Gig review: Duck Baker

Published on Wednesday 14 April 2010 20:40

DUCK BAKER CAMEO, EDINBURGH * * * *

EXACTLY why the veteran US guitar maestro Duck Baker is doing a tour of the Picturehouse independent cinema chain was never made clear, but the Cameo's Screen 3 made a comfy and conducive venue for this intimate solo gig.

Like Baker's recent 18th album, the show is called The Roots and Branches of American Music, a summation of what's effectively been his stock-in-trade since his debut release in 1976.

Far from its being any kind of historical or musicological lecture, though, Baker simply led us on an easy-going ramble around some of the myriad vintage and contemporary styles he's made his own, illustrating as much as explaining their evolution and overlap.

He began, for instance, by highlighting the various cross-fertilisations of African, British and Celtic influences on US soil, via a mellow, impish Thelonious Monk blues and a set of Appalachian banjo tunes. Other of the tributaries feeding into both jazz and country music's development were exemplified later on, including bluegrass, ragtime, western swing, gospel and cowboy songs, while those Old Country connections were further underlined by an elegant rendering of a Scott Skinner march, an Irish medley collected a century ago by Francis ONeill in Chicago, and a lyrical, classical-tinged number adapted from a Salif Keita track.

Baker's justly legendary virtuosity on six strings, like his rugged baritone voice, was less an exercise in pristine precision than a masterclass in fully rounded expression, with all the raw-boned directness and organic aural textures much of his material demanded, winningly interwoven with his vast wealth of knowledge and gently barbed humour.