The Musical Box

leo kottke.

In a recording and performance career that spans four full decades, Leo Kottke remains an original.

Onstage, he seemingly brings little with him outside of a pair of acoustic guitars - usually 6 and 12 string models. But within his playing is an assimilation of harmonic, stylistic and improvisational capabilities that merge into music that is as unparalleled as it is indefinable.

But he matches such virtuosity with devilishly constructed but wonderfully askew between-song stories. So one moment you’re taken in by the earthy folkish warmth he lends to longtime concert favorites like Tom T. Hall’s Pamela Brown or his own masterful instrumental suite Bigger Situation. The next you’re doubling over laughing as Kottke reminisces about smuggling baggettes onto submarines while serving in the Navy so they could be used as filters for torpedo fuel.

“They still let me play,” Kottke said last week by phone from Seattle. “That’s the amazing thing. I had no idea I would still be doing this. I thought my career would be all over, at the most, in about 10 years.

When it was suggested that the key to career longevity might be his distinctive blend of instrumental daring and wildly off-center storytelling, Kottke hesitantly agrees.

“That may be part of it. There aren’t many brands like me available to the consumer.”

“Even with all his virtuosity, the first thing I noticed about Leo was how intent he was in pushing ahead with his playing,” said Lyle Lovett, who regularly opened concerts for Kottke in the mid ‘80s. “Guitarists everywhere were going out and buying 12 strings to try and play like him. But Leo was always looking for the next thing.”

To say that chance played a role in bringing Kottke to the guitar and, more important, to the stylistic innovators that helped him forge a commanding voice on the instrument, is not an understatement. He took up violin at age five and then moved on to trombone. He settled on guitar, primarily because “it made me happy.”

“It really hit me hard,” Kottke said. “By the time I was 11, everything took a back seat to the guitar. There was never a real effort to turn all of it into a job. I knew that playing music was something I needed. And when I found the guitar, I finally discovered the instrument I needed. That was enough. It was more than enough. But to make a living playing it? Well, that’s something I still can’t quite get around.”

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of 6 and 12 String Guitar, the recording that largely introduced the world to Kottke. Two independent recordings preceded it, but 6 and 12 String Guitar was released on the Tacoma label, an enterprise run by the guitarist who served as a mentoring force for Kottke - John Fahey.

“I had heard a lot of the great Delta players like (Mississippi) John  Hurt and people like (Appalachian banjoists) Frank Proffitt and Obray Ramsey, and even some jazzers like (guitarist) Kenny Burrell. But they were all kind of discreet to me. John put them all together. And he did it at a pancreatic level. It was so organic that there was no self-consciousness whatsoever.

“But the other thing about John was that his whole effect was metaphysical. It was as if music was a metaphor. Usually music is just itself. It kind of overrides and subsumes metaphor. Not with John. He discovered this whole attitude, this whole realm that was out there. He was like Marco Polo.”

Such stylistic innovation fuels Kottke’s music, as well. There have been all kinds of exemplary recordings since 6 and 12 String guitar, including the orchestral shadings of 1976’s Leo Kottke, the compositional calm of 1986’s A Shout Toward Noon, the playful pop experimentation of 1994’s Rickie Lee Jones-produced Peculiaroso and the collaborative fire struck with Phish bassist Mike Gordon on 2005’s Sixty Six Steps. When asked if he has a favorite recording, Kottke politely balked.

“The minute I think I have one, it turns out I actually hate it. Or the opposite happens. I used to be deeply ashamed of a record called Burnt Lips (an extraordinary 1978 album of unaccompanied vocal and instrumental tunes). The last time I heard it, I thought, ‘You know, this isn’t so bad.’”

The constant for Kottke, though, remains concert performance. He considers stage work, after 40 years, a privilege. That assertion was instilled long ago when the guitarist received a glimpse of an artist that had lost such a privilege.

“This was a long time ago. I played this old theatre in Miami, a really nice, kind of miniature concert hall. From the time of the soundcheck until I was leaving the building that night there was this one guy sitting in a folding chair. As far as I could tell, he was in his 80s. He never said anything. He never stood up. But he was there for the whole night. So I asked, ‘What the hell is that guy doing there?’ I was told he was the first act to ever play that theatre. He was a tap dancer, but now he comes to every show and just sits there for the whole thing.

“So, yes, it is a privilege to still play. There is something very humbling in that for me.”

Leo Kottke perform at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main. Tickets are $24.50. Call (859) 231-7924.

r.e.m.: live at the olympia

“This is not a show,” announces bassist Mike Mills through a bullhorn at the onset of the second R.E.M. concert album in two years. Such a qualifying intro winds up better serving the veteran Georgia band than the audiences crammed into the 19^th century Dublin theatre known as the Olympia. That’s because the five night Irish run during the summer of 2007 that now gives us the 39 songs on Live at the Olympia was intended as a string of working rehearsals before the band recorded its redemptive Accelerate album. Yet, outside of a false start here and a vocal hiccup there, nothing reflects a practicum-like environment. That’s pretty remarkable considering what winds up on Live at the Olympia.

For R.E.M., the Olympia concerts were a chance to give legs to nearly a dozen tunes being readied for Accelerate. Two of them - the fuzzy psychedelic romp Staring Down the Barrel of the Middle Distance and the jagged ballad On the Fly - were left off the record and appear here for the first time. But Live at the Olympia’s ultimate charm is its ability to reconnect R.E.M. with its past as it prepared for what was then its future. Along with the wealth of Accelerate-related music is a stunning assemblage of vintage material that favors obscurities over hits.

How old are we talking here? How about four of the five songs from the 1982 debut EP disc Chronic Town? How about five tunes from the mystic, muddy 1985 ceremony that was Fables of the Reconstruction? And then there are the obscurities, like Monster’s rampaging Circus Envy, New Adventures in Hi-Fi’s gloom-meets-glam confessional New Test Leper or the lost soundtrack gem Romance that wound up on 1988’s Eponymous.

Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and singer Michael Stipe don’t attack these relics with the cracked whip immediacy they employed in the ‘80s when they were roughly half their current age. But there is clearly a vital electric vigor that connects the old and new

The album opening crunch of Accelerate’s Living Well is the Best Revenge bleeds directly into 1984’s chiming, churning Second Guessing. The piano/backbeat melody of the 1996 pop charmer Electrolite (which is as close as Live at the Olympia comes to hit territory) neatly prefaces the jacked up, hook-heavy Man Sized Wreath. And in Live at the Olympia’s greatest mash up of the then and now, the propulsive Fables neo-hit Driver 8 crashes into the proto-punk gusto of Accelerate’s Horse to Water.

“We’re R.E.M. and this is what we do when you’re not looking,” jokes Stipe before the 1987 nugget Disturbance at the Heron House comes into focus. Given the breadth of the drive and spirit tied into the time traveling on Live at the Olympia, maybe we should glance away more often.

kenny barron. photo by carol friedman.

If you had only the initial moments of his splendid solo piano concert last night at the University of Louisville’s Comstock Hall to go by, you might have pegged jazz pianist Kenny Barron as something of a standards man. His touch was light and approachable, his tone was clean and melodic and his repertoire was full of the familiar - namely, ample inclusions from the Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn songbook along with such often-covered covers as How Deep is the Ocean, Love Walked In and Body and Soul. And truth be told, if the performance delved no deeper than that, the evening would have still wound up in the win column.

There was such a subtle punctuation to Barron’s playing, as in the rumble of left hand blues in Strayhorn’s Isfahon and the even gentler right hand sweeps during Melancholia (part of a four song Ellington/Strayhorn medley) that the soulfulness inherent in the tunes was effortlessly enhanced.

But Barron proved a wily player, as well. You don’t clock time with greats like Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Turrentine on top of a famed five year stint in the mid ‘60s with Dizzy Gillespie and not pick up a few tricks. On the original New York Attitude, Barron let loose with runs that, in the tune’s madder moments, possessed the danger level of a cab ride through Midtown Manhattan. But Calypso, another Barron composition, favored dynamics over tension for a bright, lyrical, tropically inspired bounce.

As Barron is deeply versed in the music of Thelonious Monk (he is a co-founder of the great Monk tribute ensemble Sphere), there was also room in the performance for the modal mischief and overt playfulness of Well You Needn’t. But the gems of the night were two other Barron works - the decades old Lullaby and a tribute to South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim titled Song for Abdullah. Within their sparsely designed frameworks, Barron created passages of unhurried lyrical warmth balanced by the solemnity of a hymn.

Neither could be classified a standard. Yet. But the unforced elegance, soulful charm and emotive beauty that defined the performance suggested another learned pianist a few decades down the pike may be exploring Barron’s music with the same reverence he afforded the Ellington generation last night.

joe henry. photo by lauren dukoff.

Confessing that he normally doesn’t perform in an unaccompanied setting, producer/song stylist Joe Henry vowed last night at the 930 Art Center in Louisville to play assorted songs of love, sex and death  “almost all in minor key.” But even with only two well worn Gibson acoustic guitars, an upright piano and nine strategically placed lamps as onstage allies, the evocative nature of Henry’s music was in no way shortchanged.

Sure, half the beauty of his recordings are the sonic fortresses - the ambient arrangements, the trip-hop grooves - that surround the atmospheric nature of the songs. But the combination of the pin-drop-quiet the 930 audience afforded the concert and the intimate clarity that resulted brought two often overlooked attributes of Henry’s music to the surface.

The first, of course, were the lyrics. Sometimes disparaging, often mysterious and, in more than a few instances, strangely sunny - they were all pushed to the forefront instead of serving as another element of the ambience. In this instance, no song sounded more involving or human than the title tune to what remains Henry’s finest album, 2001’s Scar. Served as a show-closing encore, the confessional grace in this hesitant but hopeful love song simply glowed with only a lone acoustic guitar melody as a backdrop.

The performance’s other great rediscovery was Henry’s singing. Instead of the purposely corrosive vocals that surface on his recordings, a crisp, patiently paced folk/pop voice liberated self-described “opaque” songs like Channel (one of five tunes pulled from the new Blood From Stars album). “Every fuzzy word I send returns a finer blade,” Henry sang before quoting the title to one of Van Morrison’s most mercurial songs You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push the River.

Insightful as the performance was, it didn’t diffuse the wonder of Henry’s finest works, from the revolution-from-a-child’s-eye slant of This Afternoon to the romantic inscrutability of Progress of Love. Nor did it make apologies for past successes that slipped away. Henry summed up the differences between his Scar song Stop and the version that sister-in-law Madonna took to the Top 5 (as the re-titled Don’t Tell Me) with little regret.

“I recorded my version as a tango. She recorded her version as a hit.” With that, Henry let loose with the tango version in all its solo, unplugged glory.

joe henry.

The cost of a road-trip to Louisville will be your only expense for what may well be one of the regional concert highlights of the fall.

Tonight at the ultra intimate 930 Art Center is a very rare concert evening with Joe Henry, Americana stylist-turned avant-pop journeymen who doubles as one of today’s most scholarly and insightful (and in-demand) record producers.

We first got a look at Henry the performer in the mid ‘90s when he visited Lexington and Louisville as an opening act for bands like Son Volt. He was already starting to shed the Jayhawks-style alt-country leanings that underscored albums like 1992’s Kindness of the World and the exceptional 1994 covers EP Fireman’s Wedding. With turn-of-the-decade albums like Fuse (1999) and Scar (2001) - both essential recordings in the Henry catalogue - the stylistic contours of his music began to warp. Henry’s last three albums - 2003’s Tiny Voices, 2007’s Civilians and the new Blood from Stars take on almost Tom Waits-like abstractions that balance carnival-like playfulness and dark, noir-style pop accents.

On Blood from Stars, which will likely be the focus of tonight’s free show in Louisville (part of the 930’s opening of an exhibition of works by Cincinnati photographer Michael Wilson titled Whatever Happened to Martha?), such stylistic corrosion is detailed by way of the wiry guitars, stark percussion, jazzy dissonance and vocal animation that enhance songs like Death to the Storm, Suit on a Frame and The Man I Keep Hid. But the deconstructed orchestration of This is My Favorite Cage may better reflect the solo acoustic setting Henry will perform in tonight.

Of course, Henry has made just as much music with other artists as he had on his own over the past eight or so years. A devotee of vintage soul, he has produced recordings for Allen Toussaint (including this year’s extraordinary The Bright Mississippi), Solomon Burke (the Grammy-winning Don’t Give Up on Me) and Bettye LaVette (her comeback recording I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise). He has also produced more pop and folk directed works for Loudon Wainwright III, Ani DiFranco, Teddy Thompson and Aimee Mann.

On his website, Henry recently divulged two 82 year old icons he is currently producing albums for: jazz-blues vocalist/pianist Mose Allison and calypso great Harry Belafonte.

No tickets are required for tonight’s Louisville performance. Seating is general admission. The Wilson exhibit begins at 7 p.m.

Joe Henry performs at 9 tonight at the 930 Art Center, 930 Mary St. in Louisville. Admission is free. Call (502) 635-2554.

tara jane o'neil

The chieftain behind the recent Boomslang festival, Saraya Brewer, passed along word about an intriguing WRFL-sponsored performance tonight at The Red Mile Round Barn, 1200 Red Mile Road, featuring former Louisville song stylist Tara Jane O’Neil.

Now part of a thriving music community in Portland, Oregon - home to, among others, The Decemberists and The Minus 5’s Scott McCaughey - O’Neil conjures wonderfully lo-fi but immensely atmospheric story-songs. Rounding out the five-buck-bill (that is, if you’re a student; for everyone else, it’s a mere $7) are two other indie voices from the great Northwest: co-headliner Mount Eerie from Anacortes, Washington (a buzzsaw folk project featuring The Microphones’ Phil Elverum) and Vancouver’s No Kids.

We will bow to Brewer’s recommendation on these acts. She offers an insightful preview of the performance over at her fine Blueline blog.

Showtime tonight is 8:30 p.m.

lyle lovett: natural forces

The Lone Star alliance of Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen, a friendship that extends back to the mid ‘70s, is wonderfully reconstituted at the conclusion of the former’s fine new Natural Forces album. On a jointly penned romp titled It’s Rock and Roll, Lovett speaks in his dry Texas tenor of glitzy fame where “the bright lights fall down on you and the money does the name” before a Slash-like guitar riff shatters the serenity.

The song is only partially tongue-in-cheek, mind you, as Americana accents dominate the rest of Natural Forces and all of Keen’s The Rose Hotel.

Natural Forces is essentially two albums in one. It sports four new originals, excluding It’s Rock ‘N’ Roll, and six covers of works by esteemed Texas songwriters that reprise the stately warmth of Lovett’s sublime 1998 tribute record Step Inside This House.

Of the new songs, the home cooked double entendres of Pantry offer the most immediate enticement. But Empty Blue Shoes, with its richly languid blues sentiments (”your mother might hold you forever but forever won’t hold you for long”) and the title song’s dark imagery of natural forces and very un-natural migration satisfy more deeply.

The Texas material, as with Step Inside This House, sounds regal. Eric Taylor’s Whooping Crane possesses an almost meditative unease while Vince Bell’s Sun and Moon and Stars outlines solitary but eerily elegant despondency. In comparison, Townes Van Zandt’s Loretta sounds surprisingly hopeful, a vision of home on an album where sentiments are as scattered as storms along distant Texas plains.

robert earl keen: the rose hotel

Keen mines more familiar turf on The Rose Hotel with tunes that tuck colors of minor chords into highly accessible choruses to heighten the mix of drama and sometimes wry but human humor. Such devices abound on Something I Do, a reggae-fied lowlife anthem with a cha-cha-cha beat and the album’s title tune storyline of intended but missed connections. Keen also covers Van Zandt by way of a darkly fantastical reading of Flyin’ Shoes.

But the kicker is Wireless in Heaven, a smart honky tonk yarn that ponders internet connections to the hereafter with a melody that morphs from country to bluegrass.

Sure, the tune may search for an ISP in heaven. But its lyrical and melodic drive still come from deep in the heart of you-know-where.

Lyle Lovett and his Large Band perform at 8:30 p.m. Oct. 30 at Newlin Hall of the Norton Center for the Arts at Centre College in Danville. Tickets are $60-$125. Call (877) 448-7469.

Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider and Bruce Robison perform at 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at the Lexington Opera House. Tickets are $22.50-$32.50. Call (859) 233-3535.

battlefield band: sean o'donnell, alasdair white, mike katz, alan reid. photo by louis de carlo.

When asked at last night’s taping of the WoodSongs Old-Time Hour at the Kentucky Theatre to describe the instrument he cradled in his hands, Battlefield Band’s Mike Katz didn’t hesitate. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s the sexiest of all instruments.” Then again, how else would you expect a six-foot-something Scot with a beard that would put ZZ Top to shame to profess his love for the Highland bagpipes?

Katz actually spent more time doubling on bouzouki last night, meshing with fiddler Alasdair White and guitarist Sean O’Donnell to create a sort of Scottish string band hybrid sound. Still, the pipes wheezed, whirred and roared to attention during the Counting Cowries finale of the Ku’ula-kai medley, one of four “pursuit of wealth tunes” Battlefield Band pulled from its new Zama Zama (Try Your Luck) album.

Once considered a bit of a rogue Scottish folk operation for its sometimes contemporary accents, Battlefield Band steered down a largely traditional path last night with the dance hall flavor of founder Alan Reid’s electric keyboards taking a back seat on the string driven Baile An Or (Gold Town).

But the traditions surrounding the performance took flight from Scotland more than once. While Plain Gold Ring became a lament of Celtic-spun desire thanks O’Donnell’s stoic vocals, the tune didn’t originate in ancient Scotland at all.  It instead emerged on American pop charts in the ‘50s as a hit for Nina Simone. Then there was the blues spark that prefaced the bagpipe celebration of The Pretty Apron. And let’s not forget that the title Zama Zama boasts zulu ancestry.

Adding to the program’s international thrust was Bardstown multi-instrumentalist Pauly Zarb, a native of Australia. Much of his set leaned toward Americanized pop-folk performed in almost vaudevillian one-man-band fashion with Zarb juggling keyboards, congas and guitars with his hands and kick drum and hi-hat with his feet. A nod to his homeland by way of a cover of the 1982 Men at Work hit Down Under added flute to the mix.

Zarb and the Battlefield Band also teamed for impromptu jamming at the show’s conclusion. While neither really needed the other’s help, the onstage bonding was fun to watch. But in the end, when Katz cranked up the bagpipes one last time during the encore of The Merry Macs (from Battlefield Band’s 2001 album Happy Daze), the global summit wound down as that sexy beast from “the ol’ kintry” took centerstage.

jolie holland. photo by scott irvine.

Even in its rockier moments, like the ones that define her wonderful 2008 album The Living and the Dead, there remains an unmistakable intimacy to Jolie Holland’s music. It requires space and demands attention. So placing her stories of addiction, abandonment and faith on display at the new Woodland Ave. music club Cosmic Charlie’s may not have been the most skillful booking job in the world. Located in the same space that occupied the old Lynagh’s Music Club, the room’s design seems to almost amplify the noise made by restless bar crowds - and last night there was a wealth of it. There was so much, in fact, that the musings of Holland and accompanist/guitarist Grey Gersten almost seemed like a secondary part of the bar atmosphere.

Amazingly, the performance drew a hearty crowd - a feat in itself, considering the concert received almost zero publicity. But it was disheartening to find nearly one-third of the crowd located at the back end of the room near the bar treat an artist and guest (and a performer they forked over 10 bucks to see) with such flippant resignation and ill respect. On club atmosphere alone, the evening was a disappointment.

Now, take away the offstage distractions and you were left with a rather accomplished performance. Holland painted musical portraits with a vocal accent beautifully stalled between the longing of Lucinda Williams’ Lone Star drawl (Holland, likewise, is a Texas native) and the soul/jazz phrasing of such timeless stylists as Billie Holiday. Instrumentally, she colored her tunes with rhythms from a weather-beaten Epiphone guitar and a handcrafted, cigar box-shaped violin, although Gersten’s keen guitar leads propelled the material

In terms of repertoire, the performance was a delight, from the show-opening montage of death, love and loss in Mexico City to the lone encore - a cover of alt-country fave Freakwater’s Gone to Stay. In between, the performance revealed snapshots of Western-flavored mystique (Roll My Bones) and rural Appalachian fancy (Alley Flowers) along with a few fun, well-chosen covers (Michael Hurley’s O My Stars and Sonny and the Sunsets’ Halloween-themed Death Cream).

Topping everything, though, was the highlight tune from The Living and the Dead - a remorseful but ultimately elegant romantic still life called Palmyra. Quietly rugged as this version was, it was still beautifully restless, emotive and tense enough to deflect the dismissive bowling alley ambience of an uninvolved bar crowd.

jack white, jimmy page and the edge exchange riffs and conversation in "it might get loud," which is still playing at the kentucky theatre.

If you were late to the party that is It Might Get Loud, as I was until last night, cheer up. The extraordinary documentary by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim that brings together three landmark rock artists from three generations for conversation, shop talk and some honest artistic reflection, is being held over for an extra week at the Kentucky Theatre.

If you’re a guitarist, the film is loaded with obvious appeal as Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White discuss their instruments, their hardware and the ingenuity that transforms the simplest of riffs into monster musical hooks. But the appeal of It Might Get Loud is by no means exclusive to gear heads. Anyone who has experienced a serious rock ‘n’ roll itch, especially fans, will get a royal kick out of being a fly on the wall as the three guitarists gather with a ton of equipment on a Los Angeles soundstage to swap stories, divulge influences and share a few impromptu jams.

That summit is then balanced with footage shot at three locales reflecting the musical heritage of each player. Page pokes about East Hampshire’s Headley Grange, where Led Zeppelin recorded its third, fourth, fifth and sixth albums. But nothing compares to watching Page, 65, beaming like a child at Christmas as he listens at home in London to a recording of Link Wray’s Rumble.

Similarly, the film allows The Edge to revisit the school where the U2 members met and initially rehearsed. But the shadows of Dublin’s violent political past remain vivid as he describes the climate surrounding the band’s beginnings. That, in turn, leads into The Edge working alone on the riff that was to become the backbone of the recent U2 single Get on Your Boots.

White, who seems a touch stand-offish at times around the guitar elders, nonetheless confides his love of the blues as he roams the American countryside outside of Nashville detailing stories of a Detroit upbringing that are every bit as deflating as those The Edge reveals about Dublin.

Finally, the three square off on trademark songs from each of their respective careers with only their mutual guitar voices as artillery. White unleashes the dirty blues of the White Stripes’ Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground while The Edge offers the chiming stutter of the early U2 favorite I Will Follow. To no one’s surprise, though, Page steals the show as he cranks up the Zeppelin warhorse Whole Lotta Love. There, the good-natured Edge and the initially distant White sit transfixed and trumped by the true guitar hero.

Dig into It Might Get Loud and you will be, too.