Gordon Stone
From:
Vermont, USA
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Posted 6 Mar 2010 12:51 pm |
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Night Shade – Gordon Stone Reviewed by Brian Robbins for Jambands.com
2009-08-17
Jeezum Crow Music
Pedal steel magician/banjo djinn Gordon Stone uses the title track of his new Night Shade album to pick up where he left off on 2005’s Rhymes With Orange. Where Rhymes … closed with a majestic and almost eerie-sounding “Night Shade” (Stone’s pedal steel at times sounding like Lon Chaney on the pipe organ at 3 AM), the new album takes that same theme, gives it a neck rub, straps a booster rocket to its backside, slaps it on the butt, and fires it off into outer space.
That’s right: just as you’re lulled into submission to the slow sway of the opening melody – WHAM! – things take off on a romp that sounds like a jacked-up version of the Doors’ “L.A. Woman” until the drums get all crazy/funky. The beat crunches to halt and a B-3 bellows its guts out (Page McConnell!) – there’s another blast of drum funk and then the pedal wails in response – more drums/more B-3/more pedal … and things spiral and tumble as the rhythm section slides back underneath the whole works and takes off down the highway once again. Before you know it, you’re back where you started, a little sweaty and disheveled, but grinning like an idiot.
It’s that kind of album.
Stone has always pushed the limits of his main musical weapons, taking the pedal steel and banjo to places no mere humans normally tread. On Night Shade, however, he pushes things further (Furthur?) than ever, lashing world rhythms and out-of-this-world melodic ideas together.
Here we have a circle of Senegalese drummers laying down a driving beat as the pedal steel leads the crazy dance around the fire (“Snakehouse”); here (“Champ’s Reel”) we have what can only be referred to as Celtic banjo veering off into jazzy places up under the rafters; over here the steel chants and cries over a bed of moonlit percussion (“Kaki Lambe”); and here we have – what’s this? A lost Stones track with Ronnie Wood on pedal steel? (“Stone’s Throw”.) Naw – that’s ol’ Gordon again; you’ll know it for sure when the music drops away to handclaps and cowbell and instead of Mick Jagger growling/slurring something like “Come on, bay-bay … gimmee summa that – oh, yeah!”, we have … a dog barking. Yep – Champ the dog lays it down right in the groove just before the band comes crunching back in and Erik Lawrence tears into a sax break that sounds like Bobby Keys in his prime. (Elsewhere, Lawrence – who’s doing great things these days with Levon Helm’s band - is absolutely brilliant on a cover of Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t” as he weaves, bobs, and ducks around handfuls of pedal and banjo Stone throws his way.)
That’s the deal with Night Shade: the musical brilliance of Stone, his band, and his guests will make you shake your head and rewind the tracks in an effort to figure out “How’d we get here?” At the same time, a thread of quirky humor is woven throughout the album – which is good, because Gordon Stone’s so talented he’d be scary if he wasn’t so funny.
Defying the laws of musical categorization and gravity will do that to you every time.
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Gordon Stone
www.gordonstone.com |
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