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He’ll be 79 on Christmas Eve, but guitarist Jan Akkerman is still toiling away, regularly touring and even slipping out the occasional album. The man from Amsterdam is a survivor, not only of the 1992 car crash that broke his back and briefly confined him to a wheelchair, but also of leaving Focus seven years after helping found them in 1969 and playing a large part in their early success.
His steady rather than spectacular solo career incorporated guitar synths and drum machines in the 80s, alongside the guitar pyrotechnics, and evolved towards excursions into jazz-rock, but Akkerman always understood that technical expertise and feel are not necessarily incompatible.
In May 1973, Focus played North London’s Rainbow Theatre. The subsequent live album, At The Rainbow, made the British Top 30. All these decades later comes its similarly titled, wholly instrumental (sort of) successor. The actual Rainbow is now owned by a Brazilian church. Live Under The Rainbow comes from recordings of several dates on Akkerman’s UK tour this February with his Dutch band.
Akkerman has not always willingly embraced his Focus past, but from its title to its track-listing, My Focus is an acceptance of what he’ll ultimately be remembered for. Four At The Rainbow tracks - Answers? Questions! Questions? Answers!, Hocus Pocus, Sylvia, Focus II - are revisited, as is Anonymous, which Focus played at the Rainbow but didn’t make the album. Needless to say, the absence of a flute strips the Focus material of some of its charm and a certain layered depth, and a yodel-free Hocus Pocus isn’t really Hocus Pocus at all. It still swings like a twinkle-toed guitar demon, though. There’s no between-song chat at all. No matter, because the music says enough.
Akkerman’s solo material ranges from 1983’s laid-back but intricate Pietons with its shuffling blues hue, to the more in-your-face Spiritual Privacy (Sunset Tango) from his most recent studio album, 2019’s Close Beauty. This post-Focus music showcases a veteran virtuoso whose, ahem, focus remains startlingly undimmed by the passage of time.
Like anyone his age, Akkerman is making music because he wants to. That’s totally commendable, of course. More pressingly, though – try his subtle gorgeousness on Focus I (a Focus opus not on At The Rainbow), on which he gives Mark Knopfler a twang for his money – he’s doing it because he still can. And he really still can. That’s more than enough.
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