Arts
Strumming his guitar with all 10 fingers and a toe!
Mayhem past midnight: Ramsay playing at the Sun House. Pic by George Cooper
The crowd bustles about, wanting to escape the scorching sun, perhaps sip on a refreshing thambili, whilst chilling to some David Bowie and Leonard Cohen tributes. The musician on stage has a soothing voice that is just perfect for the moment and his amazing guitar work has jaws dropping. All his ten fingers lay on the fret board and soon he uses his right toe as well.
The ‘Lit Fest Café’ at the Fairway Galle Literary Festival, 2017 (FGLF), was certainly the go to place, for everyone wanting to take a break and grab a quick bite for lunch. It was here that we first got a chance to check out Ramsay Nashef, a 26-year-old musician, from England.
His performances at the café included a range of different covers, amongst which some were tributes made to renowned musicians, who passed away in 2016.
Aside from performing at the café for two days, Ramsay was also part of a collaboration, with Jemima Foxtrot, the British performance poet and theatre maker. The pair performed at ‘Mayhem Past Midnight’ at the Sun House Galle Fort, combining their different styles, featuring Jemima’s poetry and a few other pieces that the pair composed especially for the festival.
According to Ramsay, the collaboration was interesting because Jemima’s poems were already completely written and she was used to performing them spoken and not sung. He tells us that before the festival, they only had a few meetings to practise and prior to that, he worked on the music at home.
Despite the initial excitement, Ramsay had before coming here, he didn’t know what to expect, but was pleasantly surprised, he says. “People told me to expect good food, good weather and beautiful nature. I did not realise how much so! I pretty much only ate traditional food and loved it all! Also, Sri Lanka is so rich and diverse with beauty and spirituality, I did not expect it to be such a paradise.”
Ramsay’s first experience was the opening cultural show, which blew him away, he recalls. He explains that the traditional drumming and dancing, were things he had never experienced before and it was amazing.
Exposed to music at an early age Ramsay learnt to play the trumpet and piano. “My whole family enjoys music, which gave me a good foundation.” He first thought, it was ‘cool’ to be playing the guitar. His dad taught him the basic chords “like the twelve e-bar blues,” which he later learnt to improvise, with his brother. “We would take it in turns playing the chords for “Hey Joe” by Hendrix and doing solos over the top,” he tells me.
The first song that Ramsay endeavoured to learn was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” by Bob Dylan. To him, Dylan was a constant influence in his life, as was David Bowie. Aside from this he is also enthused by melancholic pop like Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley.
“My favourite band is Faust, an avant-garde European band. Their music is experimental and surprising and full of revelry,” he says.
Over the years, Ramsay has developed and mastered new techniques on the guitar. His speciality includes the involvement of all ten fingers and even one toe in some pieces.
“For years, I’ve been translating songs by Joanna Newsom from the harp to the guitar,” he says, adding that normally on guitar, the right-hand strums while the left hand presses the strings on the frets, whereas on the harp, both hands pluck the strings independently. “To stay faithful to the original music, I experiment with unnatural, contorted hand shapes. For example, alongside the fingers I fret strings with the left thumb, which normally holds the guitar neck. If the hand still can’t stretch that far, I can bring my toe in to hold down bass notes. Then I practise until these positions become natural.”
Outside of his work and guitar, Ramsay enjoys living in Stratford-upon-Avon with his cat. “In Shakespeare’s town, I go to the theatre and there is a folk club and regular music nights at the pubs,” he says.