Washington Post - July 15 2001 - review by Mike Joyce
Renewing His Haunting License
Kelly Joe Phelps Affirms His Status as a Master Musician and Storyteller
Anyone who has ever seen singer-songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps in concert knows
he makes quite a first impression. Now, with the release of his CD "Sky
Like a Broken Clock," he's made a lasting one. Onstage, Phelps plays lap-style
acoustic guitar with a bar slide. The guitar strings are jacked up a little,
like those on a Dobro, but the absence of a resonator allows Phelps to produce
a tone that has more sparkle than twang. Sometimes he doesn't even sound like
a slide player who uses open tunings. For example, when his right thumb is in
motion, creating an alternating bass pattern beneath a bright melody, Phelps
evokes the tuneful fingerstyle touch of Mississippi John Hurt and other seminal
blues artists. Prior to "Sky Like a Broken Clock" (Rykodisc), Phelps
recorded alone. On his previous three albums he favored a mix of traditional
and original tunes that suited his soft but weathered voice. The new album marks
a departure for three reasons: the consistent quality of the songwriting (Phelps
is becoming a heck of a storyteller); the haunting allure of the arrangements
(a rootsy mesh of guitar, bass and drums, accented by cello and organ); and
the fresh emphasis on conventional fingerstyle guitar playing, sans slide. The
songwriting on "Broken Clock" sometimes mirrors the subtlety that
distinguishes Phelps's guitar work. Just as he often implies harmonic changes
with a single note instead of a full chord, his lyrics frequently leave words
unspoken and tensions unresolved. Against a backdrop of muffled beats and rustling
percussion, a series of dark ballads and offbeat scenarios emerges. As a writer,
Phelps is clearly drawn to emotional extremes; his characters often seem to
be teetering between despair and death. "Clementine" concerns a prostitute
who encounters "men with eyes that bleed inside their head, who murder
souls in every bed." "Flash Cards" traces the trajectory of an
unfulfilled life, from a young boy's bravado to middle-aged man's anguish. "Tommy,"
one of three solo tracks, weds a simple guitar melody to a tale involving schizophrenia
and arson. But Phelps has more to offer listeners than just a sack full of woes.
His songs are also infused with poignancy, passion and spirituality. Accompanying
Phelps on the band tracks are bassist Larry Taylor, best known for his work
with Tom Waits, and drummer Billy Conway, of the Boston band Morphine. Both
musicians are closely attuned to the moods Phelps conjures on acoustic guitar,
not to mention his bedrock blues sensibility, and they frequently manage to
add drama, color and texture to the arrangements in a manner that sounds freely
improvised. They also help generate the entrancing rhythmic momentum that keeps
even the bleakest songs on the album from drifting into lulls. The more you
listen to "Sky Like a Broken Clock," the more you'll likely think
of stylistic parallels: the early and late recordings of Waits; the Deep South
musings of Cassandra Wilson; the languid flow and hushed tone of recent music
by Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams. Granted, Phelps isn't in the same league
as these musicians, at least not yet. But he'd sound perfectly at home sharing
a bill with any of them.
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Kelly Joe Phelps-'Sky Like A Broken Clock'
The Independent (UK newspaper)-review by Andy Gill - June 15 2001
WITH 1999's Shine Eyed Mister Zen, Kelly Joe Phelps took
country-blues to a new place, a peak from which the past was clearly visible
in the machinations of the present. The future, though, remained as unclear
as ever, and admirers struggled to see how he could possibly improve on such
a blues masterwork. This opinion was obviously shared by Phelps himself, who
with the equally sublime Sky Like A Broken Clock takes a left turn away from
the genre all together, into something closer to traditional folk music. His
dazzling slide-guitar runs are conspicuous by their absence here, replaced by
more of Phelps's knuckle-knotting fingerstyle flourishes; and where previous
albums feathured just his voice and guitar, on Sky Like A Broken Clock he's
backed by the yawning double-bass of Tom Waits's sideman Larry Taylor and the
painterly percussive embellishments of the Morphine drummer Billy Conway, with
occasional tints of cello or Hammond organ lending discreet pastel shades to
some tracks.
Amazingly, the whole album was recorded live over three days, as first or second
takes with no overdubs, despite the musicians never having met before. Clearly,
there was magic in the air, as indeed there is in Phelps's new songs, which
bring to mind Bob Dylan's appreciation of traditional folk music as "weird
- full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts".
On one level, Phelps's tales of loners and losers from the soft, brutal underbelly
of American society have the rustic grain and matter-of-fact fatalism of a Cormac
McCarthy novel. But there's a surreal, strangley anachronistic edge to his writing
that lifts them into another, more mysterious realm, where you're never quite
sure whether the man "Bouncing across the lake of 10 years/ Like a stone
tossed from the burglar's hand" is sinking into memories, or into the water
itself. As a result, the characters are never easily assessed and dismissed,
but retain their uniqueness long beyond the three or four minutes it takes to
sing the song.
Besides being a virtuoso guitarist, Phelps turns out to be an accomplished lyricist,
with a variety of voices. The song "Beggar's Oil", for instance, has
the manner of an arcane theological metaphor, with lines such as "A doubter's
cusp, a braggart's pyre/ Sweltering in brandy-mire" seeming to emanate
from several centuries ago. Elsewhere, the obtuse argot and jerky rhythms of
"Gold Tooth" and "Sally Ruby" ("Stroke the bottom of
a sterno cup/ Plywood hand-out going 'cross and up/ Jack your coat against a
backroom wall") vividly recall Tom Waits's "Swordfishtrombones",
set as they are to a ramshackle clatter of rolling drums and jazz bass.
But it's Phelps's voice that ultimately comes through loudest - a warm, smoky,
dark-brown drawl that captivates from the first phrase of "Taylor John"
to the closing admission of "Worn Out", perhaps the most personal
of his songs: "I live to breathe more than believe/ A reason for this load".
One of the albums of the year.
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Nothing but blue Sky: Slide guitarist Phelps opens his poetic soul to new possibilities
by adding a full band.
BLUES Revue (US monthly magazine)-review by Michael Cote - August 2001
KELLY JOE PHELPS
Sky Like A Broken Clock
Rykodisc 10612
On his first three albums, Kelly Joe Phelps achieved a deep, haunting sound
with just voice and guitar. He forged a slide style that drew from the acoustic
folk tradition, but added his own sense of foreboding. For Sky Like A Broken
Clock, Phelps augments his sound with bass player Larry Taylor (from Tom Waits'
band) and drummer Billy Conway (from Morphine), while engineer David Henry adds
cello and Tom West contributes Hammond organ. The result is a fuller sound that
hardly abandons the sparse approach of Phelps' previous work; the other musicians
add color but never clutter his brooding tales. Like Waits, Phelps writes songs
that are hard to decipher. His characters wander the world as if constantly
on the edge of a precipice, with cryptic lines like "A one-armed man with
a box of dimes/Throw the stick and let the bull dog roll" suggesting moods
without providing literal meaning. That's not true, though, of "Tommy",
the story of an unbalanced but gentle soul who ends his lonely existence by
setting his apartment complex on fire - but only after madly pounding on doors
to make sure no one else remains in the building. Phelps manages to craft the
tender folk ballad without becoming maudlin; like the best short stories, "Tommy"
encapsulates an entire life in a single song, a high watermark on an album on
which competition is mighty fierce. On "Taylor John" and "Clementine",
the presence of instruments other than Phelps' guitar is subtle. Conway sounds
as if he's playing brushes on the former, and Henry's cello on the latter rises
from the mix. The drums pick on "Sally Ruby", where the faster tempo,
storytelling style and playful falsetto vocals on the chorus underscore one
of Phelps' most upbeat songs. Perhaps because he has other players to flesh
out the sound, Phelps focuses on fingerpicking rather than slide on this material,
and his soloing on "Sally Ruby" offers the first strong evidence of
the shift. His slightly coarse, soulful vocals continue to rival his guitar
playing. As if to take a break from the near-racket percussion, Phelps performs
"Beggar's Oil" alone, picking in a quiet style reminiscent of the
sweet-natured blues of Mississippi John Hurt. When the drums return on "Flash
Cards", they're like a distant bear, the slapping of Taylor's bass fleshing
out the sound of an effective trio. Sky Like A Broken Clock doesn't reveal all
its treasures in a single listening, or even three or four, but Phelps knows
how to create that elusive quality best described as "magic". Even
if he tried to show you how he did it, the secrets would remain with him.
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PULSE (US magazine)- July 2001. Review by Ted Drozdowski.
**** (Rykodisc) Darwin taught us that evolution is a beautiful thing, and Kelly Joe Phelps has kept that lesson alive. Through 10 years and four albums he's progressed from free-jazzer to bluesman, slide-guitar spiritualist and, now, poignant storyteller. Phelps has left his solo format to employ Tom Waits' bassist Larry Taylor and Morphine drummer Billy Conway on these 10 poetic songs - all character studies that use hard-chiseled details to evoke delicate, shifting emotions. He's also abandoned his trademark slide guitar for a more subtle kind of acoustic virtuosity that spins lovely little melodies and gently propulsive arpeggios into every corner of the music. What he's found along the way is a knack for describing a watch and an apartment that says volumes about his sweet, slow and suicidal charcter "Tommy", and stepping into the lives of lost souls in "Taylor John". There's newfound freedom in his dusty voice, too, which sails into ghost-whisper falsettos and growls like a blundering, injured lion as his lyrics demand. That plus the rambling, rhythmic support often invokes Waits, but without the rust and the rat traps. The result is textured, pure, noble and moving. Call it art.
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UNCUT - September 2001 - review by Nigel Williamson
Fourth album from American slide guitar hero leaves blues
behind
This is something of a departure for the young, white bluesman, with not a 12-bar
repetition in sight. After three LPs on which his mastery of the slide guitar
took centre stage, culminating in 1999's superb Shine Eyed Mister Zen, Sky Like
A Broken Clock finds him expanding his musical vision. With his own guitar work
backed by a shit-hot rhythm section of string bassman Larry Taylor on loan from
Tom Waits' band and former Morphine drummer Billy Conway, Phelps sings with
a sure, expressive voice, which ranges from true grit to haunting falsetto.
There's a quantum leap in his own darkly compelling songwriting, which at times
is even reminiscent of the great Waits himself. ***
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Time Out (London) - June 20-27 2001 - review by Ross Fortune
Fourth album from the shine-eyed Mister Zen of the acoustic slide guitar, and it marks a notable step forward from his former (gloriously realised) works of solo bluesy introspection. Progress and change can be a tricky thing in contemporary blues - witness Alvin Youngblood Hart's boldly eclectic Beefheartian advances, or Eric Bibb's rather less successful experiments with electrification - but Phelps manages to stay true, move forward, keep the faith and sow the seeds for further future development with rare comfort and ease. So, here he is subtley augmented by the pluck, pull, putter and stomp of Tom Waits sideman Larry Taylor on string bass and Morphine drummer/percussionist Billy Conway. With the further addition of cello and Hammond organ, it makes for a tenderly expressive sound - perfectly suited to Phelps's husky, emotive drawl. No more the doff of the cap to Dock Boggs or Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi Fred McDowell, this is pure Phelps. A git up, lay down, moonlight throb. A hip shake boogie. A long desirous backyard moan of busted hearts, greased-up good and bent down low.
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The Sunday Times (UK newspaper) - July 1st - review by Clive Davis
If you have ever seen blues-folk troubadour Kelly Joe Phelps play live, you will know how mesmerising his lap-based guitar playing can be. Those mercurial fingers conjure the mystifying illusion of two or three sidemen. A jazz player in days gone by - his passion for Coltrane knew no bounds - he is no broken-down, back-porch strummer. After all the solo tours, Sky Like A Broken Clock represents a surprise change of direction, Phelps surrounding himself with like-minded musicians including Tom Waits's cohort Larry Taylor. Don't worry: the poetic vision has not been swamped by the combined force of feedback and backbeat. Recorded in just a few days, the collection of originals prove as airy and evocative as anything he has done before. Phelps's smoky growl is a remarkable instrument in its own right, even if it does not always do full justice to the intricate flow of the lyrics: these are no 12-bar chants. The melodies, sinuous and teasing, take us on a dusty journey across the heartlands.
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Sunday Observer (UK newspaper) - June 24th 2001 - review by Neil Spencer
Phelps's previous albums have been impressive excursions into acoustic blues - exquisite but near spartan in their purity. Here he's found a more adventurous style, augmenting his dazzling guitar picking with a low key trio and an occasional dab of cello. His songs, too, have grown in scope, his husky voice narrating the lives of assorted chancers with a timeless, rustic slant much as, say, John Martyn did back in his heyday. A class act.
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METRO (London newspaper) - June 14th
So fluid and seamless are Kelly Joe Phelps's acoustic, modern blues one could imagine them being played at an Islington dinner party; coffee table roots music for the chattering classes. But with God, and the devil, in the detail with Phelps, a more illuminating label would be the Bert Jansch of blues. Jansch was an early influence on Phelps and in recent years he has returned to the sound of slide guitar with the same dexterous grace Jansch bestows on his acoustic guitar. On this third album for Rykodisc, Phelps is joined by Larry Taylor on string bas and Billy Conway on drums and percussion. The result is argueably his most realised work to date - and as soulful, taut and tender an album as you're likely to hear all year. ***** (out of 5)
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Kelly Joe Phelps - latest reviews and press articles ...
Kelly Joe Phelps
Up from the Roots, Out on a Limb-by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
(taken from Artists of the Decade feature (* see 'latest news' section for more details..) in Acoustic Guitar's Tenth Anniversary Collector's Edition issue (July 2000))
EVERYWHERE KELLY JOE PHELPS HAS gone in the past six years, he's left behind a trail of guitarists with wide eyes, shaking heads, and jaws bruised from hitting the floor. He hasn't done this with hot licks or tricks, although he can fingerpick or whip around a slide guitar as well as anyone. Phelps does something far more rare: he goes deep into that zone where all master musicians go (he calls it becoming a "shine eyed mister zen") and unearths songs that grow and change with each performance. Along the way he takes alarming risks - reharmonizing, revamping the melody, making up whole songs on the spot, knocking his forehead against the mic if the moment requires a kickdrum sound - and delivers extravagant rewards.
What initially drew attention to Phelps was his state-of-the-art slide guitar, accomplished on a regular flattop modified for lap-style playing. Drawing on his free-jazz background, he moved quickly past the traditional blues vocabulary, though in a way that tapped into the spirit of the old masters much more than note-perfect re-creations ever do. As the decade progressed, he did the same with his nonslide playing (eventually settling on C G C G C F as his standard tuning), while his singing and songwriting grew ever more nuanced and haunting. He also found himself in demand as a sideman, adding his slide touch to albums by Greg Brown, Tim O'Brien, Tony Furtado and others. Recent projects underscore Phelps' compatibility with many musical worlds: he performed with Bert Jansch in a documentary on the British folk icon, and was featured alongside Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, Philip Glass, and others on the soundtrack to the film Condo Painting; meanwhile, Phelps' tour itinerary took him to the roots mecca Merlefest and the experimental mecca Knitting Factory.
Shine on, mister zen.
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Article taken from feature in June/July 2000 issue of Dirty Linen
Kelly Joe Phelps-by Philip Van Vleck.
FOLK IMPROV!
Kelly Joe Phelps first came to the attention of music fans beyond the Pacific Northwest with the release of his album Roll Away the Stone [Rykodisc] in 1997. (His first album, Lead Me On, released by Burnside Records in 1994, is an excellent piece of work that didn’t exactly make it to everyone’s neighborhood record store.) Roll Away the Stone evoked an immediate and overwhelming upbeat response from both music critics and fans who follow folk, blues, and the rootsier side of country and rock. Phelps’ lap slide guitar wizardry immediately caught the attention of guitar afficianados, and his ear-catching voice - a dusky, well-worn thing - has the sort of visceral appeal that stays with a listener.
Phelps, a resident of Vancouver, Washington, followed Roll Away The Stone with his second Rykodisc release, Shine Eyed Mister Zen, in 1999. The CMJ review of this CD noted: “Phelps plays with the tender prowess and soul-soothing magic of a man twice his age, surrounding the listener with intricate music, backwoods lyrical gloom and warmly evocative vocals.” Mr. Zen did a great deal to solidify Phelps’ reputation as a unique musician and songwriter. He’s building a repertoire that finds inspiration in country blues, traditional music, gospel, bluegrass, rock, and jazz. This multitude of voices comes together in Phelps’ music in an understated and wholly fluent fashion, giving him a sound that is both familiar and rarefied.
Phelps’ musical odyssey bean in the farm country of western Washington in the midst of a very tuneful family. When the music bug got to him, he started behind the drums. As a teenager, an encounter with Jimmy Page’s guitar playing prompted Phelps to take up the instrument. After the usual romance with rock music, he entered his twentysomething years and became intrigued with jazz. “I was drawn to the improvisational thing jazz players were doing,” Phelps explained. “Initially, I was listening to some of the standard jazz guitar players, but not understanding what they were doing at all. I was just trying to pick out stuff off their records. Guys like Joe Pass and George Van Eps. I was studying them, but not from the point of improvising. That started my fascination with the music in general; that, and meeting musicians who were actually playing jazz.
“At that point it wasn’t the guitar that mattered; it was just to get into that music,” he continued. “If it had come to it, I would’ve done it on trumpet or trombone, or anything. I just wanted to play that music. The bass was an obvious choice, because I already knew how to play stringed instruments. Gigs for bass players were easier to come by, so I switched to bass.”
Jazz has been a particularly crucial training ground during Phelps’ musical coming-of-age. Fans who have not had the chance to catch him in concert may not be aware of the role improvisation plays in his music. If you listen to the tracks on his albums and then you go to hear him in concert, you’ll soon realize that the songs you heard on the CDs didn’t exactly happen the same way in concert. They never do.
Phelps invested a good deal of time in jazz, playing for about a decade in Washington and Oregon. Then he dropped out. “I kind of stopped, but I kind of moved forward, as well. When I first got into jazz, I was playing all that standard material, you know, bebop tunes, Charlie Parker tunes - the usual hundreds of songs that jazz guys play. The more I got into the freer side of that music, the less I was attached to the more straight-ahead stuff. Once that freedom was laid down, I was able to borrow from lots of different influences.
“What happened was that I found myself wanting to play in an improvised manner, but a more folk kind of music,” Phelps continued. “I grew up listening to country music with my mom and dad, and I always liked certain aspects of that music. And, of course, I was always into guys like Leo Kottke and Chet Atkins.”
These varied impulses initially led Phelps into confusion
about what he was doing. He decided to kick back, put the jazz playing aside,
and sort out where he was at musically. “I was listening to country blues
players, and I basically just started over, picking stuff out off their records,
note by note.”
Phelps jazz years laid the groundwork for his return to the guitar and to folk
music (folk in the broadest sense of the term, as he pointed out). He realized
that what he had wanted to do all along was improvise in a folk/blues context,
but it took jazz to teach him the spontaneity he lacked. What Phelps eventually
learned was how to use his musical vocabulary to initiate, or hold up his end
of, a musical dialogue.
Phelps’ affinity for country and folk music, overlaid
by his years playing jazz, has given him a musical breadth that is manifest
in his work to date and very much a reflection of the way in which he approaches
writing and performing. “Keith Jarrett is a prime example of someone who,
in the end, is just playing music,” Phelps explained. “All the beautiful
things about music come out when Jarrett plays. Ornette Coleman is someone else
who just blows me away. In a way, Coleman’s doing very odd country music.
The way that he handles melody and stuff just isn’t that be-boppy, do-dah
stuff. The purity of his melody choices, no matter what direction he goes, were
so unusual. I feel the same way about Don Cherry and Charlie Hayden. I mean,
those guys were like a bluegrass band,” he laughed.
The eclecticism that is a hallmark of Phelps’ music was evident on his
debut album and his first Rykodisc CD, and it caused a bit of scrambling among
music critics. Blues writers seem to have been the first to pick up on Roll
Away the Stone, and their vociferous praise led many fans to the erroneous conclusion
that Phelps was a stone blues player. While it’s difficult to compare him
to anyone else, living or dead, there is a spirit and a breadth to his music
that resembles that if Huddie Ledbetter. Phelps has one foot firmly planted
in folk and the other planted wherever.
“The country blues players have been both an inspiration and an example,” Phelps said, “but I don’t think of myself as being a blues player. I think when I first set the guitar on my lap and started playing slide, I toyed with the idea that I would play blues music. After a while, however, it just became more and more obvious that blues was just a set of sounds and emotions that I identified with and wanted to include in what I did. The fact is that from the first time I picked up a guitar, I never considered playing in a style. I just wanted to find the music.”
When Phelps is sitting on stage, guitar in his lap, slide in his hand, he presents a bluesy sort of image. He spends a lot of time playing guitar in that style - like a Dobro player works his or her instrument. According to Phelps, the legendary bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell has something to do with his playing style.
“When I started listening to Fred McDowell, and I was trying to figure out his slide guitar stuff, I initially tried playing the guitar bottleneck style. That was sort of working, sort of not. But there were a couple of things going on with that. For one thing, I’d been listening to Derek Bailey quite a bit, which had me wondering what else I could do with the guitar that I’m not doing with it yet, to get some other sounds out of it. That’s when I threw it in my lap and started using different things as slides and tuning the guitar in odd ways. I picked up a couple of lap steels to continue the process.
“Learning that Fred McDowell slide guitar style, I discovered that playing the guitar in my lap just felt better,” Phelps added. “I use a solid steel bar, like a Dobro player, and that, combined with the strings being raised up off the fingerboard, gives me a very rich tone. I also realised that playing lap-style gave me a lot more freedom in terms of using the slide. I can pick different combinations of strings, that is, different combinations of open strings and strings using the slide bar. The compromise was that I couldn’t use my left hand to fret notes, but that seemed like an easy trade-off, considering what I could do with the slide that I couldn’t do playing bottleneck.”
When Phelps returned to the guitar, in the wake of his fabled jazz years, and began the process of building the sound that his fans are familiar with now, he also had to face another imperative: “It was obvious that I was gonna have to sing.” Phelps’ improvisational instincts did not lead him to embark on the path of an instrumentalist like, say, Leo Kottke. Instead, he wanted to pursue his guitar stylings within the framework of a song structure that included lyrics. “When I decided to move in the direction in which I’ve gone, it was apparent that I was going to have to sing. The only other options were playing instrumental guitar, which was gonna be insane, or playing with a singer, which seemed like a cop-out. It was kind of a do-or-die situation. Because I’d never done it before, I was scared to death. It was kind of like taking your clothes off in front of an audience.
“You know, I used to play guitar solo at gigs - just instrumentals - and I felt like as long as there was something between me and who was listening, I was safe,” he laughed. “The singing thing, however, makes you feel like you’ve jumped out in front of your guitar. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t wanna be here,’ you know.”
Phelps’ approach to singing was initially informed mainly by high anxiety. This was one thing that the decade of jazz had not prepared him for, and he was, at best, a reluctant vocalist. It was surprising to hear this from him, given the fact that critics have bee quick to praise his vocal style. He has warmed to the task, however, in the last couple of years.
“I’m intensely glad that I’m singing,” he admitted. “I just thoroughly enjoy it. Now it feels like it’s just part of the package. A lot of times I describe the singing thing as if it was the seventh string on the guitar. You know, sometimes at a gig I have to describe what I want to the sound engineer, because a lot of times they do the typical mix where the voice is way out front and the guitar is buried. But I tell them that my approach is to weave my vocals into the guitar, so when they’re setting their levels, I tell them not to get the voice too far out in front of the guitar. When I think of it that way, it’s almost as if I’m not actually singing. Maybe that’s what I’ve created as my own little safety net - you know, I’m not really singing,” he chuckled.
“I really do feel my voice has integrated itself into
a sound,” he continued. “It’s almost like I’m not doing
anything - not singing, not playing the guitar, just making this noise.”
Phelps’ game plan has been about instrumental improvisation, not vocal
improv. Whether he’s playing original material or covering other artists’
tunes, Phelps doesn’t routinely change the words every time he performs
a song. Rather, the lyrics provide a framework around which he builds an instrumental
dialogue that varies from performance to performance. “It’s the same
with the recording process,” Phelps noted. “That’s something
that surprises some people. I talk about improvising all the time, and I think
a lot of folks who come see me now are used to that idea and expect it. How
I played the song before I recorded it was different than how I played the song
when I recorded it, and when I do the song in concert it’s gonna be different
again.”
For Phelps, it’s the lyrics on which he hangs whatever happens instrumentally. “The blueprint of my songs is always there in the lyrics,” Phelps said. “But I’ve never actually sat down and composed a song all the way through.”
In a way, Phelps is still working in a jazz-like pattern. If you think of the lyrics of his songs as melodic lines, then, in a sense, he’s still improvising on a theme. He’s certainly not as free-form as, say, Medeski, Martin and Wood, but he has given himself a certain freedom within the framework. “There is this body of material that I use,” Phelps said. “I don’t use set lists when I do a concert, but I have 40 or 50 songs and I pick and choose as I go. I give myself the freedom to decide how I’m going to interpret a song on a given night. The lyric is my anchor.”
With three albums to his credit in five years’ time, Kelly Joe Phelps is both a veteran recording artist and a singer/songwriter who is still exploring the possibilities offered by his musical skills. Most recently, he has contributed two songs to the soundtrack of the film Condo Painting. Still in his 30’s, Phelps figures to be sitting around with his guitar in his lap, working tunes, for many more years, which is good news for everyone who’s gotten into what he’s doing.
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Taken from MOJO (April 2000).
live review by Colin Harper
The Girl I Left Behind/Love Me Baby Blues/Fare Thee Well/Piece By Piece/Train Carried My Girl From Town/Lass Of Loch Royale/Katy/Pretty Saro/Wandering Away/Roll Away The Stone/River rat Jimmy/Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues/The Waggoner's Lad/Pretty Polly/Hobo's Son/Blackwater Side
THEY CALLED them folk clubs in the '60's - anything went if it was played on something that used to be a tree. That term's gone, but every Thursday in Belfast former Four Men & A Dog manager Jim Heaney satiates a reborn craving for that exquisitely dangerous, indestructible woody stuff: once folk, blues, jazz, or hillbilly, now a fusion of everything. Such is Heaney's 'Real Music Club' and such is Kelly Joe Phelps: the Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and travelling slaesman of one-time Delta blues.
Formerly a music tutor at various US colleges, Phelps' discovery discovery of Mississippi Fred McDowell 10 years ago resulted in his forging of something simultaneously grounded in the Delta and soaring to the moon. Those who thought they'd nailed his muse with Roll Away The Stone in 1997 had to think again with last year's Shine Eyed Mister Zen - from spine-tingling langour to "a twisted folk thing". If there was anybody at tonight's show still putting Phelps in a bag with Eric Bibb and Keb' Mo' they were in for a shock. As his own agent put it, holding court at the bar with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, "He's gone a bit weird."
Such is the mesmeric blur of Phelps' moaning, free-wheeling vocalising and dizzying guitar impressionism that everything becomes one. There is new material, but even songs familiar from the records are turned inside out in a performance that worships at the shrine of John Coltrane. Wildly extemporised flurries of notes, de-tuned deviations into blissfully unrelated keys and great shimmering slabs of sound are wrenched from Phelps' lap-position guitar with a physicality that belies the speed and accuracy of the notes. Nothing is played, however tangential, that those fingers don't aim to play.
Phelps is unashamedly playing for himself, right to the limits. While the first set is mind-blowing, the second is refreshingly earth-bound, with gentle ballads and a smouldering Appalachian trilogy featuring guest fiddler Tim O'Brien. An encore of Bert Jansch's classic arrangement of Blackwater Side - once the epitome of a guitarist's virtuosity, here made effortless, is played straight and with sincerity, revealing another facet to this extraordinary musician's palette of influences.
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Taken from UNCUT magazine (March 2000)
review by Nick Hasted
London, The Jazz Café
KELLY Joe Phelps' slide guitar seemed to spring into independent life at the multiple climaxes of 1997's breakthrough LP, Roll Away The Stone, to ripple and snake into unknown territory for the country blues he allegedly played, to squeeze out sounds touching the searching jazz that ad once been his trade, to mutate through more layers than 12 strings should hold. And the songs - half traditional, half his, their pleas for God's mercy beyond the grave healed the spirit in ways disbelievers, in Bibles or blues, could feel. Last year's Shine Eyed Mister Zen took another twist as Phelps - "I'm not necessarily a blues player" - turned the technique down and the songwriting up, attempting the austere death-folk recalled in Dylan's World Gone Wrong, territory surely as alien to this 37-year-old, middle-class Washington State native as to the 58-year-old Minnesotan. In genres so leeched of life for so long, casualty ward cases drip-fed on nostalgia, phelps' records stirred blood.
It's a reality-lurch seeing Phelps in the flesh, the gaunt, shadowy figure of photos strolling on stage as a close-cropped near-beauty, a blues Evan Dando. He's surreally funny between songs too, a supple entertainer, an observant traveller - closing his third British tour, he mordantly dissects our collapsing railway system before his own train song (his guitar like whipping power lines, "Almost crashed there, almost crashed").
He finds new shapes and words for his songs, sweetening the pill of the graveyard stuff with Dylanesque insults, still slipping in the fear:
"I read my Bible/Surely he will hear me/I wanna go there/When I die& ." His own mysterious, intangible song of childhood blood-bonds and terror, "River Rat Jimmy", may be the highlight, but through it all Phelps contorts his face, moans and howls, looks like he's chewing Mississippi tobacco, half-playing the part of bluesman. And he strides, slides and strokes the guitar laid flat on his lap, karate-chops its strings, beats its body like a drum, yanks out brief glittering electricity, matches the half-whistling sound of his mouth, the faraway holler of a train that keeps coming.
Somewhere, in some Surrey mansion, Eric Clapton lazily maintains what he plays is the blues. Phelps doesn't bother; he's better than that.
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ACROSS THE BORDERLINE
(article taken from HOT PRESS magazine (Ireland & UK) 16th Feb. 2000)
KELLY JOE PHELPS may be viewed by some as a bluesman, but the multi-instrumentalist isn't going to be confined by such narrow boundaries. By SIOBHAN LONG.
"Who's gonna shoe yo' feet/Who's gonna glove yo' hand? If I prove false to thee ?"
MUSIC THAT'S not of this world is a scarce commodity these days. Amid times of plenty there are souls starving for something real, something that cuts right to the bone. Kelly Joe Phelps has sated many an appetite with his last two CDs, but it's his live shows that really salve the spirits.
Phelps received a rapturous reception at his recent Whelan's gig, so much so that he was cajoled to return for three encores. Billed as a blues player, he tore strips off our preconceptions by gathering around a sound that was part blues, part folk, but wholly of his own conjuring. Listening to his razor-sharp ramblings on 'River Rat Jimmy' and his wry re-working of 'Wandering Away', even a blind man could see that Kelly Joe had gotten beneath the skin of the music and made it all his own.
A native of Sumner, in the western part of Washington State, 40 miles south of Seattle, Kelly Joe Phelps didn't exactly grow up in a cauldron of blues or folk. "The area I grew in wasn't musically rich," he offers, "but my family was very musical, so it was an integral part of my growing up. My earliest childhood memories are of watching them and listening to them play. So I was raised with the idea that music was something that you did, and not something that you listened to." Phelps has a reputation for playing by his own rules, as opposed to slavishly living by anybody else's rule book. He's collaborated with an eclectic range of musicians form Tim O'Brien to Steve Earle. There are many of the opinion that Phelps has done for folk/blues what Ry Cooder did for Tex Mex with Chicken Skin Music way back in 1976. "I don't necessarily consider myself to be a blues musician," he avers, "and when I started out, I didn't decide that I wanted to play blues music, but at a particular time in my career, blues made sense to me both musically and personally. Even when I was learning to play guitar, at 12 or 13, I was listening side by side to Jimmy Page, John Denver, Chet Atkins and so on. I never followed just one sound."
Phelps has made sure throughout his musical career to test all of the sounds that appealed to his curiosity. Having started out with drums, he subsequently played sax, bass and acoustic and electric guitars, thus creating a virtual orchestra of sounds. "When I wanted to figure out how to play jazz music," he explains, "and how to improvise, and to understand that music both cerebrally and emotionally, I decided that what I needed to do was play a horn - to get inside the music from that angle. So I took some lessons for 2 or 3 years and then I stopped, because after a time, it seemed that I got from it what I needed and then I put it away. Then I went back to the guitar with a different mindset. For me it was trying to be a musician with no regard for the instrument you're playing. In other words, I like the idea that potentially a musician could play music without the instrument dictating what you're going to play."
Despite the plethora of original songs on his last two albums, songwriting is not something that Phelps takes naturally to his bosom. "Songwriting, even though I try to approach it improvisationally, is a very regimental experience," says Phelps . "You have to sit down and deal with the words and try to figure out what kind of music goes with it. It's certainly not natural for me, and I'm trying to figure out a system to write songs that allow the most improvisational room. When I write, I don't really write them as compositions. The words are pretty set, but musically I try to leave room to get inside of it. Every once in a while, I figure out I'm on to something, but you know, it's a slippery fish!'
Whatever his achilles tendon might be, one thing's for sure: Kelly Joe Phelps is going to keep on pushing the outside of the envelope when it comes time to step inside that studio again. "It probably sounds hackneyed to say this," he offers, "but people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis - whether or not you like the records they were putting out - there was always something going on, always something changing. It was vital, and you felt they were really putting everything on the line. And to me that's great, and I can't imagine what music would be like if that's what everybody did. Maybe that's too idealistic, but I still hope it's a trap I fall into!"
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Live review (Kelly Joe Phelps at Jazz Café, London, England) taken from
Evening Standard (London) -- 2 February 2000 .
Written by Jack Massarik.
REBIRTH OF THE BLUES
There's more than one way to skin a guitar (not counting with your teeth, or behind your back), and one of the strangest and most beautiful was demonstrated to a captivated Jazz Café last night by a former jazz bass-player raised on Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
Kelly Joe Phelps was nearly 30 when he took up blues guitar, inexplicably drawn to the ancient Delta-blues tradition. Nine years on, he can make a standard Gibson six-string folk model ring like a Dobro resonator. Only he knows how, but it involves laying his instrument flat on its back in his lap and articulating it with a bottleneck, much as a pedal-steel player would. His right hand tweaks the bass strings with thumb and forefinger while hammer-chording the others with fingers three, four and five.
It's a complex skill, and one day Kelly Joe will reveal all to Guitar Player magazine, but what makes him special is his lazy feel for acoustic blues, that gently pulsating melange of one bitter voice and six sweet strings. "It's like making love, isn't it?" breathed a nearby female fan. "So intense."
Swamp fever claimed several such victims as Phelps husked through Train Carried My Girl From Town, Katy, River Rat Jimmy - songs from his Rykodisc album, Shine Eyed Mister Zen, and its humid world of empty pockets, faithless women, hopeless yearning, late trains and early death. These tales had an air of nonchalant authenticity nobody would expect form a slim, crop-haired Caucasian, especially one from Washington state, next door to Canada and musically a million miles form Mississippi.
Between numbers he revealed a dry sense of humour, but little about himself. Just as well. We' d hate to discover that a modern bluesman has an agent, an accountant, a personal manager and a prenuptial agreement.
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New York Times review by Ann Powers-Wednesday, February 9, 2000
FLYING FINGERS ON GUITAR
Kelly Joe Phelps has a wise right hand. When playing his
lap-steel acoustic guitar at the Knitting Factory, he would sometimes anchor
that hand by the pinky and pick, his thumb and three other fingers whirling
across the strings. On other songs, he would hold three fingers still and get
a steadier but equally swift flow of notes from his index finger and thumb.
Occasionally that right hand would run free across the guitar's body, strumming
lightly up the fretboard and down to the bottom of the strings.
All the while, Mr. Phelps's left hand was flying its own imaginative course,
usually aboard a metal slide but sometimes lightly pressing notes into the fretboard
or reaching to detune a string. The relationship between left and right hand
determines Mr. Phelps's style, just as the meeting of left and right brain defines
his songs.
The analytical side of this music links Delta blues with free jazz and jazz-folk, in compositions and arrangements as tied to the spacious melodicism of Joni Mitchell as to the well-grounded improvisations of blues masters like Mississippi Fred McDowell. The intuitive side contradicts all categories in performances that are never the same twice. Mr. Phelps may have growled and moaned like a postage-stamp bluesman in his performance last Wednesday, but his croon also invoked the light phrasing of Paul Simon; his playing may have echoed heroes like Bukka White, but it also rode on vapors of Bach and Mr. Phelps's fellow American experimentalist Bill Frisell.
Mr. Phelps connects to the blues as poetry; his own lyrics,
as in "River Rat Jimmy," the song that gave him the title to his latest
album, "Shine Eyed Mister Zen," are highly metaphorical and as nonlinear
as his playing.
Performing the folk standard "Black Waterside," he focused on the
fairy tale language, his airy playing conjuring a pocket of supernatural space.
On gospel songs, he manipulated his fretboard to create eerie harmonics as he
slipped from a mumble to a falsetto, as if to follow the soul beyond the physical
realm...
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Kelly Joe Phelps - latest reviews and press articles ...
The Japan Times Tuesday Nov. 23rd 1999
Excerpt taken from article 'Down to the roots of World Music' by Paul Fisher
[One of the more remarkable musical experiences of 1999 for me, was to spend a few days in Canada with Indian slide guitar player Debashish Bhattacharya. While his face remained a picture of serenity, his hands would be effortlessly racing along the strings at breakneck speed. There are many good Western slide players (Bhattacharya has toured with two of them, Martin Simpson and Bob Brozman), but I never believed they could aspire to that mixture of spirituality and dazzling technique that takes music onto a different plane].
I still don't, but the nearest I've heard is Kelly Joe Phelps. Phelps, from Washington state, draws his spiritual qualities from the likes of Mississippi Fred McDowell or Blind Willie Johnson. For him, music is a mystical experience. When totally caught up in it, oblivious to anything else, he says he becomes a "Shine Eyed Mister Zen" - the title of his latest cd. Phelps is a phenomenal player, but his music is devoid of any pointless flashiness.
He uses his vocals much like an additional instrument, singing in a smoky, gliding tone. Reinterpreting old songs such as "House Carpenter" or Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" on the new album, he almosts reinvents them while staying true to the core spirit. His own songs appear to come from deep within, with that same sense of emotion and pain. Those songs are constantly evolving, whether Phelps is playing live or on record. He performs with no set list, but prefers to let the ambience dictate. Visually exciting, he bangs out a rhythm on his guitar, jerks his head and switches between lap slide and regular guitar to keep the variety.
Previously a bass player in a jazz group, Phelps believes there is a thread that connects the deep blues of an originator such as Charlie Patton to the saxophone to the improvisations of John Coltrane. It's probably true the blues came from Africa, and jazz came from the blues. Kelly Joe aims to follow that thread and close the gap. No fake "white boy sings the blues", Phelps is the genuine article. American roots music is in safe hands.
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OUT ON A LIMB - taken from October '99 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine. Reviewed
by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers.
Roots-music adventures with Kelly Joe Phelps
FOR KELLY JOE PHELPS, IMPROVISATION isn't a matter of tweaking the tempo or stringing together different licks in a solo - it's the very core of his music, as he reharmonizes, re-creates, and even creates songs night after night. So what we hear on his new album, Shine Eyed Mister Zen , is a snapshot of what he laid down with his fingers, slide, and voice on particular days when microphones were set up to capture them. On different days - even on another set of takes - he would have made a different album. And as soon as the tape stops rolling and Phelps takes the stage again, the songs continue to breathe and evolve without regard to what gets encased in plastic on the CD rack.
Which isn't to suggest that what does get captured on disc is unsatisfying in any way. Quite the opposite: Shine Eyed Mister Zen is a deep, soulful journey through American roots music, played by one of the finest guitarists at work today. With his dusky voice and peerless lap slide guitar, Phelps reinvents old songs like "House Carpenter," and "Goodnight Irene" alongside originals that grow right out of the same rich soil. He picks up an open-tuned standard guitar with anything but standard results, from the feisty blues "Katy" to the cheerfully dissonant "Many a Time" to warp-speed modal picking on "Capman Bootman." On "Piece by Piece," Phelps is joined by Dave Mathis on blues harp, but he's best left to his own devices - his guitar is a turn-on-a-dime bebop, blues, and Appalachian string band all wrapped up into one. His playing is truly monstrous - he's one of the elite who seem to be able to play anyhting he can conjure - but it's shorn of all the ego and theatrics that usually accompany guitar heroism. Phelps is a virtuoso improviser who really only likes to play songs, not licks.
All this description will be familiar to anyone who had the good fortune to pick up Phelps' last Rykodisc album, Roll Away the Stone , or catch the man himself on stage. As evidenced on Shine Eyed Mister Zen , one of the chief developments in the two years since Roll Away the Stone is that, in terms of chops and sophistication, Phelps' standard guitar work is now on a par with his slide style (on his first solo album, the Burnside release Lead Me On , he played only lap slide). If anything, his standard guitar playing has become even more varied and idiosyncratic than his state-of-the-art slide work. He also shows tremendous growth as a songwriter, achieving the kind of spiritual union with traditional sources that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have found in the old-time country vein. Phelps' haunting "River Rat Jimmy" and barreling "Capman Bootman" are just as weird and unforgettable as songs that have been passed down through generations.
Who woulda thunk that a guy playing lap slide guitar would lead us down this path, where the harmonic seeking of jazz meets the musical world of the Harry Smith Anthology ? Make no mistake: there's something rare and wondrous going on in Kelly Joe Phelps' music, which is deep rooted yet exhilaratingly free.
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Talking country blues - interview taken from September issue of Guitarist magazine.
Written by Jon Jordan.
KELLY JOE PHELPS plays the slide guitar lap-style, and makes music like you've never heard. But as Jon Jordan found out, there's more to his sound than a slide and six strings .....
When he starts to play, you have to sit up and listen. It's partly down to Kelly Joe Phelps' characteristic style. Laying the guitar face up, he plays with a solid slide held between thumb and forefingers. But more than this, he uses the guitar as a percussive tool, banging it to maintain an offbeat, while playing the strings the capo to add to his palate. His vocal style is peculiar too. If anyone sings 'slide guitar style' it's him. Kelly Joe Phelps is more than just a guitarist; he's a musician and entertainer. And his secret is that despite playing that most traditional of instruments, the slide guitar, he plays it for 1999.
"It's not 1929 so how can you be authentic?" he laughs. "I'm not an authentic Mr. Blues." Instead the secret of his success is that he's prepared to do what he feels is best for now. Watching a recent live performance, it was only a few songs into the set before he switched styles and started to play a regular guitar. Even the king of slide has more than one string to his bow.
"Each night I start out with the slide and at some point I'll pick up the regular guitar," he explains. "If it feels like it wants to be played then I'll play a handful of songs on it. But sometimes I'll put it back after two." This could be because of the way the venue sounds or because the audience seems to be full of slide lovers, but it's clear that Kelly Joe is confident enough to follow where his music leads.
"I try to let the music do what it wants," he says, casually. "I just play the guitar and sing. Sometimes it can be magical, sometimes it can be a bore." It's unlikely any of his audience will agree with the latter though. And if he sometimes disappoints them by putting down the slide, it's only because the regular guitar is a crucial part of his routine.
"When I practice, 90% of the time it's on the straight guitar," he says. "One reason is because I'm striving to play the normal guitar as comfortably as I can." That's despite the fact he's been playing for close to 30 years. "Then, when I play the slide, it feels fresh."
His music is built on solid technique. "I think it's a bit weird that more guitar players don't want to play it well," he muses. The same level of dedication is applied to his singing as well.
"Although I haven't been singing nearly as long as I've been playing the guitar, I do everything I can to understand how to sing better," says Kelly Joe. And listening to his latest album, 'Shine Eyed Mister Zen', there are some songs in which his voice becomes almost abstract.
"At those moments, I'm using my voice as an instrument," he says. "I'm using it more like another guitar string, another part of the guitar." And this is the heart of his extraordinary sound. Not only does his guitar technique give him the freedom to go where he wants to go, his voice meshes with it seamlessly. It would be tempting to say he's the complete article, but that's not something he would agree with.
"Occasionally, I feel trapped by technique and that's one of the constant battles with anything that you are pursuing," he says. "Many times it feels like I'm playing the same old stuff and I don't want to."
This is the reason he never writes, and certainly never follows, a set-list.
"I've tried them a few times but they never work," he complains. "A gig isn't like an interview. To me it's like sitting down over a beer and talking. There's nothing to work out ahead of time." Which accounts for the natural feel of his shows. Not only are no two shows the same, but he thinks no two songs are ever played the same way either.
Even if he worked out and studied the songs, memorising every note, it would never have the same feel, he explains. And while many musicians say this about their live performances, the same is true for his albums too. 'Shine Eyed Mister Zen', like his two previous albums, was recorded at home with all the tracks recorded in single takes. Even the meaning of the title relates to Kelly Joe's way of playing.
"It's when a person is so caught up in any experience that nothing else exists at that moment. At that moment you become a shine eyed mister zen," he says. "I felt like it was a good way to describe the sensation of playing the music," he recalls.
Get a copy and you might find that it describes the experience of listening accurately as well.
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SHINE EYED MISTER ZEN
Kelly Joe Phelps
By DAVE VEITCH
Calgary Sun
Kelly Joe Phelps: Dave Alvin, who knows a thing or two about American roots music, likens Phelps' virtuosic flair to John Coltrane, which may seem like hyperbole until you witness the guitarist's amazing feats of six-string dexterity and a delivery that's fiery bordering on possessed. Fellow guitarists and rural blues aficionados -- Phelps' chief constituency -- will find plenty to like on his third album, although he also manages to branch out without abandoning his unaccompanied voice-and-guitar approach. Alongside his nods to Leadbelly and Dock Boggs are many stellar Phelps originals -- some indebted to acoustic blues, others surprisingly akin to the work of early-70s singer-songwriters, most of which are apparently inspired by a woman walking out of his life for good. This is a soundtrack to hard times but, in Phelps' capable hands, you'll hurt so good.
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Review by Andy Gill.
Taken from 'The Independent' Friday 16th July 1999.(British Press)
WHITE BLUESMEN used to be 10 a penny in rock'n'roll, waiting
out their facsimiles of someone else's pain.
Kelly Joe Phelps, though, is different; like the generation of young black bluesmen
who take their lead from Taj Mahal - prodigious talents such as Corey Harris
and Alvin Youngblood Hart - his devotion is to the acoustic blues tradition
of Leadbelly and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
The most significant difference separating Phelps from most of his white forebearers,
however, is the conviction of his connection to those sources - the naturalness
with which he wields both the slide guitar and the old blues imagery.
I saw him perform only once, at a small, intimate wake for his fellow musician
Rainer Ptacek, and it was clear as soon as Phelps began playing that he was
something special: his command of his instrument was mesmerisingly dextrous,
but not in the deliberate, showboating manner of electric blues guitarists.
What was so fascinating about his slide bar technique was the casual, unobtrusive
way in which it tracked the emotional contours of a song, each note being shaded
and weighted to fit its task in an almost offhand manner, as if he'd never even
bothered to think about it.
That kind of honesty burns through Shine Eyed Mister Zen, where Phelps's ego
remains firmly subservient to his emotions, whether he's reinterpreting old
songs such as "The House Carpenter" and Leadbelly's "Goodnight
Irene", or using old forms as the mould within which to cast his own observations.
Sometimes, it's hard to see where one leaves off and the other takes up, as
with his "Dock Boggs Country Blues", where the venerable white bluesman's
meditation on the fiscal fickleness of friends serves as a template for Phelps's
own complaints.
As with so many travelling musicians, Phelps's own songs, for example "Wandering
Away" and "Train Carried My Girl From Town", are riddled with
departure and dismay, with regret at the ease with which responsibilities can
be abandoned.
Elsewhere, childhood memories ("River Rat Jimmy") and ruminations
upon time and family ("Piece By Piece") are delivered in a husky,
powder-blue voice that is every bit as naturally engaging as Phelps's guitar-playing.
Like all the great blues singers, he's never afraid of exposing the raw nerves
of his emotions, and this results in some of the most soulful blues expressions
of recent years. In its near-egoless modesty and absolute commitment, Shine
Eyed Mister Zen offers a potent reaffirmation of the power of the natch'l blues.
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FOLK ROOTS - Review by Ian Kearey. Taken from July 1999 issue.
KELLY JOE PHELPS
Shine Eyed Mister Zen Rykodisc RCD 10476
Ker-umba! Who would have thought only a few years ago that lap slide guitars would ever become popular, let alone sexy; after all, only Hawaiians, old timely players and a few eccentrics like Mr Fahey were playing them - or so it seemed. But all over the world, as we realise today, people were hiding themselves away with their Weissenborns and konas, biding their time for world domination. And here they come at you! Now! Kelly Joe Phelps's dazzling way with a lap guitar and a slide has caused grown men and women to weep with jealousy; when allied to a world-weary voice and strong arrangements, this makes for great music. This is his third album and features the blend of original material and cover versions that characterized Roll Away The Stone. Here, the covers include a wonderful House Carpenter, a Goodnight Irene that moves as far away from Lead Belly's song without denying its name altogether, and songs by Dock Boggs and 'the pride of West Virginia', Frank Hutchison, who is due to be raised to Boggs-like status any day now. The originals are also intense little vignettes of life: the tilt of Katy contrasts with the urgency of River Rat Jimmy, and Piece By Piece shows off more of that guitar playing. Phelps just gets better and better.
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'TRUE BLUES TO THE CORE' - By Colin Harper.
Taken from 'The Independent' May 25th 1999 (British Press)
If he never does anything else as profound as the album
that first brought him to British critical acclaim - 1997's starkly beautiful
Roll Away the Stone - the Kelly Joe Phelps story is already down in the annals:
a 37-year-old from Washington State who spent most of his teens and twenties
playing jazz and teaching guitar before he had a road-to-Damascus experience
with the blues. He completely relearnt his instrument, now playing, most unusually,
with an open-tuned acoustic horizontal on his lap, learnt a load of pre-war
stuff and set off on a worldwide mission. For the next couple of weeks he's
in Britain. Opening the tour in Belfast, his performance is highly courteous
to the crowd on one hand and simply enraptured with the music on the other.
"Hi, I'm Kelly Joe, this is what I do," he says, lurching into a scorching
10-minute take on the traditional Appalachian song "House Carpenter".
Embodying a level of musical brinkmanship rarely seen on stages this side of
Jimi Hendrix and The Who in their heyday, Phelps's performance showed the kind
of benchmark he was setting for the next two hours.
Showcasing material from his new album, Shine Eyed Mister Zen (out on Rykodisc,
12 July), there is a marked shift from the intoxicating solemnity of Roll Away
the Stone towards what he calls a "twisted folk thing": reference
points being the modern Celtic fingerstyle acrobatics of Martin Simpson, the
Sixties modal intensity of Bert Jansch, and touches of John Fahey weirdness.
The new album, like his current show, is a brave departure from the record that
made his reputation, but is recognisably the work of the same man. There may
be more notes and a lighter feel to the material, but there's nobody else travelling
this road with such a singular vision.