Howe Gelb Photo: Supplied
Nick Bollinger ponders the eclectic catalogue of Howe Gelb with a reissue and a brand new album from the prolific singer-songwriter.
Over the last thirty years, Tuscon-based musician Howe Gelb has amassed a catalogue of music you could get lost in. Between his group Giant Sand and his various solo and collaborative projects, he’s made something like fifty albums. Neither his brand new record nor the latest reissue from his back catalogue are necessarily typical, and yet, for their wilful diversity, they sort of are.
It’s a decade now since ‘Sno Angel Like You was first released, and its recent reissue in expanded form is an acknowledgement that in Gelb’s extensive discography it holds a special place. 'Sno Angel Like You was recorded in Ottowa, after Gelb had found himself programmed at a concert there between a couple of gospel choirs.
Gelb has shown before that he is partial to spontaneous collaborations. A visit to New Zealand a few years ago found him performing with the Wellington Ukulele Orchestra, and he seemed quite comfortable in the company of a dozen four-string strummers. And evidently those massed Canadian voices sparked some similar urge to collaborate.
Gelb gets a simple, emphatic call-and-response working for him there, on a song full of existential questions like ‘But I Did Not’, which he presumably wrote with choral accompaniment in mind. He also took the opportunity to revisit the odd song he had recorded before, like ‘Get To Leave’, which finds him contemplating "rumours of a better world" and the things we do to “keep the spirit moving’, and that seems to be enough to get the Voices Of Praise (who are accompanying him) into a mood of righteous testifying.
The other source of material here is Rainer Ptacek, the admired Tuscon guitarist and songwriter, who died in 1997.
Gelb pays tribute to him by reworking three of his songs, and they provide some of the record’s climactic moments.
Gelb sings like a Midwestern Lou Reed; terse and dry, pitched somewhere between melody and conversation, and usually falling more on the conversational side. Musically he has often been characterised as roots rock or Americana. But the truth is, Gelb’s music ranges across genres, sometimes radically, as you’ll find with his new record, Future Standards. It finds Gelb at the piano, propped up only by a light jazzy rhythm section, with songs that owe more in structure to Hoagy Carmichael or Cole Porter than to any roots rock.
Gelb has evidently set himself an assignment here: to write the kind of pre-rock’n’roll piano ballads you might once have heard Sinatra sing. And maybe that’s not such a stretch as it seems. Gelb has always been a mischievous rhymer, and he’s retained all his wit and wordplay here, while encasing it in the kind of verse structures you would find in the Great American Songbook. His melodies lean that way too, though it’s not always so easy to discern them through his laconic vocal style.
It’s an entertaining and unexpected detour for Gelb. But are these, as the title proclaims, future standards? The genre may be different from any he has dabbled in before, but the result is still so thoroughly imbued with his own droll wit and off-centre musicality, that I find it hard to imagine I’ll be hearing any of these tunes echoing from piano bars any time soon. Yet it’s a welcome new addition to Howe Gelb’s ever more extensive, ever more surprising catalogue.
‘Sno Angel Like You (+ ‘Sno Angel Winging It) & Future Standards are available on Fire Records.
