INTERVIEW:At the tender age of 14, Andreas Varady's considerable talent is threatening to make the young jazz guitarist a star, writes FIONOLA MEREDITH
IT’S IN THE BLOOD – that’s the only way to explain the extraordinary talent of 14-year-old gypsy jazz guitarist Andreas Varady. From the moment he first picked up a guitar, aged four, the Slovakian-born youngster, now living in Dundalk, has been amazing the people around him. It helps that his father, Bandi, is a jazz musician in his own right. But Bandi says he never taught Andreas. The music was already there, within him, just waiting to be released. His mum, Beata, says that Andreas didn’t play games as a young child; he always just wanted to play his guitar.
When the Varady family came to Ireland from Hungary in 2008, Andreas soon became a sensation on the streets of Limerick, busking with his father. Now he’s shaping up to become the finest guitar player of his generation and the excitement about his talent is spreading across the world. Varady has already played with master guitarists such as Martin Taylor, Andreas Oberg and Frank Vignola.
Benedetto Guitars, one of the world’s finest makes of jazz guitars, is creating a customised model for him, embossed with Varady’s signature. Last year, together with Belfast-based jazz percussionist David Lyttle, Varady released his debut album, Questions, featuring two of his own compositions. And in March of this year, he became the youngest person ever to headline a session at Ronnie Scott’s famous London jazz club.
Despite all this early success and recognition, Varady has nothing of the indulged child star about him – none of the driven, one-dimensional quality that prodigiously talented children often have. He’s charming and unaffected, with big brown eyes and a cheeky grin. Perched on the corner of the sofa in the family living room, he talks seriously about his guitar-playing before breaking off to wrestle with Adrian (aged nine), or pretend to shoot his 11-year-old sister, little Beata, with a toy gun.
Apart from jazz guitar, his other great enthusiasm is Spider-Man: “He’s my big hero. I like crazy gadgets too, all the cool stuff you can buy.” Varady looks blank when I ask him how much he has to practise his guitar.
“It’s just fun. At the weekend, me, my dad and my brother, who plays the drums, go to the music room, and then we’re just in and out of there, playing throughout the day. All day long there is music in our house. It never gets boring, in fact it actually gets more interesting, the more you play.”
Musicians who have played with Varady remark on his surprising maturity, despite his tender years. Soweto Kinch, the British jazz saxophonist and rapper, has noticed how Varady is “so composed and comfortable at his instrument that you never feel like he’s trying to prove anything”. James Mackin, an Irish drummer, met Varady at Sligo Jazz festival and now plays with him whenever he can. Mackin says it normally takes jazz musicians a long time to develop a “conversational” approach to their music. “You have to realise that you’re not playing independently, you’re actually having a conversation with those around you. What I really like about Andreas is that he’s already tuned into that.”
A further measure of Varady’s youthful confidence is that he’s not afraid of slipping up. “That’s another thing that normally takes you a long time to work out, that in jazz there’s no such thing as a mistake,” says Mackin. “Andreas is technically so proficient, his ear is so good, but if he does something slightly off, he just corrects it, in fact he might even do it again. He’s a joy to play with.”
As Varady says himself, he loves to improvise, playing the notes that he thinks best suit the chords, or even messing around outside the chords because he knows he can make it sound good. It’s that sense of joyous play, a youthful refusal to be tied down by rules, you suspect, that makes Varady such an exciting musician.
But I still haven’t heard him play his guitar. So we all troop off to the music room. There’s a 1948 poster of jazz saxophonist and bebop pioneer Dexter Gordon on the wall and Varady’s mother Beata shows me the growing stack of press clippings she has collected. Young Adrian climbs up behind his drum kit, Bandi picks up his rhythm guitar and little Beata settles down to listen with her kitten, Cici, on her lap. With a shy smile, Varady lifts his guitar, which is almost as big as he is.
Adrian sets up a lazy, skipping beat on the drum and then Varady starts to play: at first a complex scribble of sound, and then he’s off, fingers flying. The music picks up pace, meandering in all kinds of crazy directions before Varady brings it back together with an ease and grace that belies the technical skill involved. He watches his dad all the time, and it’s as though they’re throwing each other knots and scraps of music – it’s a conversation, just as Mackin described.
Bandi provides the solid underpinning, but he knows Varady is the star. There’s a great big smile on the young man’s face and it’s obvious that he’s loving every moment: for him, playing jazz is as fun and carefree as a walk in the park.
Listening to Varady, you can almost feel the intensity of his talent, the inheritance of the jazz greats – Wes Montgomery, George Benson – that he has absorbed at his father’s knee. Despite that joyous youthful energy, he’s a serious player. Afterwards, though, he goes back to being an ordinary 14-year-old boy, spinning his guitar upside down and comically strumming it like a double bass. Worldwide fame might be beckoning, but Andreas Varady’s feet are firmly on the ground.
Questions is out now on Lyte Records
