Luke Winslow King - Postcards from New Orleans

"Moving on towards better days"

It all began with a stolen car. The first time he set foot in New Orleans, Luke Winslow-King was twenty years old, carrying a suitcase full of dreams. He had set off from Michigan to play in a few clubs, or perhaps to escape the uncertainty of which direction to take. But true love, as we know, is always born from the unexpected: and it was when his car vanished, stolen along with all his instruments, that Winslow-King truly discovered New Orleans.

"I stayed in the city long enough to fall in love with it," he recalls. The encounters he made under the Louisiana sky were like a revelation to him: jazz singer John Boutté became his mentor, and Winslow-King decided to enroll in music theory and composition courses at the University of New Orleans. "I was lucky enough to complete my curriculum of studies in New Orleans. My education brought together classical training and the knowledge gained on the streets and in the clubs. Both of these elements shaped my writing in different but equally important ways. I learned music theory, but also style, and how to entertain an audience."

On the other hand, Winslow-King has always had a wandering spirit. In the Bronx he worked as a music therapist and a music teacher for the blind, in Prague he studied string quartets, in Italy he wrote musical accompaniments for theatrical and film works. In every city he passed through, he never gave up picking up his guitar to play on any street corner, roadsides included.

His debut album, simply titled with his own name and released in 2006, is an exercise in elegant, intimate songwriting, able to enchant through the grace of its nuances. Delicate arpeggios and chamber-music drapery accompany the American songwriter's voice throughout the album, right up to the instrumental epilogue of "There, There". Here and there the pace picks up slightly ("Fall Down The Boulder", "Flood Waltz"), a female counter-melody appears ("Staying People Stay Going People Go"), and a hint of swing peeks through ("Horse Stumble Fall"). These are details set within a picture dominated by the constant presence of strings, a tangible legacy of Winslow-King's classical training. One's mind inevitably runs to the scores of Nick Drake; but here the approach follows a key unmistakably rooted in the deepest American tradition.

Meanwhile, Winslow-King began playing alongside slide guitarist Roberto Luti, originally from Livorno, whom he met on a New Orleans street corner after stopping by chance to listen to him, and gathered around himself a full-fledged horn section (trombone, trumpet, clarinet and tuba), accompanied by the classic washboard, the wooden laundry board used since the earliest days of jazz to create surprising rhythmic inventions.

It is precisely the air of the "Big Easy", then, that pervades the tracks of Old/New Baby, the American songwriter's second album, released in 2009: old-time music for modern times, with a shimmer of horns able to evoke the atmosphere of a band lost among the city's streets.

The melancholy parade of "As April Is To May" opens the album with a sense of fatalism worthy of Elvis Perkins: "Why am I so dear to you, after all the wrong I've done?" It's easy to picture the rustic waltz of "Shoeshine" or the brass-band stride of "Airplane" drifting among the old wooden architecture of Preservation Hall, the historic jazz club in the French Quarter where, with the help of Earl Scioneaux, Old/New Baby came to life. The jazzy colors of "All The Same" dance with the same loose, timeless tone found in certain pages of Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire, while the tongue-twisting, acrobatic "Never Tired" takes its locomotive stride from a Johnny Cash of the Sun Records era.

If the instrumental ragtime of "Birthday Stomp" represents the most explicit (and least personal) tribute to the New Orleans tradition, there are also plenty of moments where the atmosphere returns to the intimate songwriting of Winslow-King's debut, from the arpeggios of "I'll See You When I Look At You" to the lazy tuba of "The Sun Slamming The Highway", all the way to the delicate strings of "Searchlight Waltz".

The clatter of the washboard drives the songs along with its lively tip-tap rhythm, Winslow-King's resophonic guitar nimbly plucks out the contours, and the horns spread the light of a festive sunset. “Bird Dog Blues” plunges into the murky waters of the Delta for a dark-hued electric blues, with the razor edge of Roberto Luti's slide more prominent than ever. And, for the album's epilogue, the tone relaxes into the embrace of the cinematic-flavored orchestration of “Your Eyes, Your Eyes”.

“Swing that thing”

Three years on from Old/New Baby, in 2012 Winslow-King once again sets off from the streets of New Orleans for The Coming Tide. He digs even deeper into the city's roots, as if trying to bring back to life the yellowed postcards of some old Mardi Gras. “It's an album that reflects our recent years spent traveling and living in this wonderful city,” explains the American songwriter. “There are songs of love and nostalgia for the old days, when jazz was born”.

Preceded by an Ep of four unreleased tracks (You Hear Me Talkin' To Ya), Winslow-King's true third album remains steeped in a brass band atmosphere, only with a more openly roots inflection.

Once again, the album is christened by a historic New Orleans building: this time it's the old post office that houses Piety Street Studios, best known for having hosted the Dave Matthews Band and for narrowly escaping the devastation of Katrina.

From the little orchestra that seems to have sprung from the Roaring Twenties on “Moving On (Towards Better Days)” to the chiaroscuro of “Ella Speed”, The Coming Tide is a constant parade of horns, slide, washboard and folk-jazz nostalgia. Winslow-King's voice is joined for the first time by that of Esther Rose, the American songwriter's partner, in a blossoming of vocal harmonies that runs through the whole album like a backlight.

The coordinates shift ever more explicitly toward the Delta, as shown by the electric blues of the classic “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning”. It's a dive into tradition that's far from isolated, echoed by the tribute to the streets of New Orleans in “I've Got The Blues For Rampart Street” and the reinterpretation of “I've Got My Mind Set On You”, made famous by George Harrison's version.

After being tapped to open for Jack White, Winslow-King's talent also catches the attention of Chicago's Bloodshot Records, which signs the American songwriter and reissues The Coming Tide in 2013. Meanwhile, Winslow-King releases a short live Ep in digital format, Live At Tweed Recording, tackling a couple of classics like “Miss The Mississippi” and “Ragtime Millionaire”, alongside a few original tracks such as “The Coming Tide” and “Mississippi Slow Drag”.

For his first proper release on Bloodshot, Everlasting Arms, Winslow-King moves toward a less clearly defined kind of Americana: still steeped in nostalgic echoes of Chess Records-style blues, jazz and swing, but also tied more directly to the present, following in the footsteps of the roots songwriting of Justin Townes Earle.

It's no coincidence, then, that the title track, “Everlasting Arms”, opens the curtain with an explicit nod to a classic. Winslow-King takes the famous gospel hymn “Leaning On The Everlasting Arms”, written in the late nineteenth century by Anthony J. Showalter, and turns it into a celebration of brotherhood built on call and response: “You can lean on me brother/ I believe you've carried too long”.

The American songwriter seems determined to think big: besides the familiar Piety Street Studios in New Orleans, the recording sessions also take in Michigan and Italy, at Jambona Lab in Livorno, renewing his collaboration with Roberto Luti.

The result translates Winslow-King's love of vintage atmospheres into a more direct and energetic form than in the past. Though at times, it ends up favoring polish over personality.

Benji Bohannon's drums beef up the contours, the guitar turns sharper, and on “Swing That Thing” Winslow-King delivers a feverish vocal performance. It's all built around a simple riff improvised backstage at a Roman concert, complete with a dedication to Esther Rose, who in the meantime has become his wife (as well as a faithful musical counterpart): “Gonna give you my grandma's diamond ring, make you Miss Esther King”. And it's Esther Rose herself who takes center stage on “Wanton Way Of Loving”, her thin voice caressing Matt Rhody's violin.

Everlasting Arms reveals its best side, though, when the tones turn darker, from the walk to the gallows set to the piano notes of “Graveyard Blues” to the flicker of trumpet and clarinet that works its way through “Home Blues”, venturing into the shadows of southern gothic: “They’ll make you mean, they’ll make you cruel/ Make you treat your lover like a fool/ Those blues will make you do things you would never do”. And the air of the South, with its unchanging gravity, reclaims the scene.

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