Show Me the Way Home, Honey

Winslow-King is from Cadillac, Michigan but he calls New Orleans home and has lived there since 2002 when his car was stolen in the French Quarter with all his musical equipment in it. At the time, the guitarist had already immersed himself in the academic study of jazz and composition. But, he found the emotional sterility and high-bandwidth musicality that informed so much bop and fusion jazz to be a dead- end, vapid and disconnected. He related instead to th folk music of the legendary Woody Guthrie and the cryptic deep blues of Mississippi John Hurt, music from, as writer Greil Marcus termed it, “the old, weird America.” Having his car stolen may, in fact, be one of the best things that ever happened to Luke Winslow-King.

He was quickly accepted into the music theory program at the University of New Orleans, and was eventually awarded a prestigious scholarship to study Czech classical music at St. Charles University in Prague. But while Winslow-King is certainly a heavy-hitter in terms of musical knowledge, instrumental prowess and compositional ability, his approach to the music of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta is never dry, never academic. His compositions are not musicological set pieces, nor do they ever reek of the dusty utility of the affected and dolorous purist. Luke Winslow-King pulled off the considerable feat of creating something beautiful and unaffected and new from the plump and thickly intertwined history of the great American musics — New Orleans jazz and Mississippi Delta blues. On these gorgeous and glowing recordings made for Oxford Sounds, you’ll hear Luke Winslow-King — accompanied by the lovely washboard percussionist and back-up singer Esther Rose and double-bassist Cassidy Holden — deliver a number of tunes that reference ragtime, dixieland jazz, minstrel tunes, and 1920’s pop. That none of this music ever sounds even remotely like a revival act is testament to his considerable skill as a songwriter, arranger, guitarist and singer. The lyrical themes, too, harmonize with a 1920’s New Orleans aesthetic but they thankfully never veer into the execrable kitsch of, say, Leon Redbone or the ham-fisted hippie humorousness of early David Bromberg or Jerry Garcia solo records. Recorded by Andrew Ratcliffe at his superlative Tweed Recording Studio in Oxford, the session features several songs taken mainly from Winslow-King’s recently released album “The Coming Tide”. “Ragtime Millionaire” is as infectious as the title suggests, totally engaging. The song “The Coming Tide” is a real classic, simple and lovely, a wonderful and contagious tune with excellent accompaniment from Esther Rose. “Mississippi Slow Drag” is nothing short of stunning, though, a great ambling dance number delivered with faint ennui and replete with cool slide guitar phrases that recall the legendary Ry Cooder as well as that other under-heralded guru of pre-rock American guitar music, David Lindley. Of course, those guys got their licks from the Delta, too. ~Pat Cochran