Yet Another Interlude...
The summer of 97’ was a year in which I found myself exploring a lot of new musical concepts in my own playing style as a guitarist. Being strongly influenced by the jazz style of legendary guitarist Wes Montgomery and his often used technique of employing the underside uf his thumb as a plectrum to push out beautiful single line jazz melodies, my imagination and creativity was thirsty to explore the possibilities of this mode of playing. In other areas I was being strongly influenced by a lot of 70’s soul and funk music, folks like Sly Stone, Van Morrison, and Parliament Funkadelic were beginning to make their influence known in my playing and songwriting style. Around the time that this was occurring there came a night that seemed to take all of the disparate elements of everything that was turning me on musically and manifest them all in one package.
I took a trip down to Ithaca to The Haunt, My favorite music venue at the time, no longer at it’s legendary hole-in-the-wall location, to see a band that a friend of mine had casually recommended to me. Moonboot Lover, what kind of name is that for a soul band, really?
Nonetheless, I was pretty well guaranteed by my friend who was meeting me at the club, that it would be time well spent. The band was a 3-piece out fit that consisted of Hammond organ, drums, and guitar. It was hard to tell what was more enthralling about the whole outfit, Guitarist singer Peter Prince and his utterly infectious and high energy playing and soulful Van Morrison-esque singing, or the two brothers, Al and Neal Evans, Situated on opposite sides of the stage facing each other, obviously to me communicating with each other on a level that was far deeper than just music, which was the most glorious, soulful music that, at that time, I’d ever heard. I noticed at varying points in the show that Prince would lose the pick and opt to let his thumb and fingers do the work. It wasn’t so much that he was sans pick, as that that he was man-handling his instrument in such a dominating, visceral way. I was mesmerized by the results. it was like nothing I’d ever heard before, as if some barrier between his own passionate soul and the instrument had been lifted and what I was witnessing was pure joyous energy.
During the set break I took some time to talk to him. He was very gracious; smoking him out probably contributed to that fact, but we spent the whole of he set break talking about his playing style, a little bit about Wes, and everything that I observed about the pureness of his expression. During the second set there came a climactic point In the song that they were playing where he was about to go for his solo where he turned, look directly at me, and when he had my attention, flung his pick at me and systematically proceeded to tear apart my reality piece by piece, ever so emphatically that 5 minutes and 5 broken strings later, the show was over and my mind was sufficiently blown.
Fast forward 2 years later, I was 28, in college, playing in 2 bands, booking shows around the general area, doing live sound engineering with one of Upstate NY’s biggest reinforcement companies and still, somehow I had time for 2-3 shows a week. I’d taken the weekend off to go to a 3 day music festival called The Flash of Light Festival. At that time, it was something that I would normally not have time for, as the live sound production company that I was affiliated with already had cornered the market on upstate NY’s the 3 day hippie fest scene, but this was one of those rare weekends where I had nothing booked, and It was especially fitting that the predominate theme of the festival was to represent the Jazz/soul/urban influences that were progressively making themselves known in the jam band scene.
I had thought that the highlight of that Friday night was going to be Charlie Hunter. I’d seen him before, but never with his Duo, and yeah it was hot, but as I was taking the time at my campsite to get sufficiently blazed and take in a few home brews after the show, a sound that was new and at the same time vaguely familiar. I rushed up to the main stage area and immediately proceeded to be overtaken by the music which was very organ heavy and seemed to have one foot planted in both the jazz and funk vain. I knew that I heard this sound before, but where? I made my way closer to the stage and that, gracing its presence were to familiar characters that I knew I would never forget anywhere; Al and Neal Evans. But this wasn’t Moon Boot. The man at the center of the stage was someone I had never seen before, and he played in a style that was equally as infectious as Peter prince’, but extraordinarily different. By the end of the show I’d found out that his name was Eric Krasno, and the name of the band was Soulive.