Rick Emmett

I have not seen this guy since his days in Triumph!!
if any one out there has please advise like to take in one of his shows
http://www.rikemmett.com./
thanks
Bluezman

Fans who remember the incendiary guitar licks of classic Canadian rock anthems like Rock and Roll Machine, Magic Power, and Follow Your Heart, will be thrilled to discover that the man who created them, Rik Emmett, has come to terms with his inner rock star and is stepping back into the form of music that made him a household name while a member of the hard-rock power trio Triumph.

Yep, Emmett, the man who has spent the past 15 years travelling down a variety of musical highways and byways - from folk, swing, smooth jazz, blues and classical - is re-entering the hard rock arena with a new project called Air Time.

He is also performing a tribute to one of his personal rock guitar heroes, Eric Clapton, in a special show at the Gryphon Theatre in Barrie on Feb. 2.

Air Time sees Emmett working with songwriter/vocalist/drummer Mike Shotten, former member of the short-lived 1990s band Von Groove, who also replaced Brad Delp as the vocalist for Boston for a tour not long ago.

He isn't abandoning all the other forms of music, though. His latest CD was a project with longtime sideman and fellow guitarist Dave Dunlop called Strung-Our Troubadours. Emmett said he would still work with Dunlop on material, as well as on solo singer-songwriter projects and Air Time.

"The Air Time thing is riff rock at the bottom side of it. It's like Zeppelin meets Rush ... but then Shotten and I are both high-tenor kind of singers. When we got into the studio, the most fun of all was to sit with a microphone between us and start singing harmony parts and he suggested a thing that was kind of a Beatles-ish answer line, to happen in a verse," he told The Mirror from his home studio.

"He'd hit record and we'd double it singing into the mic together ... by the time we were finished, we had choirs of Queen-ish backgrounds built on everything, everywhere. And now it's a huge problem because at the top end of the record it sounds like Queen, the bottom end of the record sounds like Zeppelin. So we're both like, 'what have we done?'

"I don't know, but I think that Air Time will become unique in its own way. And because it was fun to do, I'm just going to go ahead and do it, and we'll see if an audience likes it or not. We'll see."

The Air Time album is in the final stages of mixing, and Emmett hopes to have it our sometime in the spring. He and Shotten are in negotiations with a label based in Italy that specializes in melodic rock bands like Styx, while Emmett will most likely release the CD domestically on his own Open House Records label.

Having eschewed the hard rock genre for most of his now 18-year solo career, Emmett understands how people might be perplexed with his immersion back into realm of crunching chords, blistering solos and hard-driving rhythms.

"I must admit I am coming to terms, I won't say I'm all the way there. But I am coming to terms with my own history in that sense," Emmett said.

"I heard a story about [Eric] Clapton and he was going through customs in Africa and they asked him what his occupation was and he had one of those sort of blinding moments of insight and he looked at the guy and said, 'I'm a rock star.' And Clapton is a hundred times more than anything that I would ever dream that I was in terms of rock starness. But I still am one, kind of. There's not a lot of people that walk the face of the Earth who can say, 'yeah, I've been a rock star.' But I have, and I guess I'm sort of coming to terms with that."

Doing a Clapton tribute is also another sort of departure for Emmett. Under the auspices of Peter Brennan's Jeans and Classics program with the London (Ontario) Symphony, Emmett played a few shows doing Beatles covers as a special guest with the orchestra. His rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, originally recorded by George Harrison, with Clapton on guitar, brought the house down, and Brennan encouraged Emmett to come up with a set of Clapton tunes.

He played to show in London to rousing success with the symphony, and now performs around Canada in the show, with community symphonies, or, as in the case of the Gryphon Theatre gig, with a regular band.

"I love to play, and I love to have opportunities to play. And playing the Clapton stuff is fantastic material to play, and it's fun and almost like a vacation for me in the sense that I don't have to worry about my own tunes," Emmett said. "It's almost like being in a play where you're doing a role. And Clapton's shoes are really nice shoes to be able to try on for a while."

Emmett said that the key to doing a 'cover' show is to truly inhabit the music and to be in the moment, else you can drift into the realm of being a parody.

"You have to be in the moment with the audience, and in that place and playing that song in that moment. And you have to be yourself," he said, adding that he's unconcerned with any criticism doing a tribute show could engender. "If you are too much of a purist, politically, you're starting to enter into that area of fascism, which I really hate. Jazz Nazis and folk Nazis and rock Nazis, there's no point to being so critical. It's music, and it's supposed to be kind of liquid ... something that allows people to interpret it inside their own heads, in their own spirit as it hits them. If it doesn't have that quality, then what was the point of doing it in the first place?"

On top of all this, Emmett, 53, has been married to wife Jeannette for more than a quarter of a century, and a father of four. He teaches a music business course at Toronto's Humber College, conducts guitar workshops and clinics around North America, and performs at all sorts of venues, in all sorts of musical incarnations around the world (but mostly in Canada and the U.S.)

Whew!

The Emmett Plays Clapton show at the Gryphon Theatre on Feb. 2, will see interpretations of Slowhand's tunes with Cream (White Room, Sunshine of Your Love), Derek and the Dominos (Layla) as well has Clapton's many solo hits (Tears In Heaven, I Shot the Sheriff, Wonderful Tonight.)