Reviews for Kelly Joe Phelps

Over the space of his 15-year recording career, Vancouver, Washington-based fingerstyle guitarist, singer and top-notch songwriter Phelps has always been on his own maverick wave length.

An album that hasn’t left my playlist since it arrived a couple of weeks ago is Kelly Joe Phelps’s new one, Western Bell. For some KJP fans, this album is bound to be bitter sweet: it finds Phelps returning to slide guitar, but on a completely instrumental album, which means many will no doubt miss his haunting vocals. Me, I just love this CD.

When Bill Frisell and Leo Kottke are in your corner, you don't have to worry much about who isn't…and that pair has already put their stamp of approval on Kelly Joe Phelps' music.

Guitarist and songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps has always traveled an iconoclastic, enigmatic path.

Avant garde fingerpicking here

Kelly Joe Phelps, the American singer and guitarist, is another in the vast club of musicians who reside in relative obscurity despite critical validation with every release. On this latest opus he dispenses with the oblique wordplay that marks his usual output and concentrates instead on his considerable skill with six strings and piece of wood.

This famed fingerstyle and blues guitarist gets adventurous with 11 improvisatory pieces that are meant to shake things up. Kelly Joe Phelps stretches his technique to just-this-side of the breaking point, utilizing alternate tunings, strange rhythms, odd fingerings, and a general lack of regard for tradition.

Kelly Joe Phelps releases his eighth - yet first solely instrumental - album, Western Bell, expressing cool rhythms of a vast and haunting western landscape. With no vocals at all, Phelps's slide guitar takes the lead, producing poignant and wistful ballads that a voice couldn't give proper credence to.

Kelly Joe Phelps has built a reputation as a master solo slide guitarist throughout his 20-year recording career, and anyone who has ever seen him live can attest that he performs with as much intensity, if not more, than the average band.

After a trio of song-based albums, on which his original trademark lap slide guitar seemed to have long since gone, this all-instrumental selection for Steve Dawson's Black Hen label brings Phelps's guitar skills right back into the foreground - but not in the way one might expect.

Kelly Joe Phelps has been travelling with the blues for over a decade and a half. Before that he was a jazz musician, bass player, music teacher and improviser. First and foremost, he is a songwriter and guitar player of both the straight and slide variety.

Kelly Joe Phelps has been touring the world for the last 15 years and this is his eighth album; you could say he's been around the block. It shows. Western Bell is 11 tracks of instrumental guitar that will make your jaw drop off.

U.S. guitar icon Kelly Joe Phelps once said he wasn't sure what he would be doing if he weren't making music.

It is all he's thought about, Phelps said, since he was 14. He'll turn 50 later this year.

"There are a lot of things I'm sure I would enjoying doing. I just don't know what they are because of that goofy guitar," Phelps told his hometown paper in Oregon.

The singer-songwriter's eighth album starts with an instrumental and ends with an instrumental too. The nine tracks in-between are, er, solo instrumentals - there's not a peep from him vocally.

I was admittedly a little late getting to the Kelly Joe Phelps party when I first heard his third record, 1999’s Shine Eyed Mister Zen. With his acoustic guitar flat in his lap, Phelps was able to carve out a style of folk blues with his bar slide that seemed to be as much about free jazz as Fred McDowell.

Kelly Joe’s latest record is an entirely solo, exclusively instrumental offering that both reflects on his life and experiences and expands his personal musical envelope. In the latter context, you must therefore expect more than a modicum of comparatively uneasy listening within a genre-defying musical landscape that’s impossible to pin down.

It's not exactly what record labels consider a good career move, following up your best and most successful singer-songwriter album with a completely solo acoustic guitar collection. But Kelly Joe Phelps has never been one for following the rules, and Western Bell is so often exquisite, and always intriguing, that his commercial divergence is our gain.

In a world adequately full of praise for the likes of Leo Kottke and John Fahey, surely there is room for Washington’s Kelly Joe Phelps. His eighth album of solo acoustic guitar improvisation should be enough to land him status in the company of legends, if he isn’t there already.

One of the most expressive vocalists within the Americana genre, Kelly Joe Phelps has also long been recognized for his dexterity within various guitar styles.

On his latest album, Phelps sings not a word. Instead, in producing a nocturnal collection of 11 solo guitar instrumentals, the West Coast native allows his six and 12 strings to reclaim their rightful place.

SOUNDS LIKE: Pastoral Americana banjo-strummin’ folk music you can set your toe-a-tappin’ to.

WHY/WHY NOT: I find a great deal of pleasure in listening to Americana guitar-pickin' folk. The simplicity, honesty and downright tenacity of this genre lends itself to setting musicians apart. Take Kelly Joe Phelps for example and his new instrumental record, Western Bell.

Sometimes you just have to shut up and play your guitar. For Phelps that time is now. The Washington picker's eighth CD is a back-to-basics affair, with 11 lulling solo instrumentals played on six string, 12-string and lap-steel guitar. Some are folksy; some are bluesy; none are showoffy; all are gorgeous, if somewhat overly atmospheric. Don't get rid of the mic just yet, dude.

While his virtuosic guitar skills are enormously respected by his fellow musos, notably Bill Frisell, Kelly Joe Phelps has remained a shadowy figure, operating in the area where Americana backs up against the blues.

he music of Kelly Joe Phelps is often characterized as a mixture of delta blues and jazz, but it transcends such limiting labels. He started by playing and studying jazz, drawing inspiration from free jazz players like Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He later converted to blues and blended elements of the two into his own style.

They spend a lot of years on the road, meandering here, there and everywhere, letting the music be their guide.
Such is the life of a touring musician -- the long days, the excitement of the unknown and the relief of being able to take the stage nightly and do what one does best.

You don't normally associate experimentation with acoustic blues, but Kelly Joe Phelps is not your run-of-the-mill bluesman.

He started playing guitar as a 12-year-old growing up in Sumner, a working class and farming area in Washington state.

Phelps played free-form jazz before he traded in his bass guitar for a Gibson flat-top and turned to acoustic blues.

Slide guitar maestro, back in the Delta at last.

Not that we don’t like his lyrics and singing but us longtime Phelps fans have longed for an instrumental album that allowed him to take his instrument and run with it. This all new album finds him alone in the studio with just his guitars exploring the limits of his vast skills.