Guy Buttery
Photo: Alisha Chatterjee
Guy Buttery is a “National treasure” according to South Africa’s leading newspaper The Mercury. As an internationally recognised guitar innovator, he enjoys invitations to play sell-out performances all over the globe. The USA, UK, Australia, France, Brazil, and Italy have all welcomed him back year after year. Guy Buttery has evolved into an ambassador of South African music, inspiring people across the world with his homegrown style at the very heart of his talent and tenacity.
Photo: Yatin Khatri
It was whilst Guy was embarking on his 2019 tour of India, as part of a trio with the highly acclaimed Indian classical musicians Mohd. Amjad Khan and Mudassir Khan, that the seed was sown for One Morning In Gurgaon. Remarkably, all three musicians had never met before, let alone made any music together, and before their first concert, they had only “practised” via voice recordings and exchanged texts somewhere between Hindi and English to break down the various parts of the set. Ultimately it was this unrehearsed approach combined with the inauspicious and eleventh-hour nature of their first meeting which provided the stardust for this collaboration as Guy explains, “Due to Delhi traffic, our intended dry run was shaved right down to a single 60 minutes giving us just enough time to shake hands, share a chai and tune our instruments. As a result, we went in totally blind to that first concert yet what unfolded on stage over the next hour left me in complete awe. So much so that after our performance I immediately set about asking anyone who would listen, how we could track down a local studio to capture our newly formed trio. As luck would have it, the very place where we had performed that first night had a basic recording set-up and we somehow managed to secure a single morning to record.”
Alisha Chatterjee
Photo: Alisha Chatterjee
Guy’s fascination and love for India’s musical wonders and myriad landscapes are deep-rooted and go back to his first brush with the subcontinent when he was just twenty-one. Talking about the synchronicities of his first encounter with Amjad and Mudassir and the unexpected studio session that followed to create this album, Guy explains the importance of that first trip, “I don’t believe any of my prior or subsequent travels have impacted and shaped me as much as that trip did. I came back a vegetarian, 10 kgs lighter, with a severe case of lockjaw and a deep love for the land, its people and its intoxicating music.”
