NEW YORK TIMES
By Ann Powers
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...

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