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[MUSIC REVIEW] Leo Kottke, Colonial Theatre, Oct. 4, 2006
10.5.06
Leo Kottke at the Colonial Theatre, Pittsfield, Mass.
Review by SETH ROGOVOY, critic-at-large, BERKSHIRE LIVING
(PITTSFIELD, Mass., October 5, 2006) -- The overall impression with which one leaves a Leo Kottke concert is not so much that the singer and superb guitarist has just performed for you, but rather, that you just stumbled in on Kottke at home when he wasn't expecting visitors – in fact, he may have been sleeping when you walked right in – and that, too embarrassed to have been caught napping at eight in the evening, Kottke did his best to entertain you with his wry wit and his amazing guitar playing for a decent amount of time before standing up and saying goodbye.
This isn't meant as a criticism of Kottke's performance, but rather as a description of his unique, seemingly effortless, albeit drowsy approach to keeping an audience enraptured for ninety minutes straight, as he did last night in his solo performance – one man, one mike, one guitar -- at Pittsfield's Colonial Theater.
Actually, there were two guitars, but the 61-year-old entertainer played only one at a time. But if you closed your eyes, especially during the first half of the concert, when he played his twelve-stringed instrument, you could be forgiven for thinking there were multiple instruments and musicians on stage.
Kottke doesn't play the guitar in any conventional sense of the term. Sure, he uses the basics of strumming chords, plucking, and fingerpicking that are available to everyone, but somehow, in his hands, the instrument turns into a lush, resonant orchestra, suited as much to the Bach-like fugual improvisations he rattles off as to the jittery rags and modal slide blues that pepper his repertoire.
His guitar is a symphony of bells, chimes, ringing harmonics, bass, percussion, keyboard like effects, and, of course, a complete string section, capable of producing a greater variety of tones than many a five or six piece band.
Kottke grew up throughout the South and the Midwest and attended college in Minnesota, and shares more than a little of his dry, offbeat, Midwestern sense of the absurd, his sardonic nature, and his penchant for meandering tall tales with fellow Midwestern Garrison Keillor – it's no surprise that he's a frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion.
Kottke's musical style is eclectic enough to incorporate elements of jazz, classical, folk, blues, country, new-age, Caribbean music, and rock. He's always remained something of a cult figure, under the radar, but he's also a musician's musician who has been sought out by the likes of Chet Atkins, Procul Harum, Lyle Lovett, John Fahey, Los Lobos, Rickie Lee Jones, and Mike Gordon, the bass player for the jam-band Phish.
Kottke interspersed his instrumental meanderings and songs with dry asides and seemingly aimless tangents. The first words out of his mouth after taking the stage of the century old vaudeville house were "Built in 1903; same as me." He told stories of his father, a golfer; a scary canoe trip where he was left alone; one about his daughter, a budding comedienne; and a tale about fellow singer guitarist John Prine rescuing two teenage girls from a huge fiberglass orange.
He introduced a version of Bob Dylan’s epic ballad, "Desolation Row," saying that he met Dylan once in a recording studio and talked to him for an hour and a half without realizing he was talking to Bob Dylan.
That's the world according to Leo Kottke.
-- Review by SETH ROGOVOY, critic-at-large, BERKSHIRE LIVING
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