Loaf Comes Quackly, Whatever You Do

I've been offline for a little over a week. Well, sorry to my regular readers (phphpffffhhfrt), but you'll probably get 3 posts out of me then I'm off for another week or so. In the interests of half arsed efforts, here's a revuiew most of you wil already have read from the latest Nightshift. See some of you at Punt tomorrow? We've probably never met, but that won't stop the drunken camarederie, eh?


DUCK BAKER, Phoenix Picturehouse, 19/4/10


Every two-bit mouse-clicker has had a crack nowadays at a “soundtrack to an imaginary film”, but watching a gig in a cinema with no projections is something else. Surreally, Virginian guitarist Duck Baker plays beneath the huge white expanse of the unused screen, on a little stool so that we can only see his twitching moustachioed head, like some strange Beckett play about a disembodied downhome musician.

Thankfully, Baker’s affable presence defuses the environmental oddity, and the show is half concert, half rambling, fascinating lecture on The Roots & Branches Of American Music, to quote his latest album title. He’s an urbane and jovial raconteur – to be honest, if there hadn’t been a timetable to keep, he’d probably still be sitting in the foyer now, chatting to the listeners during the interval – and he makes some insightful comments (Scott Joplin is the jazz J S Bach, in Duck’s world, which actually makes perfect sense), but the night is really about the music.

Unlike many fingerstyle guitarists, who use their impressive technique to create a mellifluous and hollow new age waft, Baker really attacks the music, burrs and percussive snaps from his strings interjecting rudely into delicate licks. Baker plays a wide range of material, highlights being a Salif Keita number and his own gospel whirlwind “Blood Of The Lamb”, but every tune is a rumble down a rocky road in an old jalopy: listen to the way in which he stretches the melody in “For Dancers Only”, and you might be forgiven for thinking he’s trying to recall how it goes, or check out the amazing way he dissects Chuck Berry’s dumbass “Maybelline” like James Blood Ulmer deconstructing an Ornette Coleman number.

Baker’s knowledge of American music, as well as related work from Europe and Africa, is encyclopaedic, but this respect for the material doesn’t stop him adding his own idiosyncracies. He adapts tunes written for banjo, piano, fiddle and The Duke Ellington Orchestra, but never tries to emulate artists, no matter how highly he regards them. Duck Baker is something rare, especially in roots circles: an expert who isn’t a purist. Or perhaps he’d rather just be called a musician.