There is something deep within each of us that wants to push the boundaries to experience something that we’ve never encountered before. Some people are driven to distraction by an uncharted corner on a map, others by the promise of a blank canvas. For Steve Dawson, it’s the strings along a fretboard that suggest limitless possibilities. As a multiple Juno Award-winning producer and sideman, Steve spends a lot of his time in the studio capturing the essence of artists such as Jim Byrnes, Matt Patershuk, Kelly Joe Phelps, John Hammond, The Birds of Chicago and Big Dave McLean. But, it’s when Steve turns his hand to composing and playing his own original material that he truly shines.
‘Lucky Hand’ represents a high point of more than two decades of musical searching. Comprised of ten instrumental tracks of solo, duo and full-bodied string quartet works, Dawson has never released music as sweeping, dynamic and visually suggestive as this. Enlisting his old partner, Jesse Zubot along to create complementary and adventurous arrangements for his guitar excursions, these completely realized compositions – with Zubot’s orchestration adding colour to the sepia tinged melodies - represent Dawson’s finest recordings yet.
2018 marks 20 years since the debut of Zubot and Dawson, and their collaborations never cease to inspire. ‘Lucky Hand’ is Steve Dawson’s 8th album and his first record of instrumental music since ‘Rattlesnake Cage’ in 2014. The scope of his musical
voice broadens to take on a cinematic quality as he sketches aural paintings and creates tapestries of sound with his guitar. Recorded live off the floor, with up to twelve microphones in various positions throughout the large studio space to capture the guitar and orchestration, this recording represents the perfect intersection of the primitive and the modern that has fascinated Steve for so long.
Black Hen Music
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