The king of the strings: legendary jazz guitarist Martin Taylor

I remember being about 13 years old and seeing Noel Gallagher play the guitar for the first time. I was left with a feeling that I think must have been similar to what a prehistoric human felt upon seeing a small fire for the first time – just totally in awe and having never seen anything quite like it before.

Imagine if you then took that same prehistoric human, after years of thinking a small fire is the best thing they’d ever seen, and showed them a Nasa launch with flames shooting out the back of a rocket propelling it skyward. That’s what it was like for me seeing Martin Taylor play the guitar for the first time, his fingers dancing over the frets like he was playing a piano, a look on his face that suggested he was drifting off to another realm, he blew my mind.

Taylor is a jazz guitarist, one of the finest in the world if you were to ask the likes of Chet Atkins and Pat Metheny. He’s played all over the world from the USA to Japan, won countless awards and received staggering critical acclaim in a career spanning over five decades.

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We arrange to meet over Zoom on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. “I was just out for a walk with the dog,” he smiles. Hanging behind him are two beautiful guitars. He has a presence I’d describe as avuncular with kind eyes behind his glasses. The first thing I want to ask Taylor is whether it’s true that he’s been playing the guitar since he was just four years old.

“I remember the very first time I played,” he says. “I was actually three. My dad came home with this cardboard box and inside was this little red ukulele with a palm tree on it. I picked it up and started strumming away because I’d seen my dad playing the guitar.

“My mum said to him, ‘Can you show him something musical on it? Some chords or something?’ so my dad showed me two chords and I realised I could sing My Old Man’s a Dustman with these two chords. The funny thing is it actually, apart from the sound of it, it felt good.”

When he tells me this, I immediately recall my own futile attempts at learning the guitar as a teenager. It didn’t feel good when I played it and it certainly didn’t sound good either. But for Martin, playing the guitar wasn’t just a childhood hobby.

“It soon became very obvious to me that I was seeing things differently from my brother and sister and other kids I went to school with,” he says. “Immediately, playing the guitar was a way that I came to understand what was going on around me. Things that I didn’t understand, if I could relate them to something musical then I understood it.

“Anything to do with music or playing the guitar ... I got it. Straight away. My brother would pick up the guitar, my brother is very musical but he never played a musical instrument, he just couldn’t get to grips with it at all. I’d say, ‘It’s easy!’ and then he’d play something, and I’d say ‘No! That’s the wrong chord! Can’t you hear that’s the wrong chord?’ He’d go ‘No.’ ‘C’mon man,’ I’d say, ‘there’s got to be a G seventh there!’

“I just understood it. But lots of other stuff I just didn’t understand. At school they knew I was intelligent, reasonably intelligent anyway, but I just didn’t get a lot of stuff. Maths and all that, I just didn’t get it. I filtered everything through music and playing the guitar to understand it. It was more than a pastime or a hobby … it was how I interpreted everything around me.”

By the age of 15, Taylor was a professional musician playing in bands, appearing on the radio and playing on the QE2 (above) as it cruised around the Caribbean. It has seemed to be pretty much non-stop for him since then, going on to be nominated for a Grammy and having several top-10 albums in the US and Europe.

I wanted to ask Taylor about “getting into the zone”, that almost trance-like state where nothing but the task at hand matters. When you see him play, he looks to his left. Is that where “the zone” is? What’s going through his mind when he gets to that point?

“I started playing the guitar when I was so young that I can’t remember not playing a stringed instrument. I grew up with it, it’s part of my body,” he says. “Think about it like learning to tie your shoelaces or a tie, or learning to drive. It’s complicated at the start but after you’ve been doing it for a while, your subconscious mind takes over.

“When I’m playing the guitar, I’m not even conscious I’m playing the guitar! When I was a kid and people asked me what I was thinking when I played, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it but if I told them what was going on, that I was really playing this instrument in my mind, they’d think I was mad.”

In 2008, Taylor began teaching guitar and since then has taught thousands of guitarists in more than 60 countries through California-based guitar school ArtistWorks. What made him want to make this move?

“I didn’t really have any interest in teaching before, I just wanted to go out and do the thing. I had a great guitar mentor, Ike Isaacs. I met him when I was 20. I’d go round his house and listen to him play and some of things he would do … I would just be in awe; I couldn’t get my head around them.

“He said to me one day, ‘Have you ever thought about teaching?’ I said, ‘No, I just want to play.’ He said, ‘One day you’ll want to teach, and you should do. You’ll know when the time comes’.

“I used to have a lot of guitar players come up to me and ask me to teach them and I said I can’t because I’ve never had a guitar lesson myself. I don’t know what happens in a guitar lesson. I wasn’t nervous about going on stage and playing in front of people, but I was nervous about sitting with a guitar player and giving them a lesson. Now, it’s like my students have become my mentors. It’s become a two-way thing, it’s very therapeutic.”

Most of Martin’s students are advanced players, many are professionals and guitar teachers themselves. Some are already accomplished players but are new to jazz guitar.

One of the things I’ve always wondered is what is it that makes a lot of people go hell for leather with a creative pursuit later in life. Is it as simple as them just having more time on their hands or is it maybe something deeper?

“I think a lot of people play guitar when they’re younger, it becomes their passion, but as they get older life just gets in the way,” Taylor says. “My son, James, he’s a keynote speaker, he gives this talk where he mentions just that. He says if you give a small child some crayons and say, ‘Draw a house,’ they’ll doodle something fantastic and abstract.

“Then they go to school, where they’re told to draw a house, but it’ll be a square shape with a door and four windows and a chimney. They’ll conform. What’s happened to some of my older students, and what I think happens to a lot of people, is they now want their crayons back.”

Martin Taylor’s website is at www.martintaylor.com