Jorma Kaukonen,
Stars in My Crown
(Red House, 2007)

Jorma -- pronounced Yorma -- Kaukonen not only played guitar for Jefferson Airplane but gave that legendary band its distinctive moniker (an abridgement of a joke on Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson's name). Kaukonen's first love, however, has always been traditional American folk music. He's a widely admired finger-style acoustic guitarist, strongly influenced by ragtime-blues-gospel giant Gary Davis (1896-1972).

Stars in My Crown, Kaukonen's first for the St. Paul-based Red House, is an appealing collection of original songs and instrumentals, covers and traditionals, many with a (not overbearing) religious/spiritual text or subtext. A thorough-going professional, Kaukonen knows a solid number when he hears (or composes) one, and all 14 cuts afford satisfaction, each in its own way. I am particularly taken with the supremely tuneful instrumentals, where Kaukonen gets to demonstrate his first-rate picking skills, playing for the melody and the emotion and not for the showy performance.

For the album he's assembled a bunch of superior musicians, including noted bluegrassers Rob Ickes and Tim Stafford, but this is not a bluegrass album, even if bluegrass' echoes are to be heard here and there. Nor, in spite of having been recorded in Nashville, is Stars country. It amounts rather to an intelligently conceived blend of folk musics, based in a profound knowledge of tradition and confident enough to integrate new ideas to fashion a fresh sound. One hears, most of all, Rev. Davis's influence in the guitar, but also references to a range of rooted American genres, including trad jazz and Hawaiian slack key.

Kaukonen, who sings in a light, sometimes thin tenor, has the good sense (and experience) not to push it where it won't go. The effect is a kind of easy-going intimacy, affording the impression that Kaukonen is a decent man with a generous spirit -- surely one non-musical reason Stars stands up so sturdily to repeated listenings. The man just feels like good company. He also manages to pull off something rarely achieved: the integration of a children's choir into an arrangement without triggering that icky sugar-overdose sensation. I refer to the gratifyingly effective presentation of the venerable spiritual "By the River of Babylon."

Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around" seems, on the other hand, an odd choice. One of the last songs Cash wrote, it amounts to a Book of Revelation-inspired answer to Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall." Cash's version (on the 2002 American Recordings album of the same name) actually rattled me when I first heard it. Cash's uncompromising delivery manages to stir up fears of the end times, whether defined as a biblical apocalypse or as our private sense of fading mortality -- our own personal end times. If Cash's reading is all dark clouds and rolling thunder, Kaukonen's is a sudden cool breeze hinting at a coming storm.

by Jerome Clark
Rambles.NET
26 May 2007



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