The most fascinating thing about the first three albums from The Allman Brothers Band – more than the songs, even – was the opportunity to hear a germinating concept being realized. The records championed a love of the blues, but the music and the vibes surrounding them were rooted in the deep South. That meant a little gospel, a little jazz and a whole lot of white-hot interplay between two extraordinary guitarists.
Sure, Duane Allman was the star of the show, and rightly so. He founded the group with brother Gregg and it was his vision, one forged by a generous amount of studio work with some of the top soul and R&B artists of the era, that made the Allmans’ music so fresh, commanding and best of all, unassuming.
As a guitarist, Brother Duane was an innovator who quickly helped the ABB form a collective voice of its own that was unlike any other music of its time. In just a few short years, that sound would be imitated to a grotesque degree. But within the last of those early ABB albums, 1971’s The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East, its Southern soul-blues voice roared with originality.
It’s easy to view Duane’s guitarwork as the driving force behind the ABB. After all, it was, but the band’s fortunes seemed to vanish almost as quickly as they were earned. Three months after the release of Fillmore East, Brother Duane died in a motorcycle crash. The artist who took the helm after that wasn’t an Allman, but he most certainly a Brother. He was Dickey Betts.
The Florida-born guitarist died Thursday at the age of 80.
What made much of Fillmore East so thrilling was the monstrous but unforced interplay between Allman and Betts. Allman got the headlines, but Betts had already picked up on the band’s mission statement by dressing its sophomore record, Idlewild South, with tunes that approached jazz (“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”) and gospel (“Revival”). After Allman died, Betts unceremoniously took over, adding a strong sense of country music (real country music, that is, as it echoed in the early ‘70s and before) to three tunes that would define the band in the post-Duane era – the lovely Southern serenade “Blue Sky,” the freewheeling radio hit and forebearer to what would soon be termed Southern Rock “Ramblin’ Man” and an instrumental, “Jessica,” that would spotlight the contributions of his newest sparring partner, pianist Chuck Leavell.
The fractures came not long after that. A litany of rock ‘n’ roll vices, the kind that ran amok in the ‘70s, and dissention within the band’s ranks dissolved the Allmans in 1976. They reteamed three years later, broke up again and secured a stable run in 1989 that would last until Betts was booted out of the band in 2000 for a variety of rumored bad habits.
We’ll leave those savoring gossip and career dirt to dwell on the darker details of Betts’ later years. With his passing today, a more fitting remembrance emerges in the music he left us – 11 albums with the ABB and a sublime 1974 solo recording (credited to Richard Betts) titled Highway Call. The record deviated from the Allmans’ still-booming stardom for a crisp collection of tunes echoing vintage country, bluegrass and swing. Highway Call, along the Allmans’ three greatest albums – At Fillmore East, Eat a Peach and Brothers and Sisters – should be considered essential listening.
If there is a single tune that embodies the spirit, though perhaps not the full stylistic scope of Betts’ music, it’s the 1972 ABB instrumental “Little Martha.” The song is a wistful two-minute acoustic duet between Betts and Duane Allman. The melodies are light, almost childlike. But since the album it came from, Eat a Peach, wasn’t released until four months after Allman’s death, “Little Martha” packs a heightened, though entirely unintended, sense of reflection.
That’s the beauty of great music – it often conveys the proper emotions and remembrances when words escape us.
Archer in performance Saturday evening at 21c Museum Hotel. From left: Terre Ex, Jon Rune Strøm, Dave Rempis and Tollef Østvang. Photos by Walter Tunis.
You knew you were in for an adventure Saturday evening at 21c Museum Hotel when guitarist Terrie Ex, his legs stretched like a soccer player ready for kick-off and face illuminated with the grin of a child about to engage in some ghastly mischief, looked at saxophonist Dave Rempis and whispered two words of ensemble ignition for the band Archer.
“Shall we?”
Indeed they shall. Indeed they did. With that the two chieftains served as twin volcanos, but with very different displays of eruption. Ex, mainstay member of the Dutch punk band The Ex (hey, the name game worked for the Ramones, so why for these overseas disciples?), let loose like a wind-up toy, spinning about with a sense of merriment that very much seemed like an extension of the scorched sounds he conjured from a weather-beaten electric six-string. At times, the frenzy was strictly handmade, whether it was summoned with picks or hammered in percussive fashion by his open palms. In other instances, he would take to the instrument with a drum stick – tapping it, pounding it or using like a slide.
Terre Ex playing musical chair.
There came moments when Ex would also use found objects – a drink glass at one point, a drum head at another, to stymie or enhance the racket. The coup de grace didn’t involve the guitar at all but a wayward chair that Ex dragged across the floor, using the resulting scraps as another musical color.
All this was a marked contrast to Rempis, a 20-plus year mainstay of the Outside the Spotlight series of improvisational and free jazz performances. This concert was part of what appears to a concerted rejuvenation of the series after a few years of near-dormancy.
The Chicago saxophonist remained mostly stationary during the two extended improvisations that made up Archer’s 50-minute set, but his playing was no less volatile that what Ex was executing.
Juggling duties on soprano, alto and tenor sax, Rempis displayed – just as he has in the dozen or so different bands and duo/trio combinations that have brought him to OTS and Lexington through the years – muscular solos that were thick in texture and tone, but often amazingly agile. That’s where he fit in so well with Ex. The two players were quick witted in the extreme, shooting ideas in rapid, ragged, call-and-response fashion or joyously blowing their tops in their own little universes.
Joy was the key word here. Archer was a very fun band to watch. It possessed all the intensity and intent of serious-minded avant gardists, especially given the drive the frontmen received from bassist Jon Rune Strøm and drummer Tollef Østvang (both Norwegian, both vets of previous OTS concerts). But watching Ex bound about the floor of 21C’s second floor gallery was like watching a child dance. The action and music were richly uninhibited in their sense of discovery. No wonder he was grinning like mad all through the set.
Anagrams: Jeff Crompton and JD Walsh at 21 C on Saturday evening.
The Saturday concert also featured a 45-minute performance by an intriguing Atlanta duo called Anagrams. Consisting of saxophonist/clarinetist Jeff Crompton and guitarist JD Walsh, the two engaged in a series of short, often melodically rooted pieces as opposed to Archer’s extended, stormier rampages.
References ran from Japanese gagaku music to straight up pop lyricism with shades of ambient atmosphere at the ready. The latter two qualities nicely enhanced the spacious, bright exchanges between alto sax and six-string electric guitar on “Blue Voices” (the title tune to Anagrams’ first and, so far, only album) before steering into shades of deeper blue for “Let Us Sing Sad Songs Together,” the first half of what Crompton called the “Pandemic Medley.” The second bore the equally wistful title of “What Day is Today?” and opened Crompton’s alto leads into free territory.
The only qualm with Anagrams what that Walsh, whose playing revolved around the placement of riffs within the duo’s open frameworks as opposed more lyrical or liquid leads, only devoted two tunes to his work on lap steel guitar. Those were the instances where Anagram’s sound became more colorful, more atmospheric and vastly more distinctive.
Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn performing Sunday at the Opera House. Photo by Walter Tunis.
“We hope they told you this was a banjo show,” remarked Abigail Washburn at the Opera House on Sunday evening. Well, anyone who didn’t get the memo got the message loud and clear when they walked in to see nine of the stringed things lined up across the stage with their cases placed neatly behind them like artillery reinforcements. But when Washburn and her 17-time Grammy winning husband Béla Fleck ripped through a show-opening cover of the 1968 John Hartford survivor’s anthem “I’m Still Here,” banjo time had truly arrived.
One instrument – well, roughly a dozen models of one instrument – and a husband-and-wife team with different yet complimentary styles and voices to give it (okay, them) life was the game plan for this big banjo show. Even the t-shirts at the merch stand stated the couple’s artistic mission: “More banjo.”
Was the performance concept of watching two banjoists – and only two banjoists – for a two-hour, two-set concert in any way narrow in scope? Not a bit. Within this performance, Fleck and Washburn touched on vintage gospel, jazz with a dash of activism, classic pop, country staples modified with Covid-era lyrics, three or four shades of bluegrass, Chinese folk and pre-bluegrass country. Oh yeah, and Gershwin.
The Hartford tune drew outlines both players followed for the much of the evening. While not strict parameters, they nonetheless were set enough to help map out paths for their divergent styles to work off each other.
Washburn’s clawhammer-friendly, folk-informed playing handled largely rhythmic duties, although that’s simplifying the mission statement a bit. She was also a vocalist with a clear, robust tone that brought out the spiritual core of “His Eye is On the the Sparrow,” the topical jazz slant of “Long As You’re Living” (a tune popularized by Abbey Lincoln in the late ‘50s) and the homespun longing of the 1962 Skeeter Davis pop chestnut “The End of the World.”
Fleck, easily today’s most prolific and best-known banjo risk-taker, was a one-man symphony. Having long possessed a dazzling technical command of the instrument, he has also become a master at working with composition and melody, molding new sentiments within familiar song structures. A fine example from the Sunday performance: the way the bluegrass/jazz mash-up of “Big Country,” a wistful late ‘90s original first cut with his Flecktones band, sounded so naturally at home within a medley of vintage banjo tunes.
This was also a night of tributes for lost heroes. For Washburn, it was her recently departed father, who she championed as her “biggest fan.” In his honor she revisited “Burn Thru,” an early original tune with a sense of affirmation not unlike “I’m Still Here” and “Long As You’re Living.”
For Fleck, the tributes went to bluegrass guitar giant Tony Rice and jazz keyboard colossus Chick Corea – both frequent collaborators through the decades.
For the former, Fleck reimagined Rice’s intricate lines from a 1983 version of Hamilton Camp’s “Pride of Man” for banjo while Washburn transposed the song’s vocal and rhythmic make-up. The Corea tribute, which Fleck performed alone, brought together fragments of soon-to-be released compositions the two artists worked on prior to the pianist/composer/bandleader’s death in 2021 (the resulting album, “Remembrance,” is due out in June) that neatly wound their way to the 1973 signature tune “Spain.” It was a touching slice of reverence that honored not only the compositional ornateness of Corea’s music, but also its inherent playfulness.
The jawdropper, though, was Fleck’s 10-minute reduction of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” for solo banjo. With a performance demeanor that was completely unassuming, Fleck dived straight into the tune’s rich elegance, joy and sense of daring. As a whole, it sounded amazingly complete for an orchestral work where most of the key melodic guideposts had to be checked off by an instrument normally associated with folk and bluegrass. The solo embellishments Fleck threw in without any sense of grandstanding made the performance even wilder.
A truly imaginative feat, especially for a “banjo show.” Washburn’s onstage review of her husband’s astonishing one man “Rhapsody” was immediate, succinct and merrily downplayed.
Spending an hour on the phone with Béla Fleck is akin to climbing aboard a bullet train. One minute, you’re surveying the duo concerts he regularly engages in with wife Abigail Washburn, the setting that brings the banjo giant back to his one-time hometown of Lexington this weekend. But in no time, you’re immersed in the East-meets-West music he creates with longtime Bluegrass bassist/co-hort Edgar Meyer and champion Indian musicians Zakir Hussain and Rakesh Chaurasia, whose collaborative 2023 album, “As We Speak,” won Fleck the two most recent additions in his arsenal of 17 Grammy Awards.
Of course, the train doesn’t stay stationed long because the next step is a bold, banjo-informed reimagining of Gershwin’s immortal “Rhapsody Blue.” A recording of that project came out in February, yet Fleck already has another album with the late jazz piano innovator Chick Corea due out in June. And just a stop or two down the tracks are further dates with My Bluegrass Heart, the youthful all-star brigade of string music titans that has formed the bulk of his touring schedule for the last two years.
It’s a wonder the guy doesn’t, metaphorically speaking, get pulled over for speeding with the swiftness in which he runs from one banjo-infused activity to another, all of which are have been designed to further stretch the instrument beyond the stereotypes Fleck himself shattered decades ago.
But a remark that efficiently encapsulates the daringness of his musicality, as well as the seemingly inexhaustible work ethic that fuels it, was offered in the interview when Fleck described the 10 solo performances he played as opening sets last summer for Hussain, veteran jazz guitarist John McLaughlin and their long-running global music fusion ensemble Shakti. Fleck was describing the feeling of presenting his unaccompanied playing in concert halls for audiences of two to six thousand patrons.
“To just go in the room and fill it up with banjo was really a joy.”
That sums up just about any musical adventure Fleck has been involved with, whether it was through bluegrass and a variety of stylistic offshoots, country progression during the ‘80s with New Grass Revival, jazz/funk and fusion during the ‘90s and beyond with his immensely popular Flecktones band or projects involving, West African inspirations, classical compositions, folk influences and even Christmas music. He has won Grammys for recordings reflecting each of those genres.
Filling a room with banjo joy – that’s what Bela Fleck has always been about.
As the Crowe flies
J.D. Crowe in 2012, photographed near his Nicholasville home by Mark Cornelison.
To get a sense of where such stylistically open-minded music emerged from, you need to travel back to the late ‘70s when Fleck briefly lived in Lexington. He was already exploring extensions for bluegrass banjo music. What he came for was a closer look at the innovations forged by one of Kentucky’s most acclaimed purveyors of the instrument, J.D. Crowe. Fleck’s April 14 concert with Washburn at the Lexington Opera House will be his first local performance since Crowe’s passing on Christmas Eve of 2021.
“So here I was, a Yankee banjo player,” Fleck recalled. “Grew up in New York City. My heroes were Tony Trischka and Bill Keith, both modern guys doing new stuff on the banjo. But this J.D. Crowe thing was irritating because he was so good. It was like, ‘Well, I can’t play like that. I’m learning all this fancy stuff, but I can’t do that.’ There was something that was so visceral, so powerful – the note choices, the tone, everything about his playing was galvanizing.
“Earl Scruggs was the banjo player that, when I would hear him, I had to stop in my tracks. I couldn’t move until he was done. The only other guy who did that to me, as much as I love so many other banjo players, was J.D. I can’t talk to people when he’s on. So that made me want to move to Lexington and be around him. And I did that in 1979. Any time he was in town playing, I was there watching him, trying to understand it all and, you know, getting un-Yankeed a little bit by understanding that perspective. I just respected the crap out of him. I don’t think anybody has ever, or ever will, play like that again. Watching him night after night just taught me a lot about being a great musician over and over and over again.”
Bluegrass Rhapsody
So how does a bluegrass innovator make the leap from J.D. Crowe to “Rhapsody in Blue?” Well, the link is not as tenuous as one might suspect. In fact, Fleck’s fascination with the Gershwin classic predates his banjo education.
“I started listening to it when I was a kid,” Fleck said. “My uncle took me to see the movie, ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ I fell in love with the whole story and especially the music from the movie. I haven’t gone back to look at it, though. By all reports, it’s a terrible movie, but as a seven-year-old, it knocked my socks off. The piece stayed with me. This was long before I started playing the banjo.
“After I got to be a musician, I would always come back and listen to it. Then for my high school Semi-Annual, which was the last concert at school that was played, my principal called me to the office. I thought I was in big trouble. I was in the chorus at that time. He said, ‘We found a banjo part to ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ Do you want to play the banjo part and get out of chorus for the rest of the year?’ I was like, ‘Whoa. That’s quite an offer, but I think I’ll stay in chorus and do the banjo part, too.’ I couldn’t read standard notation at all. It was written for a four-string banjo and was intended to be strummed all the way through the piece. I did a terrible job with it. I don’t think I ever played anything right but it was all part of me loving this piece. I think I was also in love with the oboist, who I got to sit next to, but that’s another story.
“Then during the pandemic, I was started working on the piano part as an exercise. I just wanted to see what this was like on the banjo. I started digging around, spent a couple of weeks on a few bars, finding ways to play this and that. Eventually, I got through it. Around that time, I had a call from the head of the Nashville Symphony, Alan Valentine. I told him, ‘You’re going to think this is funny, but I’ve been working on the piano part of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and I think it’s possible to play the piano part on the banjo. And he said, ‘That’s great. We’ll put it on. We’ll open the season with it.’
“That was what took it, as Future Man (Flecktones percussionist Roy Wooten) would say, ‘Out of the abstract, into the stract.’ So suddenly, it became stract, which meant I really had to do it. It wasn’t just the thought exercise anymore.”
Fleck eventually recorded “Rhapsody in Blue” with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra for his recent recording of the same name. But the album also left room for two shorter variations of the piece. Their stylistic bent is outlined in the titles – “Rhapsody in Blue(grass)” with his My Bluegrass Heart band (fiddler Michael Cleveland, mandolinist Sierra Hull, dobroist Justin Moses, bassist Mark Schatz and guitarist Bryan Sutton) and “Rhapsody in Blue(s)” with Flecktones bassist Victor Wooten and two of Fleck’s most longstanding bluegrass pals, Sam Bush (on mandolin) and Jerry Douglas (on dobro).
“What appeared to be one of my worst ideas ever was this idea of ‘Rhapsody in Blue(grass),’ but it kept coming back. So I began to mess around with it a little bit with Bryan to see if there was anything there. When we started playing it, I asked him to kind of play it in the rhythm style of Tony Rice (the late bluegrass guitar great). All of a sudden, something just fell into place and suddenly that idea also went from the abstract to the stract. I showed it to the My Bluegrass Heart band and we managed to get it recorded.”
Remembrance of Chick
Bela Fleck with Chick Corea in 2015.
Rhapsody in Blue wasn’t the only project Fleck immersed himself in during the COVID-19 pandemic. With touring life at a standstill, he sifted through a series of banjo/piano works recorded during a 2019 tour with Corea. That prefaced a separate collection of studio compositions the two worked on from their home studios, with additions made through online files sent back and forth, throughout 2020. The resulting compositions, to be released in June as an album titled Remembrance, are among the final recordings Corea completed before his cancer-related death in February 2021.
“Playing with Sam Bush is just as important to me as playing with Edgar Meyer, is just as important as playing with Zakir Hussain, is just as important as playing with Chick Corea. They all have very important places in my heart. Chick I heard when I was 17 and it was probably the template for the Flecktones. That one show showed me everything I needed to know about what I wanted to do someday, if ever possible.
“So that was one side of it. But even before I saw him play with Return to Forever (Corea’s groundbreaking fusion band from the 1970s), I was listening to his tune ‘Spain.’ The way he played on that was proof to me that banjo could play this kind of music because there were a lot of short stabs and a lot of rhythm. He didn’t play all up and down the keyboard constantly and he didn’t play on the back of the beat. All of those things showed me a pathway that could possibly work if I worked hard enough. I don’t know if I have ever gotten there or if I ever will in terms of the way I wish I could play or the way he could play. But it sure pointed a way that has helped me make a lot of progress. So then when we got to be friends, that was one for the books.
“I mean, I love Sam Bush. I felt the same way when I first got to play with him. Then we got to be pals and we have played together for decades. But Chick Corea? That was not a realistic expectation. When that happened, I was pretty much thrilled. Then it grew into a real collaboration.”
It wasn’t until November 2020 that Fleck sensed something was wrong. After compositions were completed and approved for what would eventually become Remembrance, the usually outgoing Corea hit radio silence.
“He just fell off the map. He wasn’t responding. It was unusual because, typically, Chick would pick up all the time. He was always ready to chat. He would respond when I would send him a track. He would respond almost before I thought it had gotten to him. He was just very responsive and suddenly he wasn’t, so I was getting kind of worried about him.
“That last time I talked to him was on Christmas Day – the day Tony Rice died. He said he was dealing with a ‘human thing.’ I didn’t know what that meant. I knew that something was going on, but he wasn’t really telling me. Then the next thing I heard, he had passed. Just incredibly sad.”
Is there a banjo is the house?
Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck.
If a constant exists within Fleck’s juggling of musical performance projects, it would be his ongoing concerts with Washburn. Touching on a variety of bluegrass and folk inspirations, the banjo couple have recorded two albums together (the first, 2014’s “Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn,” won another of his Grammys). There is an obvious familial undercurrent to their performances, one that was highlighted when the two offered a 10-part online series during the height of the pandemic titled “Banjo House Lockdown.”
“Abby and I did a lot of touring over the years when our first son, Juno, was born, especially for the first five years. But then when Theo came along – he’s our second; he’s five now, Juno is 10 – we didn’t do as much. Touring was more sporadic because it’s just harder when you’ve got two kids and one’s in school. Plus, it became time for me to start going back to some of the… I don’t know what else to call it, Béla music. For those years when Juno was young, I really didn’t do as much of the outside, pushing-the boundaries stuff. I really loved playing with Abigail, but now it’s a more occasional thing. It’s such a joy, though. She’s always looking to be very be artistic and has an incredible way of connecting with an audience.
“Abby is very much a go-out-there-and-connect person. So I’m looking for ways to respond to that. I have a quirky sense of humor. It’s fairly out, sometimes. That usually doesn’t end up onstage. It’s funny because when I play with Edgar Meyer, a different sort of humor comes out. It’s a little more snarky, because he has that side. But with Abby, it’s different.
“She makes me a better person. She makes me a better musician, both in our duo and out. She’s a fabulous banjo player, but she’s always thinking about the heart and the soul and the direction and why. So with her as my muse, I’m often going into deeper emotional places, musically, than I get to in some of the other situations, which are pretty heavy.”
The couple have two recordings in the works. One is a collaboration with the Colorado Symphony, the other an album recorded as a result of “Banjo House Lockdown.”
“We did 10 episodes of ‘Banjo House Lockdown.’ Everywhere I go, I run into people who say, ‘Thank you so much for doing that. We were stuck in our houses for all that time when you guys were doing that.’ We got a lot of pleasure out of it, too. We had to learn songs each week because we ran out of our own material very quickly. We had to supplement and learn. And the kids were going crazy and we were trying to manage them while doing the show. We didn’t have any help.
“Looking back on it, it’s kind of hilarious. At the time it was happening, it was horrifying. But then we would watch it afterwards and go, ‘Hey, this actually pretty funny.’ We were all in that human moment there together.”
If you go: Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn performs at 8 p.m. April 14 at the Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short. Tickets: $39.50-$59.50 throughticketmaster.com
Pat Metheny. Photo courtesy of The Kurland Agency.
It all looked so simple from the outside.
Pat Metheny’s first Lexington concert in nearly 30 years was billed as part of his Dream Box Tour, a performance trek named after a 2023 album of quiet, multi-tracked electric guitar selections. And at the onset of Monday evening’s show at the Opera House, that indeed seemed how the music was going to pan out, only with the guitar focus more on acoustic than electric.
What the Grammy-winning Metheny eventually uncorked, however, was something far more devilish and inventive – a program where the only thing more mindblowing than the reach of the repertoire was the Jekyll & Hyde manner in which the music was brought to life.
The first half of the two-hour-plus performance was something of a career retrospective with ample narrative explanations from Metheny, an artist not usually known for plentiful between-song banter onstage, leading the way. It began with fragments of decades-old fusion pieces by the Pat Metheny Group that included “Phase Dance,” “Minuano (Six Eight)” and “This is Not America” reconfigured into a subtle medley for nylon string acoustic guitar. The lyricism was pure Metheny – bright, emotive and efficient, but with a sense of orchestration the solo setting did not betray.
Richer, is some ways, was a second medley devoted exclusively to Metheny’s 1997 duets album with the late jazz bass titan Charlie Haden, Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) – a record that won the guitarist one of his 20 Grammy Awards. Here, the acoustic sound was more open and folk-friendly – spacious enough, in fact, for us to readily imagine where Haden’s elegiac bass lines would have harmonized.
Then things got delightfully weird. Out came the monster Pikasso (yes, that’s the correct selling), a custom-built variation of a double-neck harp guitar with more strings than a spider web (well, 42, actually). With it, Metheny created a sound that was artfully crystalline.
A workout followed on the baritone guitar, an instrument with a wide and, as the name suggests, bass-welcoming sound. With that, Metheny downshifted into an elegant medley of non-original works from 2011’s What’s It All About (another Grammy winner) that curiously focused on hits popularized by female artists (Dionne Warwick, Karen Carpenter, Carly Simon and Astrud Giberto) before winding its way through an update of one of Metheny’s most popular original works, “Last Train Home.” The latter reading was less rhythmically anchored and more atmospherically inclined than the blueprint version the guitarist cut in 1987.
After Metheny eased through tunes on one of his signature instruments, a hollow-body six-string electric guitar, a backstage curtain opened to reveal a pared down version of the orchestrion. The elaborate mutant device (spotlighted on a pair of Metheny albums released in 2010 and 2013) is essentially the modern music instrument equivalent of a Rube Goldberg cartoon – an unmanned percussion arsenal containing bits of bells, cymbals, marimbas, drums and more manipulated by solenoids, pneumatics and God knows what else. It was like watching a ghost orchestra – harmonically rich to the ear yet utterly baffling in how it all worked as you watched it.
The whole improbable affair wound down with two of its most gorgeous entries, each representing the deepest extremes of the concert. Both were presented as encores.
The first reached back to Metheny’s first true solo (as in unaccompanied) album, 1978’s New Chautauqua, for “Sueño con Mexico.” This version had Metheny creating a live loop of a melancholic acoustic melody that repeated like a gentle mantra under equally bittersweet electric soloing and more reserved chatter from the orchestrion.
The second ended the evening on the same unadorned acoustic terrain from which it lifted off by way of a contemplative rewiring of “Wichita Lineman” that was as grounded and stately as the orchestration exhibition was otherworldly. But the music was equally inventive with a lone melody line that proved captivating even in the most deceptively simple of displays. In short, Metheny the lineman was still very much on the line.
Pat Metheny. Photo courtesy of The Kurland Agency.
One might suspect when listening to his newest album, Dream Box, that Pat Metheny subscribes to the familiar axiom of doing something yourself when you want it done correctly.
That especially holds true for the immediate impressions the record creates. It summons a profound but subtle glow unique to the electric guitar when its pace and volume are slowed and the only accompanists are multi-tracked melodies of an additional guitar line. In short, it’s a quiet venture where Metheny is the only participant.
But such a distinctive solo setting, which brings Metheny back to Lexington for his first concert here in over three decades, is but a chapter in a 50 year recording career that has thrived in collaborative settings, whether it was through his famed ensemble fusion work with the Pat Metheny Group, a cinematic collaboration with David Bowie (1985’s “This is Not America”) or supporting, as well as bandleading, roles involving artists from almost every stylistic corner of the jazz world.
Such lasting and far-reaching visibility has had its rewards – namely 20 Grammy Awards in 10 categories spanning 44 years. If you think that is dizzying, look at Metheny’s touring schedule. No sooner did an extensive international trio tour to promote his 2021 album Side-Eye wind down than an equally long-running trek of solo concerts to back up Dream Box began. On top of that, Metheny used a brief break from the road to cut an even newer album – a very different solo guitar record to be titled MoonDial – due out this summer.
All this from a guy who is going to turn 70 in August.
“The challenge is always that I have way more ideas and projects and things I want to do then I have time,” Metheny said. “It takes me a long time to fully develop ideas, to write the music for a particular project and then to come up with exactly the right people for a band and all of the other million things that you have to do in order to make something be a viable way of spending a year or two of your life as a bandleader.”
Band on the one
The key word here is “bandleader” – whether it was through the modern slant of his work in the Pat Metheny Group or the more traditionally leaning music of trios and quartets from more recent decades that have born his name, Metheny has been the man in charge. A project like “Dream Box” isn’t that different. Metheny is still the leader. It’s just that his band is smaller.
“Really, most everything I have done in my life as a musician has been under the banner of ‘bandleader,’ but a bandleader who also is the person who is going to write the music. My main job has been finding musicians that were qualified and capable to achieve the results I need for whatever music I happen to be writing or conceiving at a particular time and then doing records and touring that reflects that period.
“And in a lot of ways, this tour is similar. It’s just that in this case, I am the bandleader of a band where I am the only one in it.”
“Dream Box” differs considerably, however, in both design and intent from such previous Metheny solo records as 2003’s One Quiet Night and 2011’s What’s It All About. The former was recorded quickly on a single baritone acoustic guitar while the latter employs a more expansive acoustic vocabulary on a collection of exclusively non-original compositions. Both albums won Grammys.
Dream Box was, in contrast, a happy accident. It was constructed from forgotten files of solo electric guitar works played with quiet delicacy that regularly overlaid multiple melodies for a beautifully subtle sense of harmony. The record earned Metheny his 49th Grammy nomination.
“Dream Box is unlike anything else I have ever done, especially because I had no idea I was even doing anything when I did it. In truth, I don’t remember exactly when I recorded this music. That alone makes it unique in the wide range of things that I’ve done across the years. I discovered a folder on my computer where I kept odds and ends things and just found myself listening to those nine tracks over and over again. It occurred to me that maybe other people might like to hear them, too. As it turns out, I guess they did, which is really cool.
“It is a very different kind of a presentation in terms of the instrumentation and sound of the record. The whole thing of doing two parts like that is something that I first did on Bright Size Life (Metheny’s 1976 debut album) many years ago on the track ‘Unity Village.’At that time, it was kind of exotic to do something like that where you would overdub on top of yourself. Now, you can go on any street corner anywhere in the world and there are musicians with looper pedals doing essentially the same thing.”
The road to you
Luckily for Metheny, the ongoing and still-plentiful joys of live concerts outweigh the rigors – travelling, especially – that come with the touring life of a working musician. Though the repertoire, the performance and, to a degree, the audiences continually change, the core elements of the music, along with Metheny’s relationship to them, do not waver.
“One thing that is great about being a musician is that music, in its purest form, is impervious to all of the random ups and downs of the culture. By that I mean that the B-flat that I’m playing today is the same B-flat that existed a million years ago and will exist a million years from now. I feel so lucky to be dealing in a currency that is fundamentally true like that.
“The audiences are very different from night to night. Even if you play in the same city three nights in a row, it’s going be a totally different feeling each of those three nights. My relationship to the audience is something separate from my relationship to music itself in the sense that I hope everybody likes it. I will do my best to play well and to make sure we do a sound check, to take a shower before the concert and be as ready as I can be to present myself on the bandstand. But once the music starts, it’s kind of between me and it. And I really only answer to that.
“I don’t mean to say that in a snotty kind of way, but my sense across doing this for many years is that as long as I can respond to the music in a really honest and deep way, usually that is the quality that has gotten me to the point where I can play a lot of concerts for people and people will continue to come and check them out. It seems like that mandate is the core element in it all that has been the foundation of my whole thing along the way.”
Pat Metheny Dream Box Tour performs at 8 p.m. April 1 at the Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short. Tickets: $49.50-$118.50 throughticketmaster.com.
ZZ Top in performance Thursday night at Rupp Arena. From left, Elwood Francis, Frank Beard and Billy F. Gibbons. Photo by Mark Cornelison.
“My friend, your friend.”
That was the simple but effective introduction ZZ Top chieftain Billy F. Gibbons gave his new right-hand stage mate, bassist and Lexingtonian Elwood Francis, Thursday evening at Rupp Arena. Long associated with its native Texas and all of the dirty borderline blues and boogie that emanates from it, ZZ Top called on Kentucky in 2021 and by enlisting longtime guitar-tech Francis to fill the unexpected vacancy left by the death of bassist Dusty Hill.
Thursday was Francis’ first hometown outing with the realigned ZZ lineup and guitarist Gibbons was out to make a show of it. He led the Rupp crowd in a chant of “El-wood” to honor the occasion after the band wound its way through a playful “Gimme All Your Lovin’.”
Francis, however, seemed to almost shy away from such attention. Onstage, he was all business, dropping huge bass bombs to punctuate Gibbons’ wonderfully rustic slide guitar runs during “Just Got Paid” and offering his own variation of the deep pocket grooves Hill employed to drive “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide.” Francis’ lone indulgence: a set-opening (and eye-popping) workout with a monstrous 17-string bass guitar during “Got Me Under Pressure.”
Add in modest but playful choreography with Gibbons to up the hip factor during an encore version of “Tubesnake Boogie” and this subtle injection of Lexington grit wound up nicely complimenting a brand of Lone Star rock ‘n’ soul that still sounds scholarly after 50+ years.
Homecoming or no homecoming, though, ZZ Top remains a ship helmed by Gibbons. An extraordinarily versed guitarist in the ways of roots music, especially when they wind through the deep South, he is also a refreshingly tasteful performer. He utilized solos – like the ones that percolated through the familiar Tres Hombres medley of “Waitin’ for the Bus” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago” – to ignite blues-based outlines without undue flash or fanfare. And, of course, with his chest length beard, shades and Nudie jacket (Francis was decked out in identical duds), Gibbons looked every bit as hip and his guitar work sounded.
Francis wasn’t the only Kentucky force at work during the set. The highlight of ZZ Top’s hour-long performance was a nod to the great Rosewood country classicist Merle Travis by way perhaps his most cherished song, “Sixteen Tons.” That Gibbons chose to play it on a guitar formerly owned by the late Jeff Beck (a recording of the two playing the tune together is featured on the 2016 ZZ Top compilation album Live! Greatest Hits from Around the World) illuminated both the folk-country tradition within the song as well as a equally deep-rooted wildness that comes alive in performance.
The Kentucky connections didn’t stop there. The show-opening Black Stone Cherry, a band born in Edmonton with direct family ties to the Kentucky Headhunters, pulled from the perspective of an entirely different generation in a raucous and powerfully energetic 30-minute set.
The quartet operated less from the blues and more from a source of harder rock vigor that owed modestly to metal. But it was the boundless, go-for-broke cheer and almost manic instrumental exactness within “Me and Mary Jane” and “Blame It on the Boom Boom” that made this brief set so involving.
Johnny Van Zant and Michael Cartellone performing with Lynyrd Skynyrd at Rupp Arena on Thursday evening. Photo by Mark Cornelison.
The concert program was essentially a double-headline affair with Lynyrd Skynyrd, the longstanding Southern rock band that closed the evening
This current Skynyrd was a curious beast. It came loaded with firepower – namely a three-man guitar front line led by Rickey Medlocke, a good natured lead vocalist in Johnny Van Zant and an ace-in-the-hole pianist with a P-Funk background and the chops and looks of Dr. John, Peter Keys, who hails from the great Southern metropolis of Burlington, Vermont.
But given that none of the current members were in the Skynyrd lineups that cut the band’s career defining ’70s records, the sense of watching a tribute band at work was unavoidable.
Skynyrd classics like “Saturday Night Special” and “That Smell” rolled with an impressively dark command, but the feeling vanished completely when comparatively newer works like “Skynyrd Nation” were served up. The latter tune reflected the odd sense of distance this closing 90-minute set created. Where ZZ Top let its heritage glow through the music itself, the current Skynyrd crew was more presentational. It came off like it was selling a product. If the appeal of an artist’s music is truly enduring after a half century on the road, an audience will pick up on it. So why such a sales pitch?
Lexingtonian Elwood Francis playing the 17-string bass with ZZ Top at Rupp Arena on Thursday. Photo by Mark Cornelison.
The realigned ZZ Top. From left: Elwood Francis, Frank Beard and Billy F. Gibbons. Photo by Blain Clausen.
For decades – five and change, to be exact – ZZ Top was the self-proclaimed “Little Ol’ Band from Texas,” a trio of Lone Star blues and boogie misfits with an M.O. that Billy F. Gibbons, the band’s guitar-slinging chieftain, proudly recited during concerts – “Same three guys, same three chords.”
Until it wasn’t. When Gibbons, bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard – ZZ Top’s lineup since 1969 – returned to the road after a COVID 19-dictated hiatus, all was not well. Hill left the tour following a July 18, 2021 concert in Louisville with what was reported as a hip injury. To stay in motion, the Texas trio went in for a Kentucky tune-up. Enter Hazard native and longtime Lexingtonian Elwood Francis. Actually, Francis was already there, having served as the band’s guitar tech for the past 30 years. He knew the workings of the band, knew its music and with a past rooted as much in Bluegrass-brewed punk rock as Texas blues, he knew his way around a stage. Shoot, he even had a beard, a seeming prerequisite for front line duty in ZZ Top.
“When Dusty got sick, I was thrown into it,” Francis said. “But I was just covering for Dusty. For the first couple of gigs, I was so nervous it was ridiculous. I didn’t have time to think about it. It was just, ‘Get it done.’ But it was me helping out, you know? I was like, ‘Sure, man. I can do this. I can help you.’ And then Dusty passed. And then it was different.”
Ten days later, Hill died. Suddenly, what was to have been a substitute role in a longstanding band famous for its camaraderie and consistency, took an unexpectedly permanent turn. In short, ZZ Top’s Texas-meets-Kentucky connection was now cemented.
“It was really weird,” Francis said. “It still freaks me out some, because I do think of ZZ Top as ‘those three guys.’ I mean, this is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band spanning over 50 years. To be the person to come in and be the only personnel change… and not only that, to be picked to be that guy… that still blows me away.
“There was no audition or anything. It was, ‘Can you do this?’ In fact, that’s exactly how they put it to me when everything happened. It was, ‘Tell me that you cannot play Dusty’s parts.’ I was like, ‘Well, I can’t say that. I can probably play them.’ Then it was, ‘Okay then. We’re going to do it.’ I’m like, ‘Oh-kay. I guess we are.’ And we did.”
Punked in Lexington
Francis moved with his family from Hazard to Lexington when he was six. Following graduation from Henry Clay High School, he became immersed in the city’s fertile punk and post-punk scene, although much of his musical education came from diving into his mother’s record collection.
“In my mom’s records were Elvis and Bo Diddley. We even listened to Bobby Vinton. We would listen to all of that stuff. But then I got into Frank Zappa at a young age and I’m still right there. I’m still very huge into Zappa. And the whole punk rock movement, that was good for my age, because it broke when I was 15. I was already playing guitar but I wasn’t even thinking about playing in a band, ever, until I heard punk rock.”
And, yes, among the sounds he absorbed in his youth was ZZ Top, whose early ‘70s albums (“Rio Grande Mud,” the breakthrough “Tres Hombres” and “Fandango”) defined a Texas trio brand of Southern soaked rock, soul and blues. By the time he and friends from the sound and lighting company Showco attended a ZZ Top performance at Rupp Arena in February 1991, the band was still relishing in a ‘80s-era renaissance aided by a series of synth-charged singles (“Legs,” “Sharp Dressed Man”) and accompanying music videos where the matching chest-length beards of Gibbons and Hill served as some of the most distinctive fashion accessories of the MTV-era.
“I knew those guys from Showco when I broke into the business,” Francis recalled. “Not long after that, I was told Billy was looking for a guitar tech. He had had the same guitar tech his entire career, so I was the second guy. When I came in, ZZ Top had already been a band for 17 years and I was replacing the only tech they ever had, so I was freaking out. But Billy just called me up, asked a few questions. Didn’t talk about guitars too much. Talked about my accent. He really liked my accent. Talked about Kentucky and said, ‘Well, can you come down here and meet us?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. Sure.’ And I went down there (to Houston) three days later and I never really left.
“It was strange at first because they’re larger than life characters. Absolutely larger than life. And from a guitarist standpoint, my gosh, man, I’d go down there, and Billy’s got the best guitars in the world and some of the craziest custom guitars. It was like, ‘How could you not have a good time?’ We just clicked, you know? I understood he does things differently than other people, so I just learned his way of doing it and we don’t really venture from that. There is a process, but we don’t even talk about it at this point. It’s non-verbal. We know what we have to do and we do it.”
Bringing it all back home
Now comes the homecoming. Not only will ZZ Top’s March 28 concert at Rupp Arena with Lynyrd Skynyrd be Francis’ first Lexington show since going from backstage tech to onstage bassist, it will serve as the trio’s first local performance since the 1991 concert its newest member attended as a patron. ZZ Top has played almost every imaginable regional locale over the last decade or so, but it hasn’t hit Lexington in over 33 years (Gibbons, however, performed with a side-project band at the Opera House in 2016).
“I will be a bundle of nerves,” Francis said of the upcoming Rupp outing. “But I’m still a nervous wreck most of the time. When I stop and think about it, I’m like, ‘Man, I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ It still hits me. It still feels new. But I still miss Dusty.
“These hometown gigs are rough. They’re really rough, but I’m excited for my kids. This is probably more exciting for them than it is for me. It will be pretty wild.”
Citing how the performance at hand was being recorded, Leo Genovese encouraged the Sunday night audience gathered at Transylvania University’s Mitchell Fine Arts Center to add “a note of madness” to the music being preserved.
While one would be hard pressed to say the crowd answered with any threatening level of hysterics, its response to the Grammy-winning Argentine pianist, making his third Lexington appearance in just over a year, was enthusiastic enough to further what was already a healthy bond between the artist and our fair city.
Leo Genovese, Francesco Marcocci and Jeff Williams at the conclusion on their Sunday performance at the Mitchell Fine Arts Center. Photo by Walter Tunis.
Then again, Genovese had plenty of mad notes of his own to make use of during the 90-minute trio performance with bassist Francesco Marcocci and drummer Jeff Williams. One of the most fascinating examples came at the program’s onset when the pianist briefly shed the Argentine inspirations that so rapturously inform his playing to jump head first into pure Americana.
The show opening “Wayfaring Stranger” began as an exhibition of Bill Evans-inspired grace but quickly blew up into a more open-ended blues where the tune’s central melody sounded less like the Western elegy so many artists have interpreted (Genovese told the crowd he learned the tune from a Johnny Cash record) and more like the sweaty, soulful chorus of Gershwin’s “Summertime.”
There were still plenty of voyages to more exotic ports, though, as in “Caminito,” a nearly century-old tango from Genovese’s native Argentina. Here a similar sense of lyrical grace and introspection prefaced a sense of ensemble mischief led by a series of playful jabs from the pianist that punctured the tune enough for it to breath with an almost respiratory rhythm.
Along those lines, a Moroccan inspired melody where Genovese played melodica with his left hand and piano with his right served as an intro to the more tranquil trio exchanges within “Song for Healing.”
In one extreme, Genovese’s playing throughout the performance favored subtlety by either relaxing a tune’s central melody or deconstructing it altogether. But when Marcocci and Williams were in full gear, the pianist responded with solos where every open space was utilized. Melodic fragments would gather and, more often than not, bottleneck until they would erupt into fascinating outbursts. When such parallels were presented, as in the way churchy meditations led into trio frenzy during the premiere of a new Genovese piece titled “Gospel for the Children,” the resulting music became almost episodic in construction.
Special notice needs to be given to the onstage chemistry between Genovese and Williams, a drummer whose career stems back to early ‘70s records with Stan Getz, Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach. There is a near 30-year age gap between Genovese and Williams, yet the drummer followed and then complimented the pianist’s moves with a very natural agility. If Genovese was off on a groove, Williams hammered at the music’s heels. But if the piano runs were more open ended, Williams offered all kinds of colors to enhance what was unfolding. A beautiful case in point: Williams’ manner of guiding “Song for Healing” to a gentle landing with a tap from the hand-held side of a brush against the center of a cymbal.
Genovese ended the evening with “Play Cold,” a tune very much in keeping with its title. The music flipped a melody from an unspecified Coldplay tune Genovese said he has never heard a recording of, turning it first into in a contemplative reverie and then into a trio romp made up equally of delicacy and dynamics. It was a finale that was, you might say, well played.
Karl Wallinger, circa 1993. Photo by Lorenzo Agius.
During the home stretch of “When the Rainbow Comes,” a delicacy from World Party’s 1990 sophomore album, Goodbye Jumbo, Karl Wallinger reaches for one of the many shards of pop tradition that serve as the DNA for his extraordinary songs. In this case, it’s the 1961 Marvellettes tune “Please Mr. Postman,” the first No. 1 single for the Motown label. But Wallinger is no revivalist. In this case, he takes a muse from another era, stands it against what was then a far more modern wall and dresses it with a very different sentiment. Hence, a revised lyric of teen innocence is retooled as a refrain for a World Party tune that reflects a more discordant world.
Mr. Postman, look and see If there’s a message in your bag for me Could be a bomb or it could be a letter It don’t matter, it can only get better
Such was the way of the Welsh-born song stylist and World Party founder/chieftain who died Monday at the age of 66. Wallinger was one of pop’s great unsung assimilators. The influences he mined weren’t always as obvious and dramatic as the one just cited, but they were vast. His sense of songcraft and melody owed greatly to The Beatles and, to a lesser extent, Brian Wilson. In one of his finest pop creations, a blast of sunshiny faith called “Put the Message in the Box” (also from Goodbye Jumbo), Wallinger mashes his tune with the wordless back-up chorus that propelled the Rolling Stones classic “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Wallinger’s methodology, though, was more a product of the times, borrowing greatly from Prince’s one-man-band DIY aesthetic and sometimes even the latter’s ’80s-era sense of pop-soul groove. Lyrically, Wallinger was all over the rock ‘n’ roll road, embracing a storytelling stance that was topical without succumbing to politics and spiritual without any conventional slant on religion.
There was a Celtic spirit that surfaced at times, too, as on yet another Goodbye Jumbo gem, “Sweet Soul Dream,” a waltz that Van Morrison would have been proud to call his own.
World Party was always Wallinger’s ship to command. After departing The Waterboys following the release of their epic 1985 album This is the Sea, he fashioned music largely on his own. When “Ship of Fools” hit the U.S. Top 30 in 1987, World Party was poised for stardom. That never fully arrived, perhaps the result of an erratic recording history that produced only five studio albums, the last being 2000’s Dumbing Up, and a revolving door lineup for touring.
That translated into disappointment for fans, as well. World Party’s fourth album, “Egyptology,” was as masterfully rich in its fabric of pop smarts as any record Wallinger made, but it sold poorly. World Party would never regain commercial momentum.
Then things got very dark. His manager died, his record label crashed and in 2001, Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm that shutdown any ability to work as a touring musician for five years.
“The doctors were saying some wild things for a while,” Wallinger told in me in an interview prior to his last regional concert, an August 2006 performance in Newport. “They were going, ‘Have you got a bed in the living room? Can you be wheeled to the toilet in a chair?” Actually, it didn’t turn out that badly.”
World Party has been dormant for much of the past decade, despite the occasional rumors of possible reactivation. Sadly, such an absence allows World Party to fade from the memories of many pop fans. But there are still five albums – all great, two of them (Goodbye Jumbo and Egyptology) classic – to fall back on. All stand as the towering creations of a master pop assimilator.
“I’ve tried to use the language of pop in a pretty straight-ahead, almost iconographic way,” Wallinger told me in a separate interview following the release of Egyptology. “That was the idea, to use a kind of business vernacular we can all understand.”
The Musical Box 