LUKE WINSLOW KING - Old / New Baby

“It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh;

and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States

until he as seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.”

(Mark Twain)

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

The air thick with the charm of the "Big Easy" seeps deep into the tracks of "Old/New Baby", the second work by the American songwriter: old-time music for modern times, in which his songwriting nuances are dressed in a glimmer of horns, evoking the atmosphere of a band lost among the streets of the city.

It took just a couple of weeks for him to fall in love with New Orleans: 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. Back in Michigan he'd already studied classical and jazz guitar at the Interlochen Arts Academy, but the encounters he had under the Louisiana sky were like a revelation to him: "I didn't know much about New Orleans music before going there," he admits. "When I discovered it, it felt like a hybrid of jazz and folk. Music of the people – made for dancing."

So Winslow-King started playing alongside slide guitarist Roberto Luti, originally from Livorno, whom he met in some corner of New Orleans after stopping by chance to listen to him, and he gathered around himself a genuine horn section (Rick Trolsen on trombone, Ben Pulsar, Michael Magro and Jack Jurzak of the Loose Marbles Jazz Band on trumpet, clarinet and tuba respectively). To complete the picture, there was of course no shortage of percussion from Mike Vulkar, and in particular the classic washboard, the wooden laundry board used since the very origins of jazz to create surprising rhythmic inventions.

The melancholy parade of "As April Is To May" opens the album with a sense of fatalism worthy of latter-day Elvis Perkins: "Why am I so dear to you, after all the wrong I've done?" It's not hard to picture the rustic waltz of "Shoeshine" or the brass-band stride of "Airplane" drifting through 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 colours of "All The Same" dance with the timeless, carefree tone of certain pages from Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire, while the tongue-twisting dexterity of "Never Tired" takes on the locomotive gait of a Sun Records-era Johnny Cash.

If the instrumental ragtime of "Birthday Stomp", emerging straight from the heart of Mardi Gras, represents the most explicit (and least personal) tribute to the New Orleans tradition, there's no shortage of moments where the mood returns to the intimate songwriting closer to 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 washboard's clatter marks out the songs with the liveliness of its tip-tap, Winslow-King's resophonic guitar nimbly plucks out the contours, the brass spreads the light of a festive sunset. "Bird Dog Blues" plunges into the muddy waters of the Delta for a dark-hued electric blues, with the razor edge of Roberto Luti's slide guitar more prominent than ever. And for the album's epilogue, the tones unwind into the embrace of the cinematic-flavoured orchestration of "Your Eyes, Your Eyes".

Between ironic sketches of apartment-block life ("Below") and lovers' meetings along the misty banks of an old canal ("Dragon Fly, Dragon Flower"), Winslow-King's lyrics unfold wrapped in a melancholy romanticism, the fruit of his collaboration with his girlfriend Ji Un Choi – who, besides working in poetry and screenwriting, also enjoys co-writing songs with him. But a ray of sunlight is always ready to peek through a half-open window, as in the peaceful awakening of "Lost Soul" or the side-by-side journey of "All The Same": "Sometimes the sun comes out when the weatherman says snow".

Luke Winslow-King has a wandering spirit. In the Bronx he worked as a music therapist and music teacher for the blind, in Prague he studied string quartets, in Italy he wrote musical scores for theatre and film productions; in every city he's passed through, he's never given up picking up his guitar to play in any corner he could find, including street corners.

If in June, when he returns to visit Italian shores for a series of concerts with his trio, you happen to run into him somewhere near you, don't miss the chance: you never know what might happen when you stop to listen to the music of New Orleans...

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11/05/2009