Blue Yates – Classical Guitarist
Talented Newcomer in the Vein of Django Reinhardt and Jose Gonzalez
An interview with Blue Yates, and a brief look at his burgeoning career as one of the rising stars of the classical guitar world.
Blue Yates is a classically trained guitarist who brings a Latin flavor to his beautiful compositions. Based in the Midlands, England, Blue is well traveled having previously lived and worked in Milan and performed in New York, Barcelona, London and Madrid. This goes some way to explain how his eclectic music manages to encompass the shared identity of a shrinking modern world, whilst retaining a timeless, melancholic classicism.
Music For Film
Blue's most recent offering was the album Music for Film. As the title would suggest, this album has a cinematic vision to it, creating sweeping vistas of sound with layered guitars and interwoven samples of speech. From the lilting opening bars of "Natale", to the heartfelt, plucked strings of "Jennifer's Tears" the music creates haunting pictures in your mind. The films it evokes are dreamlike movies such as Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. This album was released after Blue's more traditional classical renditions 8 Nocturnes and Luna Eterno and it shows a maturity in his style combined with a modern twist. The fourth track on Music For Film, "Full Moon Rise", even brings to mind ambient electronica group The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds".
Teaching Johnny Depp To Play The Guitar?
Blue, is a charismatic figure. He can seem an intimidating presence; a sinewy, intellectual vagabond, but in person he is articulate and funny. He weaves fantastic anecdotes which may or may not be true such as how he sampled the noise of a dying piano (apparently true - he played me the raw footage) and how he taught Johnny Depp to play guitar for the film Chocolat (almost certainly not true). Interviewing him is fun, but afterwards it is a tricky task to decipher the truth from the teasing.
Quite believably, he explains at one point that he gets very nervous before playing live, which is perhaps why he formed the jazz combo Satsuma with Andy Lunn. The camaraderie of having a partner made playing live a more comfortable experience, and the sense of competition between them gave live performances an element of dueling banjos.
Satsuma – The Jazzy Fruit
Satsuma have played to great acclaim around the Midlands area with a set of up tempo audience pleasing covers such as "the theme from The Third Man", "Express Yourself" and "Dream a Little Dream" – all done in an inimitable jazz style. Familiar figures around our shared hometown of Burton-on-Trent, they had a successful run at both Bar XV and The Dial.
Satsuma are a fabulous live experience - if you ever get the chance to catch them - but for Blue, it seems, more of a sideline. They have not formally recorded any music together.
The Last Album
Blue's recorded releases so far have all been instrumentals, apart from the few snatches of spoken words sampled on Music For Film, and the occasional work he has done for other artists. However, his recent live performances have included vocalist Hayley di Rito. Since working with Hayley, Blue's music has changed again, becoming a more rounded sound. Is he thinking of forming a group? Blue elaborates,
"The next album will be called The Last Album, as it will be the last release under the name Blue Yates. I'm working on new music featuring a vocalist and percussion.”
Blue was not willing to share any further specifics regarding what name his group might go under, but he did hint that Hayley di Rito is the vocalist in question. Hayley often sings at Chloe's Bar (in Burton -on-Trent) and she is the confirmed owner of a lush, powerful voice. Her contributions are sure to push Blue's music into a more mainstream direction.
Check out Blue's MySpace site for further updates and to purchase his music.
Source: Michelle Strozykowski interviewed Blue Yates for this article in December 2007
