Kelly Joe Phelps

All Music Guide:

Vancouver, WA-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps continues to expand the parameters of modern blues through his strong commitment to literary songs and his expressive yet simple guitar stylings. While casual listeners may call Phelps a bluesman, his playing is so fluid, dexterous, and improvised he obviously has the soul of a jazz musician. Phelps was raised in a music loving household in Sumner, WA, near Tacoma. The son of Seventh Day Adventist parents, Phelps' father was an air conditioning and refrigeration specialist and his mother worked as a housewife and Tupperware sales person. "They didn't have a large record collection," he recalled in a 2000 interview, "but the influence from them musically was the fact that they played music, at home, almost daily." Phelps' parents didn't play music for religious reasons, but merely for emotional ones. Phelps' father played guitar, fiddle, piano, and harmonica while his mother played guitar and some banjo. His father liked country & western music, but also developed an ear for blues, as he brought home albums by Meade "Lux" Lewis, Pete Johnson, and other boogie-woogie piano players. "I can remember being five or six and hearing him beat out these boogie-woogie tunes on piano," Phelps recalled.

Phelps got interested in jazz guitar when he was in his teens, so he ended up paying equally close attention to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Led Zeppelin. Phelps switched from jazz to blues while he was still living in Portland, OR, because he saw the blues as a way to continue expanding his parameters and challenging himself. He moved from Seattle down to Portland, OR in 1980, and there he found equally vibrant jazz and blues scenes. He began to hit the jazz clubs and heard live jazz in clubs four and five nights a week. He spent the better part of the next 10 years playing bass in small jazz groups, but at home and in private, he would continue to play guitar, occasionally experimenting with a slide, to coax bluesier tunes from his instrument. In the late 1980s, Phelps heard an album by classic acoustic bluesman Mississippi Fred MacDowell that turned his career around. "Once I heard the country blues players, I wanted to figure out a way to improvise like a jazz musician would, but at the same time play a style of music that was more closely linked to folk forms," he recalled. Like a jazz musician, he reads his audiences carefully and works without the aid of a song list at his live shows. Phelps' debut for Burnside Records led him to American Records, but after that company folded, he got picked up by Rykodisc. That company in turn was acquired in part by Palm Pictures, an interactive music/film company run by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell.

Like any good bluesman, Phelps averages more than 200 nights a year on the road, and always carries a notebook with him, jotting down song ideas as they pop up. But, like so many others, he does the vast majority of his songwriting at home. Fortunately, Phelps' parents have come out to see him at gigs around Washington state and witnessed some of his success in packing theaters, festivals, and large coffee houses. His recordings include Lead Me On, his 1994 debut for the Portland-based Burnside Records label, followed up in 1997 by Roll Away the Stone for Rykodisc. His other releases for Rykodisc include Shine Eyed Mister Zen, in 1999 and Sky Like a Broken Clock, in 2001. Since 2001, other releases include the Beggar's Oil EP, Slingshot Professionals, Tap the Red Cane Whirlwind, Tunesmith Retrofit, the last a 2006 release for Rounder Records, and 2009's Western Bell, his first for the Black Hen label. By blues standards, Phelps is young, so there's much more to come from this free-thinking, innovative, groundbreaking songwriter, singer, and guitarist.

Wikipedia:

Kelly Joe Phelps (born October 5, 1959, Sumner, Washington, United States) is an American musician and songwriter. His music has been characterized as a mixture of delta blues and jazz.

Career

Kelly Joe Phelps grew up in Sumner, Washington, a blue-collar and farming town. He learned country and folk songs, as well as drums and piano, from his father. He began playing guitar at age twelve.

Phelps concentrated on free jazz and took his cues from musicians like Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. He spent 10 years playing jazz, mostly as a bass player. He refers to his "conversion" to a blues musician when he began listening to acoustic blues masters like Fred McDowell and Robert Pete Williams.

Initially gaining notice for his solo lapstyle slide guitar playing, which he played by laying the instrument flat and fretting it with a heavy steel bar, he has incorporated more ensemble work in his later albums. Inspired by the birth of his daughter Rachel in 1990, Phelps began writing songs. He began singing and released his critically praised debut, Lead Me On, in 1995. This album showcased Phelps' craft, and as well as his own songs, he tackled traditional numbers such as "Motherless Children" and "Fare Thee Well."

He released his second album, the gospel influenced Roll Away the Stone (1997) and followed it up with 1999's, Shine Eyed Mister Zen.

His fourth record, Sky Like a Broken Clock, appeared in 2001. This time he was joined by a bassist and a drummer - its companion piece, Beggar's Oil EP, was a critic's favourite in 2002. In order to achieve a richer, orchestrated sound on Slingshot Professionals, released in 2003, he collected a wider collection of musicians to play guitar, bass, drums, mandolin, violin, and accordion.

In 2005, Phelps released a live album, Tap the Red Cane Whirlwind, which was followed a year later by the studio album Tunesmith Retrofit. In 2009 he released an album of instrumentals titled Western Bell. Following the release of that CD, he began recording and touring with the American singer-songwriter Corinne West.