Boy is he good on guitar

I STAND in the porch outside Andreas Varady’s house.

Live jazz music floats out through the sitting room window, in an estate on Limerick’s south side. Inside the house, Andreas, his dad and his little brother strum guitars and strike drums as they practice for an upcoming gig.

Andreas is Ireland’s newest child prodigy. In the past year, guitarist Andreas has played with the finest jazz musicians, including David Lyttle, Martin Taylor, Andreas Oberg, Frank Vignola and Louis Stewart. He spent last summer playing at jazz festivals in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and eastern Europe. He won a scholarship to the summer jazz school at Skidmore College, in New York. Not bad for a 13-year-old who started out busking on the streets of Limerick, and who plays by ear.

Less than a year ago, Andreas uploaded a video to Youtube of himself playing the guitar. He sent an email to Irish jazz drummer, David Lyttle, with a link to the video. Lyttle took Andreas under his tutelage, organising gigs and designing a website for him.

“David is my mentor. And best friend. He’s really helped me,” says Andreas, who has recorded his first CD with Lyttle, entitled Questions. Born in Slovakia, the Hungarian gypsy Varady and his family emigrated to Ireland in 2008, to be near their relatives, and to provide better opportunities for Andreas’ musical talent.

“It would have been harder for people to know about Andreas if we’d stayed in Slovakia, it wasn’t really a great place for jazz,” says Andreas’ mother, Beata.

The entire Varady family are musical. Both Beata and her daughter, Beata, 10, are singers, youngest son Aidrian, 9, plays the drums, and father, Ondrej, plays the guitar professionally.

“Music is in Andreas’ blood. In a gypsy family, music is normal. All day we play music, eat and then play music again,” says Beata.

Andreas got his first guitar at age four, and was taught by his father, learning a repertoire of gypsy-style, Django Reinhardt-type music by ear.

“My dad played the guitar, so I kind of learned off him, because he was always playing the guitar everywhere. I always wanted to play the guitar,” says Andreas, who loves listening to, and playing, modern jazz, instead of older-style Dixieland jazz.

“When I came to Ireland, that’s the time I really started hearing about famous jazz musicians. Because in Slovakia, I didn’t really know a lot of these guys. When I came to Ireland, I got to know John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. I listen to George Benson now, he’s my favourite player,” says Andreas.

Andreas spends his weekends and holidays touring with the Andreas Varady Quartet, which includes his father on guitar and David Lyttle on drums, as well as playing solo gigs. And after hearing Andreas play at the Sligo Jazz Festival, guitar maestro, Martin Taylor, invited him to play at the Edinburgh Jazz festival with his band, Spirit of Django, to an audience of 900 people.

“It’s not hard work, really. When you do it three or four times, you just kind of get used to it. I don’t really get nervous,” says Andreas, who loves when his whole family come on tour with him, because he can go go-carting and bowling after gigs.

It’s a long way from busking on the streets of Cork and Limerick, where crowds would gather around Andreas and his father, and urge him to reach for the stars.

“I think the busking was good, because then people got to know about Andreas. Many people heard about Andreas and they thought he was great. They told Andreas, you shouldn’t be playing here on the street, you should be playing in a big place,” says Beata.

“It wasn’t really about money. My husband wanted people to know about Andreas. When we moved to Ireland, first, we didn’t have a lot of friends, and we didn’t know about jazz workshops, or anything like that. So, by busking in the street, we got to know a lot of musician friends.”

Last summer, Andreas was the youngest person to attend the jazz summer school at Skidmore College. Having won a scholarship from the Northern Ireland Arts Council, Andreas spent his time learning to play music from a host of famous musicians.

“It was brilliant. There were lots of famous people teaching us, like Curtis Fuller, he’s like one of the main guys, he was on the scene with Miles Davis, he’s a really, really famous guy. And Pat LaBarbera, Todd Cummins, there were really good guys teaching us. And we had concerts every night, and then we jammed and stuff, and we learned about music,” says Andreas.

“I couldn’t believe it when he won, because there was just one scholarship in the whole of Ireland,” says Beata.

“It was like winning the lottery,” says Andreas, as he tries to wrench a kitten from his sisters’ arms.

At Skidmore College, the students had already heard about Andreas, and were expecting him. He found his niche easily among the older students there.

“And the cool thing was that there was this canteen where you eat anything, and there was like a massive amount of food there. I liked the prawns in New York,” says Andreas.

Andreas is no awkward child prodigy tutored extensively by his parents to the exclusion of everything else. Throughout the interview, he jokes and play-fights with his sister, and her two kittens, in the kitchen.

He loves skateboarding, Spiderman and playing his Xbox. He has Harry Potter posters in his bedroom, and wants to grow his hair like Michael J Fox in Back to the Future. In his first year of secondary school, Andreas has lots of friends and hopes to make the basketball team this year.

“The good thing about doing tours, and stuff, is that you miss out on a lot of schooldays,” says Andreas, holding the custom-designed guitar made exclusively for him by Japanese guitar manufacturer, Tokai.

“It’s amazing. My name is at the back and stuff, and I helped to design it,” says Andreas.

So what’s next for this 13-year-old guitar genius?

“My dream is actually to play with famous musicians all the time, and become really famous and have an Aston Martin. Or an Audi R8,” says Andreas, to the sounds of his mother’s uproarious laughter.

“My dream for him is nearly the same, except for the Aston Martin,” says Beata, flicking through a scrapbook full of press clippings and photographs of Andreas.

“I’d be very happy if he could play music professionally. Because then he’d be doing what he loves. And I’d have the same wish for my other two children.”

As I leave, I wonder whether Andreas will spend the rest of the day playing jazz?

“Not at all,” says Beata.

“We need to get outside for some fresh air so we’re walking into town. I know he’s supposed to be a child prodigy, but, to me, he’s just my son. For me, he’s just a normal boy.”

* www.andreasvarady.com