I’d seen various short videos on Taj Farrant, at the time a 9-year-old guitar prodigy from Australia over the last few years. He was a small, dreadlocked, blonde boy with a big, flat-brimmed black hat and some serious guitars and equipment, showing off his astonishing guitar skills. I thought his father was the person behind the camera and was intent on making his son a social media sensation, which seems to be the contemporary route to fame and riches. Oddly, though, it wasn’t very interesting once one got beyond the initial fascination with the facility with which this kind played guitar. On the one hand he must have a freakish talent and on the other hand he must practice a lot.
Now I’ve come across a video on YouTube of the older Taj Farrant, and his drum playing sister Jazel, on stage at Th. e Meteor Guitar Gallery, Bentonville, Arizona where he did a three-night stand in March 2023. Taj is backed by a second guitarist, bassist and drummer and plays two sets of covers of mostly guitar songs by the likes of Gary Moore (the blues Moore), Stevie Ray Vaughan (Farrant is obviously quite partial to these two), Jeff Healey and Jimi Hendrix, but Farrant also does some of his own songs and touts his CD with, presumably, more original songs.
Farrant is excitable, chatty and unselfconsciously engaging and he sure can play the guitar well. From this set one doesn’t know whether he writes his own songs or whether his talent is purely and simply the ability to render note perfect copies of the well-known songs he performs, i.e., he is no more than a human jukebox.
There is a market for this kind of thing. There are numerous tribute bands plying their trade all over the world and bands who can regurgitate popular hits, whether oldies but goodies or contemporary hits, can always get a gig. I don’t get it. Most cover bands or artists either do mediocre versions of the classics or they do such note perfect versions that it’s scary. Either way, it’s redundant for me. I’d rather listen to a band, any band, playing their own stuff. If I feel like a bit of, for example, ZZ Top, I’ll spin their records and not seek out a band of bearded individuals who not only try their best to look like Billy, Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard but do their best imitations of the speech and playing of those individuals. Ersatz can never beat the real thing.
Farrant plays a Fender Strat, a Gibson Les Paul and a Gibson Flying V for the band numbers and also an acoustic guitar for a couple of tunes.
The first set ends with a blues rock version or Hendrix’s “Red House,” which irks me, because I prefer the more sensitive, proper blues version of the tune as performed by Hendrix and because Farrant’s version is just so generic.
The second set opens with Farrant toting an acoustic guitar and playing Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (at least a different take on the tune) and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” where the acoustic take is quite effective though he just doesn’t have Ronnie van Zant’s voice to carry off the song with conviction.
From here Farrant switched to an electric guitar and performs his own composition, “Crossroads” (not Robert Johnson’s tune), a reflection on the myth of selling your soul to the Devil in exchange for success.
When the band set resumes, Jazel is on drums for one song, and it’s back to the guitar song covers with a Jeff Healy tune, yet a detour to his own rocker, “Hit the Ground,” which is fun but not a work of genius.
The second guitarist gets his own feature turn, singing and playing solos, on “Pride and Joy” and he and Farrant do some guitar duelling for good measure. I can’t tell whether either of them is any better than the other.
The first set opener was a jazzy Stevie Ray Vaughan instrumental and, fittingly, the second set closer is a rocking Gary Moore instrumental on which Farrant audaciously plays his guitar behind his back, the first and only bit of showmanship of the night.
There’s no doubting that Taj Farrant plays a guitar exceedingly well and if it’s your pleasure to attend a gig where the band performs beloved blues rock guitar tunes just about as good as the original artists, nut in your home town, than he’s your guy. Presumably, he now plays mostly cover versions to draw in the crowd, slipping in just enough original numbers to showcase his songwriting without alienating a crowd who came for the cover versions, but in due course, as he tours more and becomes better known, the originals will outnumber the cover versions.
Farrant can probably have a good, financially rewarding career playing Gary Moore and Stevie Ray Vaughan songs, for which there will always be an audience, but the real test will be when he focuses on his own material.
Joe Bonamassa was also a child guitar prodigy and has since become a major force in the blues rock field with his own songs. His muscular, verging on rock, take on guitar blues doesn’t appeal to me, partly because he seems to be more technically fixated than on deep blues emotion. Perhaps it’s because it seems that guitar technique just come easily to him, though I’m sure he practices hard to make it seem easy. Taj Farrant is probably as talented and works as hard and will, all things being equal, go as far in his musical career, and I hope he can do it with this own music.
