Personally, I have never understood the appeal of turducken.\u00a0 Turkey, stuffed inside duck, stuffed inside chicken?\u00a0 How demented do you have to be to even come up with something like that?<\/p>\n
When it comes to music, however, it\u2019s a different matter — because Doug Wamble manages to stuff country inside gospel-blues inside jazz and make it sound like the most natural thing in the world.<\/p>\n
Singer-songwriter-guitarist Wamble comes out of the jazz tradition, but his musical reach acknowledges few if any boundaries.\u00a0 On this, his third solo disc for E1 (formerly Koch, and still the biggest indie label around), Wamble is again backed by the equally versatile Roy Dunlap (piano\/keys), Jeff Hanley (bass), and Pete Miles (drums\/percussion).<\/p>\n
Opener \u201cThink About It All\u201d might sound like a fairly straight-up Robert Cray-ish smooth-electric-blues-with-horns, but \u201cFreezer Burn\u201d quickly insinuates itself into your brain with more unique pleasures, a sort of Jack Johnson – Steve Winwood mind-meld.\u00a0 (Though it\u2019s hard not to think of Cray again when Wamble segues from a breezy island vibe to stinging your ear with sharp yet tasteful electric solos.)<\/p>\n
\u201cFind Her Way\u201d tries on an acoustic Dave Matthews feel before melting into the country blues \u201cIt May Be A Dream,\u201d featuring guest Carrie Rodriguez on violin and vocals. \u00a0Then \u201cSweet Return To Madness\u201d delivers a rather Bonnie Raitt-ish upbeat blues about dying.\u00a0 Wait, what? <\/p>\n
As if to blow your mind for good, \u201cBitter Angels\u201d follows with what I can only describe as Texas boogie gospel\u2026 except that the mid-song break has a different melody altogether, so maybe it\u2019s progressive Texas boogie gospel.\u00a0 \u201cOh Heaven\u201d is a sort of gospel trance tune with beautiful jazzy drum work under a spacey circular piano line, a very atmospheric piece from the midst of which rises Wamble\u2019s very Derek Trucks-like slide solo.<\/p>\n
Wamble reaches way back for \u201cI Needn\u2019t Try,\u201d delivering finger-snapping swing jazz, complete with a lilting solo on his favorite hollow-body acoustic, followed by a jazzy piano solo from Dunlap.\u00a0 For \u201cHome (There\u2019s A Light On)\u201d he returns to the slide and again emulates Trucks\u2019 ability to make the instrument sing like a voice, before closing things out with \u201cI Know,\u201d a contemplative acoustic blues featuring just Wamble and his open body acoustic.\u00a0 The sound is pure contemporary blues in the Keb\u2019 Mo\u2019 vein, with Wamble\u2019s guitar sounding almost like a banjo in places thanks to the way he plucks it.<\/p>\n
\u201cMusical chameleon\u201d is such a clich\u00e9\u2026 but clich\u00e9s are always born from a kernel of truth.\u00a0 Doug Wamble is an American roots music craftsman of the first order, equally adept at jazz, blues, and country, and unafraid to turn these tunes in imaginative, even progressive directions.\u00a0 The thing about all the musical reference points I threw in above is that they are all just that \u2013 reference points.\u00a0 Thanks to his remarkable range and imaginative blending of genres, Doug Wamble\u2019s music is all his own, and tremendously satisfying at that.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
To put it another way, I might not care for turducken on my grill, but in my CD player, it\u2019s pretty damned tasty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8584],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-42006","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-doug-wamble","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42006"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}