| |
|
|
Derek Trucks’s Soul Serenade, Robert Randolph’s Unclassified
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
|
|
|
|
|
The electric guitar is capable of all kinds of expression. Notes can be drawn from throughout its multiple-octave range. A wide palette of tones can be wrought from different combinations of wood, pick-ups, and amplifiers. Strings can be bent and bashed and up-plucked and down-stroked. And the instrument’s dynamic turf is an almost unlimited equation of human touch and electrical power, with all sorts of plug-ins from distortion pedals to speaker emulators available along the way. So why the hell is most roots-music guitar playing so predictable? It’s not as if every country, blues, and folk guitarist hadn’t heard of Jimi Hendrix, or for that matter Buddy Guy, Preston Reed, and Junior Brown. Haven’t enough F-to-E chord changes been strummed to evoke the Southwest? Is the number of plain vanilla pentatonic scales already aimed at the heart of the blues not yet sufficient? Don’t earnest coffeehouse singers ever pine for a dissonant chord to punctuate a crackling turn in their lyrics? Fortunately, there’s a group of new roots-based guitar players emerging to show how it can be done. Among them are Otis Taylor, whose fusion of psychedelia, Appalachian music, and pure African strings I’ve already chronicled plenty in these pages. There’s also slide player Derek Trucks and steel-guitarist Robert Randolph, two of the youngest members of the inventive inner circle of roots guitar. Both have exciting new albums that tap different sides of musicianship. The more cerebral Trucks, who’s 24, has license to play wailing blues rock as the youngest member of the Allman Brothers (his drummer uncle Butch is one of that enduring band’s founders); he makes recordings with his own Derek Trucks Band that cater to his more complicated muse. Save for " Sierra Leone, " on which he plays guitar and sarod, the new Soul Serenade (Columbia) steps away from the singular fusion of Indian raga music and microtonal Middle Eastern scales with blues and rock slide guitar that’s so far been his calling card. Instead it relies on his buttery, voice-like tone and compositional instincts to produce beauty and drama. When Trucks runs through a series of Coltrane-like harmonic leaps or drives home the end of a phrase with skronking repetition, it’s obvious that the " Elvin " he’s paying homage in the tune with that title is Mr. Jones. But already he’s developed his own language. That’s especially apparent on the climbing and descending scales of " Oriental Folk Song, " where he blends rising tones — played on his conventional six-string with the sure hand and even sound of a steel-guitarist — with squalling obbligato bombs. The closest thing to his command of six-string slide might be a reincarnation of Duane Allman and the late jazz-guitarist Sonny Sharrock. Trucks, who’s married to ex-Bostonian blues singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi and appears on her latest album, Wait for Me (Tone-Cool), walks the line between contemplation and fiery gut instinct on Soul Serenade. A guest turn from Gregg Allman, applying his gloriously rusted voice to Ray Charles’s " Drown in My Own Tears, " ups the rawness. The combustible pedal-steel wizard Randolph, on the other hand, is almost all energy. Compositional grace takes a back seat in his recordings and live shows, elbowed aside by his desire to burn on chorus after chorus, or to churn up fat funky grooves that lend themselves to wah-wah pedal yelps. Every time he solos or stretches out on an instrumental like " Run for Your Life, " which closes his new Unclassified (Warner Bros.), Randolph seems to be flying by the seat of his pants. That’s made him more popular with jam-band audiences than with blues fans. What’s uncanny is that his instincts as a player rarely fail him, and they’ve gotten even sharper as he’s continued to wean himself from the Stevie Wonder tunes and other covers that were the staples of his first secular gigs, just three years ago. Now 25, Randolph emerged from a Pentecostal church in New Jersey where a distinctive brand of steel-guitar-driven gospel music has been a staple since the 1930s. It’s there that he developed an uncanny ability to bend notes rivaling that of most Western-world vocalists. Nonetheless, his fat-toned playing on Unclassified sounds distinctly American, blending the crying tones of country steel players with the kind of heart-spearing volume swells that Roy Buchanan patented and the blues-rock pyrotechnics of his six-string idol, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Both live and on Unclassified, his first studio recording, Randolph runs wild in a way that’s easy to listen to. He’s an astoundingly inventive, unpredictable player, as likely to weave an elaborate melody as to spit out dots and dashes of sonic Morse code connected only by the adrenalized support of his Family Band. Randolph falls short only as songwriter, in the simple rhymes and unimaginative homilies of his lyrics. But he and Trucks both stand as pillars of musical inspiration, opening doors that invite other roots guitarists to plunge ahead as well.
|
