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Muriel Anderson will make her Maui debut at 'ProArts Playhouse' / The Maui News

Posted: January 15, 2025

Maui News - Jon Woodhouse writes…..Acclaimed by Guitar Player Magazine as one of the top 50 acoustic guitarists of all time, Muriel Anderson was playing in a Chicago hotel some years ago when Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page walked in.

“He was staying in the hotel where I was playing in the lobby,” Anderson recalls. “He heard me playing and came down at the end of the night. There was nobody else there, and we passed the guitar back and forth for about an hour, playing for each other. I finally said, ‘Teach me something you wrote,’ and he launched into ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ I was learning from the man who wrote it.”

The first woman to win the National Finger Style Guitar Championship in 1989, Anderson is primarily known for playing a harp guitar. She will perform Jan. 17 at the ProArts Playhouse with special guest Steve Grimes, who recently released a video for his moving “Lahaina Town” song. It will feature a multimedia planetary tour of tastes, images and music with a backdrop of visuals by photo-artist Bryan Allen.

Her fans include a few guitar greats. Country legend Chet Atkins called her “a great guitarist.” Virtuoso Les Paul lauded her as “one hell of a great player. The way she plays is like we all wish to play.” And Tommy Emmanuel noted: “Muriel plays all styles with such ease and command that it’s easy to forget how good she really is.”

Anderson favors playing a harp guitar because “it expands the range of the instrument and gives me more variety,” she says. “I don’t play on all 20 strings for every song, but there are some songs that require some low ringing sub bass notes that just make the whole song come alive. Other songs can use some extra high tinkly steel strings on top, and some songs can use the entire range. So it just leaves a lot more options for me musically. It gives me more colors to play with in my musical color palette.”

For her recent album “Acoustic Chef,” this virtuoso guitarist collaborated with some friends from around the world including Django Reinhardt’s grandson Lulo Reinhardt, Tuvan throat singing ensemble Alash, Italian guitarist Alberto Lombardi, gypsy fiddle player Zoltán Baranyi, flamenco guitarists Tierra Negra and Kasha Breau on the Finnish zither.

Combined with a cookbook, “Acoustic Chef” featured an album of memorable compositions, with influences ranging from classical and gypsy jazz to Spanish and bluegrass.

“I’ve been interested in music from a lot of different countries for quite some time, and ‘Acoustic Chef’ was a great springboard to write and arrange music in the style of the country that each recipe came from,” she says. “Cuisine and music and language are all intertwined. They’re all an integral part of the culture, so it only makes sense to put those together.”

Among the highlights, the elegant “Mansikka” reflects her Finnish heritage. “That’s a song that I sang with my sisters and my brother in the car in Finnish when we were traveling, oftentimes going blueberry picking,” she says. “I took this simple children’s song as a round and then I played different parts on the different parts of the guitar.”

One of her most acclaimed albums, “Nightlight Daylight” (picked by Guitar Player as one of the top 10 CDs of the decade), featured an amazing array of guest artists including guitar legends Stanley Jordan and Earl Klugh, bassist Victor Wooten and percussionist Futureman from Bela Fleck’s group and former Pat Metheny drummer Danny Gottlieb.

“I called some of my friends to record with me, including Victor Wooten, and he just made the music come alive,” she says. “I thought I will give each song what it needs. This is the one album in my life that I’m going to make with no maximum budget and no maximum time limit. What every song needs, that’s what it gets. So if it needed some Tommy Emanuel energy, I hired Tommy. If it needed some Earl Klugh and Stanley Jordan improv, I hired Earl and Stanley. And when it needed some strings, I hired the Nashville Symphony strings. It was just a joy from beginning to end. Every minute of recording that was a joy.

“I realized at some point that every person that played with me or that was involved in any way with the album was not only a great artist, but a great person as well. I didn’t know if that would come across in the album. It ended up being a double album, one album of lullabies and one album of music to wake up to. And it won a bunch of awards, nearly a dozen awards.”

Glowing reviews included Fretboard Journal with “a beautiful, bold, and brilliant offering from a master musician.”

Designed by Bryan Allen, the unique cover of “Nightlight Daylight” lights up with fiber optics when you press the image of the moon. Stars and fireflies sparkle, and there’s a shooting star. One of her albums even made it onto the space shuttle Endeavor.

“I was asked to play for the annual Fajita Fest for the astronauts in Houston,” she recalls. “Susan Helms (the first US military woman in space) was there and bought my ‘Heartstrings’ recording. She took it with her and told me it was good music to watch the Earth by.”

In concert, besides her original songs, she usually includes some covers like the French song “Sous le ciel de Paris,” (Under Paris Skies), which she featured on “Acoustic Chef” with Lulo Reinhardt.

“That one is really fun because it explores the entire range of the harp guitar,” she says. “I also like (Stevie Wonder’s) ‘Superstition.’ It’s really fun because I get to play all three parts at once, the guitar part, the bass, the vocal and then the horn part on top of that. And I’ve worked up an arrangement of an old Japanese popular tune, ‘Kojo no Tsuki,’ with one that I wrote in a Japanese flavor.”

Anderson will perform at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 17 at the ProArts Playhouse with special guest Steve Grimes. 

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