Skilled audacity

Shine Eyed Mister Zen
Kelly Joe Phelps
Rykodisc RCD 10476

Review by Barry Healy

Kelly Joe Phelps delights in extracting the last drop of passion and pain out of the acoustic slide guitar, bending and scratching at the strings till they seem to bleed. He is like a surgeon: he has no fear of blood as he lunges into the arteries of US traditional music.

In last year's Roll Away the Stone, he meditated long and hard on the essence of gospel songs. On Shine Eyed Mister Zen, again playing alone, he ranges wider for his subject matter but still remains deeply imbued with the Mississippi blues.

Phelps is no musicologist. He deliberately brings together the sensibilities of the blues players and jazz experimenters like John Coltrane. That may sound pretentious or perhaps impossible, but when you hear how he weaves into his guitar in “Katy” or “River Rat Jimmy”, you have to wonder at his skill and audacity.

Except for the Leadbelly standard “Good Night Irene”, all the tracks here are written by Phelps. This allows him more room to examine human issues such as love and its difficulties, as opposed to the human relationship with death and the afterlife (unlike Roll Away the Stone).

It also reveals that he is quite an able lyricist -- though goodness, doesn’t death show up a lot in this man’s world. Still, it probably comes with the territory.

Luckily for the listener, all the lyrics are included, because Phelps still mumbles something fierce in his singing.

That's a minor distraction, really. Kelly Joe Phelps has a voice that seems perfectly pitched to accompany the steely sounds of a slide guitar. It almost seems like he was born to sing these blues.

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