Buck Curran — One Evening and Other Folk Songs (Obsolete/ESP-Disk')
Curran (left) and Jodi Pedrali (right)
The Takoma-style guitar picker Buck Curran has been a regular feature of our coverage at Dusted, whether playing his own songs or paying tribute to artists including Jack Rose and Robbie Basho. Up to now, however, we have considered him mostly as a solo artist and, to some degree, as a curator of other’s work. In One Evening and Other Folk Songs, he fleshes out his psychedelic raga blues with a full band, including keyboard player and frequent live collaborator Jodi Pedrali, drummer Dave Barbarossa (a new wave veteran of Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant), bassist Robert Frassini Moneta and singer Adele Pappalardo.
The disc revisits two songs that Curran previously recorded solo (“One Evening” and “Deep in the Loving Arms of my Babe”) explores further two joint efforts with Pedrali (“Sadness” and “Zitkala-Sa (Song for Shylah)),” reworks a folk song twice in fusion jazz mode (“Black Is the Color”) and adds a couple of new songs to the repertoire. The new versions are uniformly, less folk and more psychedelic than their original iterations, seething with feverish electric keyboards, bristling with propulsive drums and bass. “One Evening” on Curran’s 2020 No Love Is Sorrow, for instance, is a dark and haunted blues-folk dirge that evokes prime 1960s Michael Chapman. Here, it rumbles with rock energy, the bass tactile and twitchy, the drums slapping, the keyboards radiating silver 1970s Fender Rhodes cool. “Deep in the Loving Arms of my Babe” likewise picks up heat and friction. The drums and bass underline its lonely freight train rhythm. The backing vocals—that’s Pappalardo—infuse its mournful contours with mystery.
Yet it’s the two versions of “Black is the Color” that really leave a mark. The song is, of course, as traditional as it comes, born in some anonymous Appalachian hollow and covered by everyone from Jean Ritchie to Nina Simone to Judy Collins to, more recently, Espers and Angel Olsen. You might not think there was much anyone could add to the tune by this point, but you’d be wrong. It starts with the eerie, free-floating vocals of Pappalardo, sliding and fluting over the well-worn tune in loosely tethered melisma; she stretches the outline of the melody into elusive and ghostly shapes. Add to this the dreaming pulse of bass, the raucous commentary of drums, and again, the high reverberating electric keyboard tones. It’s an unearthly song, touching on 1970s jazz and torch blues and the most primitive forms of folk, but lightly, without tying itself down to any of them. There’s an alternate version later on the disc, a bit dreamier, a bit more nocturnal, and also very fine.
Curran’s notes indicate that these songs were recorded quickly, mostly live and in just a few takes, the product of a sudden electric connection between and among musicians that hadn’t worked together, at least in this configuration, much before. It feels like lightning striking, the current striking Curran’s already compelling folk psych melodies and illuminating them with fire.
