A memorable concert in the key of H

Guitarist Tyler Grant, a San Diego East County native, performed in concert Saturday night at the historic Valley Music venue in El Cajon. A member of the media was there and filed this report.

Tyler Grant presented a two-hour concert in the key of H Saturday night at Valley Music before a capacity crowd.

H for history. This was the last in a series of concerts that Grant has presented over the last seven years at Valley Music, providing the audience a stirring finale in this series of his emergence from a young player with skill and dedication to a world-class performer with command of his art and of the stage. Many in the audience were family and friends from Jamul, where Tyler grew up, and he was specific, between – and even during – numbers, in recognizing his old friends and family. The center of his fame as a multi-talented musician has risen from Nashville, his adopted home, but Tyler left no doubt Saturday night about where his roots were, and his heart still is.

History as transition. As well-known as he has become in musical genres such as bluegrass, flatpicking, and Americana music, Grant is struggling with a decision to take his music commercial. He has been the subject of a cover story in Flatpicking Guitar Magazine, and he is the reigning National and Merlefest Flatpicking Guitar champion, but those are niche accomplishments with minimal effect on CD sales. During this visit, he said he was looking for an agent, and he queried the local media, unsuccessfully, about coverage of the Valley Music concert.

It reminded this reporter of musicians like Elvis Presley and Randy Travis. Even Elvis, after his 1954 debut with "That's All Right, Mama," toured the small-town circuits before breaking out in 1955. And this reporter, specifically, remembers covering a Randy Travis concert at an El Cajon venue in 1986, knowing full well that the next time Travis visited San Diego, he would be playing at the Sports Arena.

For Tyler Grant, though, it's more than paying dues. It was clear Saturday night that he is very aware of what he leaves behind, if he decides to move forward. History: he played old country tunes (Waylon Jennings), rock and roll (Marty Robbins), primal bluegrass (Bill Monroe), classical guitar (Bach, for example), championship flatpicking (a la Doc Watson) and his original songs, with country, bluegrass and Cajun influences, from his first CD, "In the Light." He played all of these, in a two-hour concert (backed up by the great Josh Dake on mandolin), with facility and fire. It has been great fun, in his history, for his family and friends to observe his ever-emerging facility, to the point where his playing looks easy. But it was the fire, Saturday night, that revealed his love, and mastery, of the craft.

Agents, though, and the machine, show less interest, in the music business world, in fire than sales predictability. Saturday night, Tyler played the music he owns and loves, like a campfire he has built for friends, that he can manipulate with six strings into a slow glow, or into a hot chimney of flame, shooting up and twisting into a storm of fireworks that, at the end, sets off thunderous applause. Such chemistry and skill is so personal, and at risk of becoming history in the commercial vacuum, where stars may be made of skill, or of simple audience appeal, or the kind of media manipulation so obvious in a CMT-TV video like Justin Moore's "Back That Thing Up."

And so Saturday night will be held by those attending as a moment in the history of an artist they know and love. Grant took obvious pleasure, as he talked about it, in being the last artist to play on the stage at Valley Music, which has been in business at its present location since 1952, and will move this summer to a new site. Tyler is relocating also, from Nashville to Boulder, CO, and relocating with him will be Kathleen Harris, to whom he proposed, successfully, on a late winter day on a ridgeline above his beloved Jamul.