Kelly Joe Phelps
Up from the Roots, Out on a Limb-by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

(taken from Artists of the Decade feature in Acoustic Guitar's Tenth Anniversary Collector's Edition issue (July 2000))

EVERYWHERE KELLY JOE PHELPS HAS gone in the past six years, he's left behind a trail of guitarists with wide eyes, shaking heads, and jaws bruised from hitting the floor. He hasn't done this with hot licks or tricks, although he can fingerpick or whip around a slide guitar as well as anyone. Phelps does something far more rare: he goes deep into that zone where all master musicians go (he calls it becoming a "shine eyed mister zen") and unearths songs that grow and change with each performance. Along the way he takes alarming risks - reharmonizing, revamping the melody, making up whole songs on the spot, knocking his forehead against the mic if the moment requires a kickdrum sound - and delivers extravagant rewards.

What initially drew attention to Phelps was his state-of-the-art slide guitar, accomplished on a regular flattop modified for lap-style playing. Drawing on his free-jazz background, he moved quickly past the traditional blues vocabulary, though in a way that tapped into the spirit of the old masters much more than note-perfect re-creations ever do. As the decade progressed, he did the same with his nonslide playing (eventually settling on C G C G C F as his standard tuning), while his singing and songwriting grew ever more nuanced and haunting. He also found himself in demand as a sideman, adding his slide touch to albums by Greg Brown, Tim O'Brien, Tony Furtado and others. Recent projects underscore Phelps' compatibility with many musical worlds: he performed with Bert Jansch in a documentary on the British folk icon, and was featured alongside Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, Philip Glass, and others on the soundtrack to the film Condo Painting; meanwhile, Phelps' tour itinerary took him to the roots mecca Merlefest and the experimental mecca Knitting Factory.

Shine on, mister zen.

FOLK IMPROV!

Article taken from feature in June/July 2000 issue of Dirty Linen
Kelly Joe Phelps-by Philip Van Vleck.

Kelly Joe Phelps first came to the attention of music fans beyond the Pacific Northwest with the release of his album Roll Away the Stone [Rykodisc] in 1997. (His first album, Lead Me On, released by Burnside Records in 1994, is an excellent piece of work that didn’t exactly make it to everyone’s neighborhood record store.) Roll Away the Stone evoked an immediate and overwhelming upbeat response from both music critics and fans who follow folk, blues, and the rootsier side of country and rock. Phelps’ lap slide guitar wizardry immediately caught the attention of guitar afficianados, and his ear-catching voice - a dusky, well-worn thing - has the sort of visceral appeal that stays with a listener.

Phelps, a resident of Vancouver, Washington, followed Roll Away The Stone with his second Rykodisc release, Shine Eyed Mister Zen, in 1999. The CMJ review of this CD noted: “Phelps plays with the tender prowess and soul-soothing magic of a man twice his age, surrounding the listener with intricate music, backwoods lyrical gloom and warmly evocative vocals.” Mr. Zen did a great deal to solidify Phelps’ reputation as a unique musician and songwriter. He’s building a repertoire that finds inspiration in country blues, traditional music, gospel, bluegrass, rock, and jazz. This multitude of voices comes together in Phelps’ music in an understated and wholly fluent fashion, giving him a sound that is both familiar and rarefied.

Phelps’ musical odyssey bean in the farm country of western Washington in the midst of a very tuneful family. When the music bug got to him, he started behind the drums. As a teenager, an encounter with Jimmy Page’s guitar playing prompted Phelps to take up the instrument. After the usual romance with rock music, he entered his twentysomething years and became intrigued with jazz. “I was drawn to the improvisational thing jazz players were doing,” Phelps explained. “Initially, I was listening to some of the standard jazz guitar players, but not understanding what they were doing at all. I was just trying to pick out stuff off their records. Guys like Joe Pass and George Van Eps. I was studying them, but not from the point of improvising. That started my fascination with the music in general; that, and meeting musicians who were actually playing jazz.

“At that point it wasn’t the guitar that mattered; it was just to get into that music,” he continued. “If it had come to it, I would’ve done it on trumpet or trombone, or anything. I just wanted to play that music. The bass was an obvious choice, because I already knew how to play stringed instruments. Gigs for bass players were easier to come by, so I switched to bass.”

Jazz has been a particularly crucial training ground during Phelps’ musical coming-of-age. Fans who have not had the chance to catch him in concert may not be aware of the role improvisation plays in his music. If you listen to the tracks on his albums and then you go to hear him in concert, you’ll soon realize that the songs you heard on the CDs didn’t exactly happen the same way in concert. They never do.

Phelps invested a good deal of time in jazz, playing for about a decade in Washington and Oregon. Then he dropped out. “I kind of stopped, but I kind of moved forward, as well. When I first got into jazz, I was playing all that standard material, you know, bebop tunes, Charlie Parker tunes - the usual hundreds of songs that jazz guys play. The more I got into the freer side of that music, the less I was attached to the more straight-ahead stuff. Once that freedom was laid down, I was able to borrow from lots of different influences.

“What happened was that I found myself wanting to play in an improvised manner, but a more folk kind of music,” Phelps continued. “I grew up listening to country music with my mom and dad, and I always liked certain aspects of that music. And, of course, I was always into guys like Leo Kottke and Chet Atkins.”

These varied impulses initially led Phelps into confusion about what he was doing. He decided to kick back, put the jazz playing aside, and sort out where he was at musically. “I was listening to country blues players, and I basically just started over, picking stuff out off their records, note by note.”
Phelps jazz years laid the groundwork for his return to the guitar and to folk music (folk in the broadest sense of the term, as he pointed out). He realized that what he had wanted to do all along was improvise in a folk/blues context, but it took jazz to teach him the spontaneity he lacked. What Phelps eventually learned was how to use his musical vocabulary to initiate, or hold up his end of, a musical dialogue.

Phelps’ affinity for country and folk music, overlaid by his years playing jazz, has given him a musical breadth that is manifest in his work to date and very much a reflection of the way in which he approaches writing and performing. “Keith Jarrett is a prime example of someone who, in the end, is just playing music,” Phelps explained. “All the beautiful things about music come out when Jarrett plays. Ornette Coleman is someone else who just blows me away. In a way, Coleman’s doing very odd country music. The way that he handles melody and stuff just isn’t that be-boppy, do-dah stuff. The purity of his melody choices, no matter what direction he goes, were so unusual. I feel the same way about Don Cherry and Charlie Hayden. I mean, those guys were like a bluegrass band,” he laughed.
The eclecticism that is a hallmark of Phelps’ music was evident on his debut album and his first Rykodisc CD, and it caused a bit of scrambling among music critics. Blues writers seem to have been the first to pick up on Roll Away the Stone, and their vociferous praise led many fans to the erroneous conclusion that Phelps was a stone blues player. While it’s difficult to compare him to anyone else, living or dead, there is a spirit and a breadth to his music that resembles that if Huddie Ledbetter. Phelps has one foot firmly planted in folk and the other planted wherever.

“The country blues players have been both an inspiration and an example,” Phelps said, “but I don’t think of myself as being a blues player. I think when I first set the guitar on my lap and started playing slide, I toyed with the idea that I would play blues music. After a while, however, it just became more and more obvious that blues was just a set of sounds and emotions that I identified with and wanted to include in what I did. The fact is that from the first time I picked up a guitar, I never considered playing in a style. I just wanted to find the music.”

When Phelps is sitting on stage, guitar in his lap, slide in his hand, he presents a bluesy sort of image. He spends a lot of time playing guitar in that style - like a Dobro player works his or her instrument. According to Phelps, the legendary bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell has something to do with his playing style.

“When I started listening to Fred McDowell, and I was trying to figure out his slide guitar stuff, I initially tried playing the guitar bottleneck style. That was sort of working, sort of not. But there were a couple of things going on with that. For one thing, I’d been listening to Derek Bailey quite a bit, which had me wondering what else I could do with the guitar that I’m not doing with it yet, to get some other sounds out of it. That’s when I threw it in my lap and started using different things as slides and tuning the guitar in odd ways. I picked up a couple of lap steels to continue the process.

“Learning that Fred McDowell slide guitar style, I discovered that playing the guitar in my lap just felt better,” Phelps added. “I use a solid steel bar, like a Dobro player, and that, combined with the strings being raised up off the fingerboard, gives me a very rich tone. I also realised that playing lap-style gave me a lot more freedom in terms of using the slide. I can pick different combinations of strings, that is, different combinations of open strings and strings using the slide bar. The compromise was that I couldn’t use my left hand to fret notes, but that seemed like an easy trade-off, considering what I could do with the slide that I couldn’t do playing bottleneck.”

When Phelps returned to the guitar, in the wake of his fabled jazz years, and began the process of building the sound that his fans are familiar with now, he also had to face another imperative: “It was obvious that I was gonna have to sing.” Phelps’ improvisational instincts did not lead him to embark on the path of an instrumentalist like, say, Leo Kottke. Instead, he wanted to pursue his guitar stylings within the framework of a song structure that included lyrics. “When I decided to move in the direction in which I’ve gone, it was apparent that I was going to have to sing. The only other options were playing instrumental guitar, which was gonna be insane, or playing with a singer, which seemed like a cop-out. It was kind of a do-or-die situation. Because I’d never done it before, I was scared to death. It was kind of like taking your clothes off in front of an audience.

“You know, I used to play guitar solo at gigs - just instrumentals - and I felt like as long as there was something between me and who was listening, I was safe,” he laughed. “The singing thing, however, makes you feel like you’ve jumped out in front of your guitar. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t wanna be here,’ you know.”

Phelps’ approach to singing was initially informed mainly by high anxiety. This was one thing that the decade of jazz had not prepared him for, and he was, at best, a reluctant vocalist. It was surprising to hear this from him, given the fact that critics have bee quick to praise his vocal style. He has warmed to the task, however, in the last couple of years.

“I’m intensely glad that I’m singing,” he admitted. “I just thoroughly enjoy it. Now it feels like it’s just part of the package. A lot of times I describe the singing thing as if it was the seventh string on the guitar. You know, sometimes at a gig I have to describe what I want to the sound engineer, because a lot of times they do the typical mix where the voice is way out front and the guitar is buried. But I tell them that my approach is to weave my vocals into the guitar, so when they’re setting their levels, I tell them not to get the voice too far out in front of the guitar. When I think of it that way, it’s almost as if I’m not actually singing. Maybe that’s what I’ve created as my own little safety net - you know, I’m not really singing,” he chuckled.

“I really do feel my voice has integrated itself into a sound,” he continued. “It’s almost like I’m not doing anything - not singing, not playing the guitar, just making this noise.”
Phelps’ game plan has been about instrumental improvisation, not vocal improv. Whether he’s playing original material or covering other artists’ tunes, Phelps doesn’t routinely change the words every time he performs a song. Rather, the lyrics provide a framework around which he builds an instrumental dialogue that varies from performance to performance. “It’s the same with the recording process,” Phelps noted. “That’s something that surprises some people. I talk about improvising all the time, and I think a lot of folks who come see me now are used to that idea and expect it. How I played the song before I recorded it was different than how I played the song when I recorded it, and when I do the song in concert it’s gonna be different again.”

For Phelps, it’s the lyrics on which he hangs whatever happens instrumentally. “The blueprint of my songs is always there in the lyrics,” Phelps said. “But I’ve never actually sat down and composed a song all the way through.”

In a way, Phelps is still working in a jazz-like pattern. If you think of the lyrics of his songs as melodic lines, then, in a sense, he’s still improvising on a theme. He’s certainly not as free-form as, say, Medeski, Martin and Wood, but he has given himself a certain freedom within the framework. “There is this body of material that I use,” Phelps said. “I don’t use set lists when I do a concert, but I have 40 or 50 songs and I pick and choose as I go. I give myself the freedom to decide how I’m going to interpret a song on a given night. The lyric is my anchor.”

With three albums to his credit in five years’ time, Kelly Joe Phelps is both a veteran recording artist and a singer/songwriter who is still exploring the possibilities offered by his musical skills. Most recently, he has contributed two songs to the soundtrack of the film Condo Painting. Still in his 30’s, Phelps figures to be sitting around with his guitar in his lap, working tunes, for many more years, which is good news for everyone who’s gotten into what he’s doing.

Taken from MOJO (April 2000).
live review by Colin Harper

The Girl I Left Behind/Love Me Baby Blues/Fare Thee Well/Piece By Piece/Train Carried My Girl From Town/Lass Of Loch Royale/Katy/Pretty Saro/Wandering Away/Roll Away The Stone/River rat Jimmy/Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues/The Waggoner's Lad/Pretty Polly/Hobo's Son/Blackwater Side

THEY CALLED them folk clubs in the '60's - anything went if it was played on something that used to be a tree. That term's gone, but every Thursday in Belfast former Four Men & A Dog manager Jim Heaney satiates a reborn craving for that exquisitely dangerous, indestructible woody stuff: once folk, blues, jazz, or hillbilly, now a fusion of everything. Such is Heaney's 'Real Music Club' and such is Kelly Joe Phelps: the Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and travelling slaesman of one-time Delta blues.

Formerly a music tutor at various US colleges, Phelps' discovery discovery of Mississippi Fred McDowell 10 years ago resulted in his forging of something simultaneously grounded in the Delta and soaring to the moon. Those who thought they'd nailed his muse with Roll Away The Stone in 1997 had to think again with last year's Shine Eyed Mister Zen - from spine-tingling langour to "a twisted folk thing". If there was anybody at tonight's show still putting Phelps in a bag with Eric Bibb and Keb' Mo' they were in for a shock. As his own agent put it, holding court at the bar with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, "He's gone a bit weird."

Such is the mesmeric blur of Phelps' moaning, free-wheeling vocalising and dizzying guitar impressionism that everything becomes one. There is new material, but even songs familiar from the records are turned inside out in a performance that worships at the shrine of John Coltrane. Wildly extemporised flurries of notes, de-tuned deviations into blissfully unrelated keys and great shimmering slabs of sound are wrenched from Phelps' lap-position guitar with a physicality that belies the speed and accuracy of the notes. Nothing is played, however tangential, that those fingers don't aim to play.

Phelps is unashamedly playing for himself, right to the limits. While the first set is mind-blowing, the second is refreshingly earth-bound, with gentle ballads and a smouldering Appalachian trilogy featuring guest fiddler Tim O'Brien. An encore of Bert Jansch's classic arrangement of Blackwater Side - once the epitome of a guitarist's virtuosity, here made effortless, is played straight and with sincerity, revealing another facet to this extraordinary musician's palette of influences.

KELLY Joe Phelps' slide guitar seemed to spring into independent life at the multiple climaxes of 1997's breakthrough LP, Roll Away The Stone, to ripple and snake into unknown territory for the country blues he allegedly played, to squeeze out sounds touching the searching jazz that ad once been his trade, to mutate through more layers than 12 strings should hold. And the songs - half traditional, half his, their pleas for God's mercy beyond the grave healed the spirit in ways disbelievers, in Bibles or blues, could feel. Last year's Shine Eyed Mister Zen took another twist as Phelps - "I'm not necessarily a blues player" - turned the technique down and the songwriting up, attempting the austere death-folk recalled in Dylan's World Gone Wrong, territory surely as alien to this 37-year-old, middle-class Washington State native as to the 58-year-old Minnesotan. In genres so leeched of life for so long, casualty ward cases drip-fed on nostalgia, phelps' records stirred blood.

It's a reality-lurch seeing Phelps in the flesh, the gaunt, shadowy figure of photos strolling on stage as a close-cropped near-beauty, a blues Evan Dando. He's surreally funny between songs too, a supple entertainer, an observant traveller - closing his third British tour, he mordantly dissects our collapsing railway system before his own train song (his guitar like whipping power lines, "Almost crashed there, almost crashed").

He finds new shapes and words for his songs, sweetening the pill of the graveyard stuff with Dylanesque insults, still slipping in the fear:

"I read my Bible/Surely he will hear me/I wanna go there/When I die& ." His own mysterious, intangible song of childhood blood-bonds and terror, "River Rat Jimmy", may be the highlight, but through it all Phelps contorts his face, moans and howls, looks like he's chewing Mississippi tobacco, half-playing the part of bluesman. And he strides, slides and strokes the guitar laid flat on his lap, karate-chops its strings, beats its body like a drum, yanks out brief glittering electricity, matches the half-whistling sound of his mouth, the faraway holler of a train that keeps coming.

Somewhere, in some Surrey mansion, Eric Clapton lazily maintains what he plays is the blues. Phelps doesn't bother; he's better than that.

ACROSS THE BORDERLINE
(article taken from HOT PRESS magazine (Ireland & UK) - Feb. 16th 2000)

KELLY JOE PHELPS may be viewed by some as a bluesman, but the multi-instrumentalist isn't going to be confined by such narrow boundaries.

By SIOBHAN LONG.

"Who's gonna shoe yo' feet/Who's gonna glove yo' hand? If I prove false to thee ?"

MUSIC THAT'S not of this world is a scarce commodity these days. Amid times of plenty there are souls starving for something real, something that cuts right to the bone. Kelly Joe Phelps has sated many an appetite with his last two CDs, but it's his live shows that really salve the spirits.

Phelps received a rapturous reception at his recent Whelan's gig, so much so that he was cajoled to return for three encores. Billed as a blues player, he tore strips off our preconceptions by gathering around a sound that was part blues, part folk, but wholly of his own conjuring. Listening to his razor-sharp ramblings on 'River Rat Jimmy' and his wry re-working of 'Wandering Away', even a blind man could see that Kelly Joe had gotten beneath the skin of the music and made it all his own.

A native of Sumner, in the western part of Washington State, 40 miles south of Seattle, Kelly Joe Phelps didn't exactly grow up in a cauldron of blues or folk. "The area I grew in wasn't musically rich," he offers, "but my family was very musical, so it was an integral part of my growing up. My earliest childhood memories are of watching them and listening to them play. So I was raised with the idea that music was something that you did, and not something that you listened to." Phelps has a reputation for playing by his own rules, as opposed to slavishly living by anybody else's rule book. He's collaborated with an eclectic range of musicians form Tim O'Brien to Steve Earle. There are many of the opinion that Phelps has done for folk/blues what Ry Cooder did for Tex Mex with Chicken Skin Music way back in 1976. "I don't necessarily consider myself to be a blues musician," he avers, "and when I started out, I didn't decide that I wanted to play blues music, but at a particular time in my career, blues made sense to me both musically and personally. Even when I was learning to play guitar, at 12 or 13, I was listening side by side to Jimmy Page, John Denver, Chet Atkins and so on. I never followed just one sound."

Phelps has made sure throughout his musical career to test all of the sounds that appealed to his curiosity. Having started out with drums, he subsequently played sax, bass and acoustic and electric guitars, thus creating a virtual orchestra of sounds. "When I wanted to figure out how to play jazz music," he explains, "and how to improvise, and to understand that music both cerebrally and emotionally, I decided that what I needed to do was play a horn - to get inside the music from that angle. So I took some lessons for 2 or 3 years and then I stopped, because after a time, it seemed that I got from it what I needed and then I put it away. Then I went back to the guitar with a different mindset. For me it was trying to be a musician with no regard for the instrument you're playing. In other words, I like the idea that potentially a musician could play music without the instrument dictating what you're going to play."

Despite the plethora of original songs on his last two albums, songwriting is not something that Phelps takes naturally to his bosom. "Songwriting, even though I try to approach it improvisationally, is a very regimental experience," says Phelps . "You have to sit down and deal with the words and try to figure out what kind of music goes with it. It's certainly not natural for me, and I'm trying to figure out a system to write songs that allow the most improvisational room. When I write, I don't really write them as compositions. The words are pretty set, but musically I try to leave room to get inside of it. Every once in a while, I figure out I'm on to something, but you know, it's a slippery fish!'

Whatever his achilles tendon might be, one thing's for sure: Kelly Joe Phelps is going to keep on pushing the outside of the envelope when it comes time to step inside that studio again. "It probably sounds hackneyed to say this," he offers, "but people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis - whether or not you like the records they were putting out - there was always something going on, always something changing. It was vital, and you felt they were really putting everything on the line. And to me that's great, and I can't imagine what music would be like if that's what everybody did. Maybe that's too idealistic, but I still hope it's a trap I fall into!"

Live review (Kelly Joe Phelps at Jazz Café, London, England) taken from Evening Standard (London) -- 2 February 2000.

Written by Jack Massarik

REBIRTH OF THE BLUES

There's more than one way to skin a guitar (not counting with your teeth, or behind your back), and one of the strangest and most beautiful was demonstrated to a captivated Jazz Café last night by a former jazz bass-player raised on Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

Kelly Joe Phelps was nearly 30 when he took up blues guitar, inexplicably drawn to the ancient Delta-blues tradition. Nine years on, he can make a standard Gibson six-string folk model ring like a Dobro resonator. Only he knows how, but it involves laying his instrument flat on its back in his lap and articulating it with a bottleneck, much as a pedal-steel player would. His right hand tweaks the bass strings with thumb and forefinger while hammer-chording the others with fingers three, four and five.

It's a complex skill, and one day Kelly Joe will reveal all to Guitar Player magazine, but what makes him special is his lazy feel for acoustic blues, that gently pulsating melange of one bitter voice and six sweet strings. "It's like making love, isn't it?" breathed a nearby female fan. "So intense."

Swamp fever claimed several such victims as Phelps husked through Train Carried My Girl From Town, Katy, River Rat Jimmy - songs from his Rykodisc album, Shine Eyed Mister Zen, and its humid world of empty pockets, faithless women, hopeless yearning, late trains and early death. These tales had an air of nonchalant authenticity nobody would expect form a slim, crop-haired Caucasian, especially one from Washington state, next door to Canada and musically a million miles form Mississippi.

Between numbers he revealed a dry sense of humour, but little about himself. Just as well. We' d hate to discover that a modern bluesman has an agent, an accountant, a personal manager and a prenuptial agreement.

'New York Times review by Ann Powers-Wednesday, February 9, 2000

FLYING FINGERS ON GUITAR

Kelly Joe Phelps has a wise right hand. When playing his lap-steel acoustic guitar at the Knitting Factory, he would sometimes anchor that hand by the pinky and pick, his thumb and three other fingers whirling across the strings. On other songs, he would hold three fingers still and get a steadier but equally swift flow of notes from his index finger and thumb. Occasionally that right hand would run free across the guitar's body, strumming lightly up the fretboard and down to the bottom of the strings.
All the while, Mr. Phelps's left hand was flying its own imaginative course, usually aboard a metal slide but sometimes lightly pressing notes into the fretboard or reaching to detune a string. The relationship between left and right hand determines Mr. Phelps's style, just as the meeting of left and right brain defines his songs.

The analytical side of this music links Delta blues with free jazz and jazz-folk, in compositions and arrangements as tied to the spacious melodicism of Joni Mitchell as to the well-grounded improvisations of blues masters like Mississippi Fred McDowell. The intuitive side contradicts all categories in performances that are never the same twice. Mr. Phelps may have growled and moaned like a postage-stamp bluesman in his performance last Wednesday, but his croon also invoked the light phrasing of Paul Simon; his playing may have echoed heroes like Bukka White, but it also rode on vapors of Bach and Mr. Phelps's fellow American experimentalist Bill Frisell.

Mr. Phelps connects to the blues as poetry; his own lyrics, as in "River Rat Jimmy," the song that gave him the title to his latest album, "Shine Eyed Mister Zen," are highly metaphorical and as nonlinear as his playing.
Performing the folk standard "Black Waterside," he focused on the fairy tale language, his airy playing conjuring a pocket of supernatural space. On gospel songs, he manipulated his fretboard to create eerie harmonics as he slipped from a mumble to a falsetto, as if to follow the soul beyond the physical realm...