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Reviews: Bourgeois Gypsies ~ Blue Morning
Posted on Saturday, June 03, 2006 @ 04:31:45 PDT
Topic: Reviews
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Artist: Bourgeois Gypsies
CD: Blue Morning
Home: Sierraville, California
Style: Jam-band / Folk
Quote: "Arnold Mitchem and Kaisa MacDonald are quintessential Day-Glo troubadours, wind-blown vagabonds who have come in off the road to heal with that time-honored elixir: good music."
By Barney Quick
This music works well if you approach it with no familiarity with the artists’ paths, but becomes even more appreciable if you consider how Bourgeois Gypsies came to be. Arnold Mitchem and Kaisa MacDonald are quintessential Day-Glo troubadours, wind-blown vagabonds who have come in off the road to heal with that time-honored elixir: good music.
When they get very famous, people will love to tell the story of their first encounter. It occurred at open-mic night at a holistic well-being hot-springs resort where some folks wear clothes and some choose not to.
Arnold Mitchem had been spending himself, down to his very soul, in the Los Angeles music scene when he opted out and headed for the desert southwest, cutting a pair of fine albums of meditative instrumental guitar music. Kaisa MacDonald had been formally trained as a pianist and flautist but was now exploring guitar according to her own intuitive methods. By the end of their first performance, a brand-new synergy was developing.
Blue Morning, their second album as a duo, is engineered for a cozy feel as if it had been recorded in a cabin in the mountains. (It was actually done in North Hollywood.) It’s music for sipping chamomile and looking out the kitchen window at the wildflowers, staring in childlike wonder at them as if for the first time.
That’s the big delight in this record: lots of elements can be discerned - funk, old-timey porch music, folk harmonies, some lyrical introspection, but they come together in the service of an innocent vision, a vision of a healthy world, one that may momentarily dismay us, but that’s safe for exploring. In a phrase, it’s modern-day hippie music. Rest assured, though, that it’s crafted with a seasoned pro’s feel for pop song structure. In fact, many these songs could be redone in any number of different arrangements. That’s how well they stand up as compositions.
For instance, guitar hooks - the kinds that introduce songs or lead from refrains back to verses - are on prominent display here, beginning with the one that kicks off the album’s first cut, “Gypsy Girl.” It’s simple but snaky and stylish. The one that takes us back to the verses on “Laredo Holiday” is a disarmingly simple minor-scale walk-down, but it’s supremely effective where it’s placed.
In fact, all the guitar playing on this record is a joy. Mitchem weaves in and out of his own overdubbed lines on both bass and six-string on “Slide,” floating a bluesy, down-home groove over some syncopated chugging for an infectious jam feel. On “Skin,” Mitchem and MacDonald set up a lazy major-seventh rhythm pattern that nicely reinforces the lyrical them of delight in holding your sweet one in your arms.
MacDonald is the more engaging of the two singers. Her thin, midrange voice takes unexpected melodic turns and approaches phrasing in ways that make the songs’ lines more unique than the listener would anticipate. She sounds, by turns, like a whimsical little girl and a haggard woman who’s experienced life beyond her years. Just about the time I am tempted to put her in some familiar musical bag, she puts her own signature on her efforts and I forget the whole matter of influences.
Here we get to the crux of the matter. If I were Bourgeois Gypsies, I would forego the whole comparison thing in the promotional copy. There is no need for this musical unit with a vision unlike any other to waste time hoping we’ll like them because they sound like some other act. I like Bourgeois Gypsies because they make me feel like kicking back, being in the moment, appreciating my friends, kin, animals, the sunshine on my lawn, the laughter of the kids down the lane, the groove that comes from playing music without pressure. We don’t have a whole lot of that on our cultural landscape these days. That’s why these folks are important.
http://www.bgypsies.com
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| Article Rating | Average Score: 4
Votes: 2
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