extremely difficult to do without a cut-away, so I think it would need one of those.
I’ve always admired large guitars with long fretboards. For some reason I find large and flat fretboards on a guitar really inspiring!?! So a fretboard something like the Peerless Journeyman or Jazz City would be perfect.
Also being a geek at heart (I’m a software engineer by trade), I would love a guitar which had both a 1/4″ jack input and a USB MIDI interface. This would allow me to quickly jot down ideas in score-form without needing to spend hours writing it out on paper or worse, one of those score writing packages for your computer! You just plug the guitar straight into my mac, start Logic and record the track into the score writer just as you would from a MIDI keyboard.
So if everyone can go and buy our album, I can have enough money to have one custom built! Then I can show you my dream guitar! 
3) When you pick up a strange guitar, for example someone else’s or in a shop what’s the first thing you play to check out if you like or not?
As there are only two people in the band; I find I have to re-compose a lot of songs which were originally written for big bands into something which would work for just a guitar and vocals, without taking the magic out of the song. Two of my most proud re-compositions are Duke Ellington’s “In My Solitude” and Nina Simmone’s “Baby Just cares for me”. The reason I love playing these in a shop or infront of people who haven’t heard me play them before is because everyone knows at least one of these tracks and rather than pulling off some terribly impressive, technically mind-boggling chord sequence or solo; I just love to see people’s faces as they suddenly recognise the song! You can see the nostalgia in their eyes and they start to grin like a Cheshire Cat!
Gypsy minor blues is something I also often play in a shop if I want to check the tone of a guitar.
They were great to read – every time the passion and love of the guitar comes through. Click here for the other posts in the series. If you are not a member and want to see more information on the guitars mentioned go to dbtwang.com and sign up.
keith
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