INTERNATIONAL GUITAR NIGHT
Where: Farquhar Auditorium, University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Rd.
When: Saturday, 7 p.m.
Tickets: $40 from the UVic Centre box office (250-721-8480) or
International Guitar Night, which showcases a cast of six-stringers from around the world, has done plenty to advance contemporary guitar music during the past quarter-century. And its founder, San Francisco’s Brian Gore, says he largely has the city of Duncan to thank for it.
“The first place we ever got a theatre show was in Duncan, if you can believe it,” he said. “From there, we were able to get an agent and build it up over many years. We started out with 50 people. Now, we’re selling out thousand-seat theatres every time. It took about 20 years, but now it’s a global thing.”
Gore faced plenty of ambivalence when he proposed his idea in 1995; few thought a tour consisting of mostly acoustic instrumental music would fly in any market. But he believed in the product, and was committed to finding a way to make it work. The tour is now thousands of performances into its run, with no end in sight, according to Gore.
“Duncan was the first place where we got a chance to show that if we put this thing together, people will come. Vancouver Island is a big part of the success story.”
International Guitar Night returns to Duncan on Friday, for a concert at Cowichan’s Performing Arts Centre. The itinerary also includes dates in Victoria at the Farquhar Auditorium on Saturday and The Port Theatre in Nanaimo on Sunday. Each performer who is slated to appear receives a showcase of their own during the first set, before accompanying each other at the close of the performance.
Gore no longer performs during the tours, stepping back seven years ago so he could trade the day-to-day grind of international travel for smaller tours as a solo artist. He still makes the majority of decisions, however, and has put together a strong 2024 line-up in his stead: Italy’s Luca Stricagnoli, Vietnam’s Thu Le, Brazil’s Marco Pereira, and Australia’s Minnie Marks, the first blues guitarists in the tour’s history.
They join an esteemed roster of more than 50 alumni that includes Britons like Martin Taylor and Mike Dawes, Italy’s Peppino D’Agostino, Brazil’s Celso Machado, and Germany’s Lulo Reinhardt, grandnephew of gypsy jazz legend Django Reinhardt, and Ralph Towner from the United States.
“It’s a nice thing to see,” Gore said of the tour’s legacy.
He brought the tour to Duncan for the first time in 1997, two years after the inaugural concert — in a converted Bay Area laundromat — under the International Guitar Night moniker. “The local folk music venue in Berkley, California wouldn’t have anything to do with me [as a performer], but they were willing to put on the show. They had to keep everything under wraps, because they were growing something funny in the back. But we had 150 people. The show was packed, and it lasted four hours.”
Gore said he sometimes can’t believe his good fortune, and when he reflects on how far he’s come, he can scarcely believe it. What’s more, he’s grown his brand amid reports of declining guitar sales, amid a trend in music more reliant on electronic than acoustic offerings.
“I think it’s cyclical. When I started out, people were saying there was a lull of interest in the acoustic guitar, but it didn’t really make any sense. Each one of these artists we work with come from their own sub-genre, and what I’ve noticed is that each of these sub-genres in the past 30 years have become more vibrant.”
Instructional guitar-playing videos on YouTube have done wonders for the fingerstyle guitars of the world, Gore said. The artists who perform during International Guitar Night tour may be lacking mainstream media attention, but that says nothing of their overwhelming online popularity, according to Gore.
“YouTube has helped make it possible for a lot of players who would have been best-kept secrets, and not so well known. If you look at a lot of the classical guitar players we have had, they get many millions of views. I don’t think the guitar is dead at all. But we just want to include people because they are good, not because they have got a name or anything like that.”
