Art Turner – Sonora

Art Turner – Sonora

So I’m a fan of the Wailin’ Jennys incase you hadn’t noticed. If you go to their website or their MySpace page, you’ll see all of these wonderful photos of them…and if you look, you’ll see they were taken by Art Turner. If you go to the Jennys’ Link page you’ll see the following, “Art Turner: Art is a great friend of ours, a fabulous finger-style guitarist and he is also responsible for our new promo shots.” I read this and thought to myself that, “Hey, I’m a guitar player and a photographer too.” Needless to say, I clicked the link and I’m glad I did.

Aside from the great pictures, as if that weren’t enough, Art Turner is just an outstanding guitar player. While I may be a “Jack-Of-All-Trades and master of none,” Mr. Turner appears to be a master of both. I listened to some of the song samples on his Albums page and was just blown away. Not only is Art Turner amazingly technically proficient, he also has a gifted ear for melody and the ability to craft a full and expressive piece of music using only a single acoustic guitar.

That’s not to say that the tracks on Sonora are only solo acoustic guitar. Guest musicians also add the flavors of other string instruments to the tracks, but if you were to take all of them away, Sonora could still stand as a perfectly beautiful album.

Sonically, Sonora is beautifully simple with nothing getting in the way of the performances, and those performances are wonderfully crafted and simple in an amazingly complicated kind of way.

If you’re a guitar player or just love the guitar, I wouldn’t miss the chance to hear Art Turner play.