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Master Picker, Etc.
Monterey County Weekly
Leo Kottke brings his original voice and style to
the Sunset.
Mar 24, 2005
By Stuart Thornton
Unplugged and Indescribable: Leo Kottke's allure
is a product of his mysteriously versatile sound
and his baffling acoustic abilities.
Listening to a couple of
Leo Kottke's albums, 1997's Standing In My Shoes
and 2004's Try and Stop Me, makes it extremely
difficult to classify the immensely talented
acoustic guitarist. Standing In My Shoes features
big riffs and a modern sound, with a drumbeat right
out of a hip-hop tune on the release's title track.
In addition, his cover of Fleetwood Mac's "World
Turning" starts with a thicket of percussion and
ends with a sitar cutting through the music like a
laser.
Try and Stop Me is an
altogether different beast. Very intimate sounding,
almost all of Try and Stop Me is just Kottke and
his guitar playing abstract fingerstyle guitar
songs like "Death By Reputation" and "Mockingbird
Hill." Almost all of the album sounds timeless and
placeless&emdash;like it could have been played for
the Queen of England in a parlor during the 1700s
or at a Mississippi juke joint at the turn of the
century&emdash;except for the last tune, a cover of
the Weavers' "Banks of Marble" with Los Lobos that
sounds like a Dust Bowl ballad sung with Kottke's
ocean deep voice.
In an e-mail interview with
Kottke, the Minnesota-based guitarist admits that
both of the vastly different releases are not an
apt representation of his true self. When asked
which better represents the true Leo Kottke, he
responds with "neither," adding, "I'll never get it
right."
Despite the air of mystery
around his musical identity, Kottke is able to
pinpoint one of the reasons why he got into
acoustic music: John Hurt.
"Sometimes, I think it was
his hat," he jokes. "His nature and the nature of
his playing were irresistible. There was a great
kindness and a rolling rhythm in his music."
After learning to play
guitar, Kottke traveled around the East Coast as an
itinerant musician, took a brief stab at college
life and had a stint in the Navy. Following these
formative experiences, Kottke released his debut
CD, Twelve String Blues, in 1969.
By 1971, Kottke released
his major label CD, Mudlark, on Capitol Records. At
the time, the record company tried to promote
Kottke as a singer/songwriter type. Kottke seems to
think he doesn't quite fit the bill of a
singer/songwriter.
"Whatever I am, I just feel
lucky," he says. "But, my curiosity will always be
for the guitar."
Following the release of
over 25 recordings including 1973's My Feet Are
Smiling and 1975's Chewing Pine, Kottke is
garnering a lot of interest for a project with
Phish's former bassist Mike Gordon. In 2002, the
duo released an album titled Clone.
Now, Kottke is getting
ready to release a new album with Gordon in the
not-too-distant future. "The label is trying to
decide when to release it," he says. "Things get
hairy when a label likes a record&emdash;and they
like this one. It's called Sixty-Six Steps. It's
basically a trio with a lot of vocals and maybe
three instrumentals."
With interest in this album
from both Kottke's fans and Phishheads, it is
possible that this upcoming release with Gordon
will finally define the elusive guitarist for a
large number of music enthusiasts.
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