Steve Gunn / Jeff Parker (East Coast) solo & together :: post-guitar music for guitar nerds

Bump. I'll probably just use this ticket if no one takes it. Two of the most individual artists working with guitars in this day and age.

Tortoise (Jeff Parker's full-time band, outside of his jazz work) scoring the B&W arthouse short La Jetee a couple years back
https://youtu.be/xDeZsGYyo08

Steve Gunn interviewed by this zine I used to write for
https://bostonhassle.com/steve-gunns-higher-calling-in-other-you/

Hey, Knotesau! Was psyched to see they just announced West Coast dates, show in Los Angeles will have Steve Gunn band as the backing band for the whole evening and feature "Special Guests."

This is almost as exciting as Berry Sless backing Bob Weir and Don Was!

A review? Sure, here's my review: if these two masters of their craft are performing their art at a location that is within an objectively reasonable distance to travel in order to engage with their art, and you are interested in art that is carried through the medium of sound, then you should go check this lineup out.

There wasn't any common time, boogie/shuffle, dance-band style music in the conventional sense. A few of Steve's songs from his most recent album (Other You), as well as the prior LP (The Unseen In Between) straddle the territory of breezy, folksy "Americana," but, that's going to be about as close to the NPR-friendly acoustic music which he's been miscast as being adjacent to, as you're gonna get. The dream-pop / shoegaze style mined for a lot of the Other You material is explored here, with more emphasis on the ornate, open-chord fingerpicking that probably more fairly described Steve Gunn's stock-in-trade, than is depicted on the album (which represents a sort of a slight-left-turn for him, stylistically); still, lots of processing through strange filters, processing pedals, and perhaps even some kind of synth effect. Space is the theme here; "Good Wind," as the song title intimates. Two songs that have been a part of this guy's songbook for the better part of a decade now buttressed the end of the set ("Wildwood"; Way Out Weather"), but played searchingly and in-the-moment, as also has been Gunn's ethereal trademark for some time now.

Jeff Parker operates on a really singular level, so much so that I honestly don't have the vocabulary to try and relate the nature of his set. Most of the tunes were from his very recently released Forfolks LP (co-released by International Anthem and Nonesuch Records, the latter of which finally makes Jeff a labelmate of another improvisatory-heavy guitarist mining a very similar vein, Bill Frisell), though the set moved through standards (Thelonious Monk's "Ugly Beauty") and moments of freely-associated melodies and loops. I suppose you could say "ambient" is one of the values thoroughly influencing Parker's solo-guitar sound, but that is like saying "ambient" is an influence on Byrne/Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and there is a lot more at play here than pleasant background music, there are: sirens; music concrete; Bern Nix (and Ornette, and Monk, and Duke...); the sound of a city truck backing up a street in the twilight morning; industrial decay. If this is the nature of the songs on Forfolks (and I believe it is), then Jeff relayed a sonic image with the skill and grace of a masterful painter.

There is a term coming back around for the type of music that I think this is, something beyond choogling rock music (there will be time for that, too, in New York City and in Los Angeles, when a full band is incorporated; certainly the sonic exploration that happens there will be well-deserving of the promotional moniker "An Evening With," as these shows are being billed), and that is "Deep Listening." Pauline Oliveros coined the term, I think, in the 1980s to describe a kind of music beyond post-classical, incorporating elements of minimalism, avant-garde, even easy listening (I'm sure). I think it's a broad enough term to be applied in a variety of settings, and I think this concert very much consistuted an evening of Deep Listening. My ears are satiated, and yet I am hungry and eager to see them perform again tonite.

Just as an aside, two highlights that I have to mention. One is that, as I surmised, Jeff Parker and Steve Gunn played a very short set of collaborative music, in between Jeff's set and Steve's set. I am sure there is some foundational outline to the nature of these sets, but to me their playing in that moment was top-tier pure improv, mixing up all those elements above. Bliss. Beyond rhythmic in its non-meter; delicate and wild and skillful. And raucous.

The other was a tune that Steve played towards the end of his set. I'm not a sucker for the melancholy, but Michael Chapman was a wonderful British singer-songwriter, a guitarist's guitarist and a musician's musician, and he died this past year; Gunn had the fortune to play on as well as produce one or two of Mr. Chapman's most recent LPs (the octogenerian was creating music right up until this past year) and, even more fortunate for him, had the chance to call that guy his friend. He played a song of his called "Among The Trees." Wonderful tune.

There's no clean summary paragraph here. I started writing about the magical, orderly and yet wild nature of the world and how perfectly these guys expressed it, how perfectly expressed it is in a timeless song like Chapman's, how that ancient yet prescient act of expression and art and gathering together to tell stories with whatever medium it is that is chosen, is something you just have got to feel, or see, or hear, in order to reconnect with, but that's moot. You just have to hear it expressed. You've just got to... go to the show.

I mean, I certainly will be doing that tonite. Gotta get that Jeff Parker record. Gotta reemerge, reconnect, and hear that wild sound just one more time.

Just a little bit of... art.
That's all I ask.

Enhanced and expanded... like in sonic widescreen. We even sat in the back, just to take it all in. It was all enhanced and expanded. The second nite (for me), Jeff Parker played a different set altogether, pulling from different standards... a cover of a song by Frank Ocean.. and yes, unique and intricate layering of looped guitar melodies, and in one instance a bit of ambient sound recorded ostensibly in Jeff's hometown of L.A. (actually he's from Chicago, but you'd never know it from the prerecorded track, especially since the way he interacted with the concrete sounds of the city, etc., evoked an entirely new sonic landscape the second nite). And hearing him and Steve Gunn do the jam impromptu had heady moments that similarly went to places totally unvisited in the previous nights jam. In fact, at the last tour stop (Ardmore, PA?) they were joined by Chicago Underground drummer Chad Taylor (Jeff's old buddy) and apparently really got down. There's some video evidence out there on the twitters worth checking out. Steve's set in western MA was 100% fire, even being the same set of songs. The way he uses the song as a framework for his sonic inventions - through use of feedback, looping/layering, open-chord tunings and remarkable fingerpicking - is truly a style of his own, and I could to him do the same eight or nine songs for ten nights in a row. The guy is just that good. Finally, both nights of my little mini-tour with this lineup there were seated sections before the stage at both venues, but plenty of room at the perimeter to wander and skulk about (which is what I did at the former show, while sitting respectfully and quietly for the latter of the two).. and the vibe was super chill, probably owing to that nice NPR-friendly dynamic. At the end of the day, if you can handle listening to 50-60 mins. worth of beautiful music without getting too distracted by a screen or mumbling in your neighbors ear, you'll be rewarded with some wonderfully transcendent, rich music.. a much-needed balm to cool the climate of vitriol and disconnect so deftly perpetrated on us as a society. 

TL;DR - Yes, of course, these guys are using electric (well, acoustic/electric in Steve's case) guitars, thru amps and pedals and pickups .. Jeff in particular isnt too shy to use a track of musique concrete to fiddle along to, and Steve was doing some straight up Hendrix-inspired feedback ambience... on an acoustic!? 

This is something I can't quite elucidate in script.. that overused Zappa cliche on writing about music... You just have to

Gtts!