Luke Winslow-King - Old/New Baby / Recorded Live At Tweed Recording EP
Album: Old/New Baby
Size: 81,7 MB
Time: 34:33
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Released: 2009
Styles: Ragtime, Blues Jazz, Folk Blues, Americana
Label: Fox On A Hill Productions
Art: Front
01. As April Is To May (2:12)
02. Shoeshine (2:07)
03. Never Tired (2:49)
04. Below (1:07)
05. All The Same (2:29)
06. I'll See You When I Look At You (2:13)
07. Birthday Stomp (2:45)
08. Dragon Fly, Dragon Flower (3:06)
09. Bird Dog Blues (2:26)
10. Lost Soul (1:40)
11. Airplane (1:44)
12. The Sun Slamming The Highway (2:49)
13. St. Andrew's Ferry (1:41)
14. Searchlight Waltz (2:57)
15. Your Eyes, Your Eyes (2:23)
If your mind was caught up and mesmerized by the dancing pink elephants from Disney's Fantasia and the music that accompanied that mesmer, or your heart has a tendency towards the vaudevillian aspects of early American folk music, then have I got an album for you. Luke Winslow-King is an obviously talented lad who lends his hand to churning out tunes with a seemingly colorful history behind them. On his latest record Old/New Baby Winslow-King shows off his vocal abilities to great effect, all the while buoying the melodies with brilliant and classic instrumentation. The album starts off with a jazzy, hungover ditty called "As April Is To May" that recalls the great history of animated drunkenness. The song has a swing and mood that is very dark, yet lithesome and filled with syncopated bomp. Then Winslow-King sidesteps into more comfortable ground, picking up his dobro and invoking the spirit of American folk at its finest. "Shoeshine" has the kind of drooping rhythm and slippery guitar that makes players like Bill Morrisey so fantastic, and the song has horns that carry countermelodies through the background, imbuing the track with a surreal beauty. "Never Tired" is classic folk-hop, filled with snappy snare hits and great slide guitar work, as well as sing-songy lyrics that are almost silly in their earnestness. Winslow-King somehow takes the spirit of New Orleans and fuses it into his songs, imparting a ragtime breakdown into "Below" before dropping back to the matter-of-factness of "I'll See You When I Look At You", a song that is simple in its musical approach but contains an immense amount of folky beauty. Winslow-King's blending of slide guitar, horns, ukulele, and doghouse bass is instantly likeable and mostly traditional in its approach, fusing classic musical elements with a vigor that belies his Northern origins. Don't believe me? Take a listen to the cool jazz of "Birthday Stomp" or the gritty, delta-infused blues of "Bird Dog Blues" to form your own opinion of what this Michigan-born lad has in his musical blood. ~L. Keane
Old/New Baby
Album: Recorded Live At Tweed Recording EP
Size: 29,4 MB
Time: 12:35
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Released: 2012
Styles: Ragtime, Blues Jazz, Folk Blues, Americana
Label: Oxford Sounds
Art: Front
01. Miss The Mississippi And You (2:44)
02. I Know She'll Do Right By Me (2:27)
03. Ragtime Millionaire (2:32)
04. Mississippi Slow Drag (2:11)
05. The Coming Tide (2:40)
Winslow-King is from Cadillac, Michigan but he calls New Orleans home and has lived there since 2002 when his car was stolen in the French Quarter with all his musical equipment in it. At the time, the guitarist had already immersed himself in the academic study of jazz and composition. But, he found the emotional sterility and high-bandwidth musicality that informed so much bop and fusion jazz to be a dead- end, vapid and disconnected. He related instead to th folk music of the legendary Woody Guthrie and the cryptic deep blues of Mississippi John Hurt, music from, as writer Greil Marcus termed it, “the old, weird America.” Having his car stolen may, in fact, be one of the best things that ever happened to Luke Winslow-King.
He was quickly accepted into the music theory program at the University of New Orleans, and was eventually awarded a prestigious scholarship to study Czech classical music at St. Charles University in Prague. But while Winslow-King is certainly a heavy-hitter in terms of musical knowledge, instrumental prowess and compositional ability, his approach to the music of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta is never dry, never academic. His compositions are not musicological set pieces, nor do they ever reek of the dusty utility of the affected and dolorous purist. Luke Winslow-King pulled off the considerable feat of creating something beautiful and unaffected and new from the plump and thickly intertwined history of the great American musics — New Orleans jazz and Mississippi Delta blues. On these gorgeous and glowing recordings made for Oxford Sounds, you’ll hear Luke Winslow-King — accompanied by the lovely washboard percussionist and back-up singer Esther Rose and double-bassist Cassidy Holden — deliver a number of tunes that reference ragtime, dixieland jazz, minstrel tunes, and 1920’s pop. That none of this music ever sounds even remotely like a revival act is testament to his considerable skill as a songwriter, arranger, guitarist and singer. The lyrical themes, too, harmonize with a 1920’s New Orleans aesthetic but they thankfully never veer into the execrable kitsch of, say, Leon Redbone or the ham-fisted hippie humorousness of early David Bromberg or Jerry Garcia solo records. Recorded by Andrew Ratcliffe at his superlative Tweed Recording Studio in Oxford, the session features several songs taken mainly from Winslow-King’s recently released album “The Coming Tide”. “Ragtime Millionaire” is as infectious as the title suggests, totally engaging. The song “The Coming Tide” is a real classic, simple and lovely, a wonderful and contagious tune with excellent accompaniment from Esther Rose. “Mississippi Slow Drag” is nothing short of stunning, though, a great ambling dance number delivered with faint ennui and replete with cool slide guitar phrases that recall the legendary Ry Cooder as well as that other under-heralded guru of pre-rock American guitar music, David Lindley. Of course, those guys got their licks from the Delta, too. ~Pat Cochran
Recorded Live At Tweed Recording EP
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Posted by kamaneOznake: Luke Winslow-King, Folk-Blues, Blues Jazz, New Orleans Blues
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