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I had the great pleasure to hear Andy Mckee and Don Ross perform on the weekend in Montreal at the Guitarmania guitar festival. It was part of the Montreal Jazz festival.

I’ve been waiting Andy Mckee especially to swing by the area to play, and this was one of the few dates he’s playing in Canada this year.

We arrived at the Place Des Arts, expecting to get really bad seats. Not being able to find the place in the dense Jazz festival crowd, we showed up at the door 5 minutes before the concert. Tickets were general admission, so I thought we were for surely doomed to some nose-bleed seats. “Ya, you see that little dot in the middle, that’s Andy Mckee!”.

Fortunately, the concert hall itself was small and intimate, with only a few hundred seats it was impossible to get a bad seat in the house. We found some seats just meters away from Mr. Mckee. His music is so amazing to hear, and to see him play it live was just a spectacular. The audience was just mesmerized by his beautiful music. It’s probably the best concert I’ve ever seen.

Then near the end of his set, he invites Don Ross onto the stage for some duet action. The concentration of talent on the stage was bewildering. They both just “jammed” and were so caught into just making music. It looked like they had a genuinely deep friendship together, and were just having fun on the stage. My emo self shed a tear!

The second concert was with Don Ross, who kicked off his set with a blisteringly fast and intense song, losing his thumbpick midway through, and trucking on. Don Ross was great to see too, and he has a very different style than Andy Mckee’s. More on the jazzy side, and definitely a lot more intense. He describes his style as “wood metal”. Don Ross’ charisma on stage gives him great stage presence, as he’s a pretty witty guy. He ended off his set calling out Andy Mckee for some more jamming duet action.

At the end of the night the two were out in the lobby signing autographs and cd’s. I got some pictures and got some CD’s signed as well as my concert ticket. Being the goof that I am, I was all shy and couldn’t muster up anything thoughtful to say other than that it was a really great concert. What do you say to those accoustic guitar gods anyways?!

It was a great night for me.

Here’s the two of them playing a song off of the new duet album:

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.