Music Review: Jeff Bell

Bucyrus acoustic guitarist Jeff Bell is an accomplished musician, known from the years he performed as half of the Bell Brothers acoustic duo.

Bell has been making solo appearances recently throughout the area, including in at Sips Coffee House in Mount Vernon, performing songs from his collected body of work, which is influenced by such musicians and bands as Leo Kottke, Son Volt, Steve Vai and Bela Fleck. Bell ties these influences to a blues framework, then leaves room for touches of exotic influence, such as African drumming and Middle Eastern melody.

Newly added to Bell's body of work are two albums released in December on his own Faultline Records label. "Liar's Smile" is a mixture of instrumentals and narratives, while "Pavonia" is purely instrumental.

"Liar's Smile" opens with "Hobet 21," a bleak song from the point of view of a coal miner at the massive, destructive Hobet 21 strip mine in West Virginia. Bell's bluesy guitar-work comes to the fore in the next track, a catchy instrumental titled "Hornet's Waltz." While it isn't really a waltz, it definitely buzzes and broods like an angry hornet. The opening and closing sections of the song are slower and intensely bluesy, reminiscent of the East Texas blues style immortalized in the early 20th century recordings of such players as Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

"Send Up the Moonshine" brings in a lighter, more buoyant tone for contrast, setting up the plaintive "Sell Me a Story," with its evocatively sung lyrics, "It's a medicine for the dead, I've got the world at my feet and flowers in my head." In the five-spot, "Come People" is a delightful surprise, featuring vigorous rhythms on African hand-drums, underlying French lyrics chanted by Bell and Kate Westfall.

The album's title comes from its sixth song, "Liar's Smile," a song about overcoming past disasters: "I have been down to the bottom, and I have climbed the highest mountain, and I have given back all my commandments, but I won't be down again." Like so much of Bell's work, the song is bluesy and melodically catchy. While most of his songs feature intricate finger-picking, this song is played bottleneck style. The dark and compelling "Slow Song" comes next, the rise and fall of its Middle Eastern melody alternates with a faster section, which itself frames a very slow central part of strongly ambivalent emotions. Another instrumental follows, "Sycamore Road," lightening the mood and interweaving intricate finger-picking like the busy patterns of growth in a garden.

The final third of the album starts with "Walter Rollins," an excellent narrative about a Prohibition-era moonshiner, driven by poverty to a life in the shadows, outside the law. A mellow instrumental, whimsically titled "Chicken Feet" follows, before the last narrative song, "King," struts in with controlled nonchalance. The album closes with the return of the African drums in "Drum I." The track starts simply, then grows in complexity and intensity, propelled forward by vigorous beats. The hurtling drums are joined by an Australian didgeridoo, bringing the track to an exotic peak before it fades out.

The more introspective instrumental album "Pavonia" opens with the lullaby, "Whale Song," which seems to cradle the listener with warmth. A brief flurry of gentle finger-picking follows with "20 Watt," quickly succeeded by the spell-binding "Sleeping," which, like "Slow Song" on the other album, melds Middle Eastern arabesques to bluesy brooding, to very impressive effect. Bell's ability to make his instrument sing makes up for the lack of words. As the song unfolds, Bell also drums rhythmically on his guitar in places, adding a new dimension to an already striking song. The song grows with trance-like intensity as it unfolds over a bass-string drone, sustaining interest for its 10-plus minutes of length.

"Charge of Amber" comes next, mellow and laid-back. A brief continuation of "20 Watt" comes next to perk things up for a moment, before continuing in a meditative groove with the intimate and attractive "Song for Kate." "Engineering Clouds" continues the lullaby-like mood of the album in a more pensive style, leading to "Finding Artifacts," which opens with bell-like harmonics, then continues on its quiet way. The final track of the album, "Pavonia," takes its name from an obscure crossroads village in Richland County, and is more quirky and upbeat than anything else on the album.

The album "Pavonia" features smooth and excellent recorded sound, while "Liar's Smile" has some sonic problems in places. Some tracks or parts of tracks on "Liar's Smile" sound as if they were recorded at a lower resolution, giving some tracks the sort of "digital decay" in upper registers that is typical of lower-resolution MP3 formats. This won't bother listeners accustomed to listening to low-res MP3s, but listeners with high-end equipment and expectations may find it annoying. Also, a few of the tracks suffer from rough edits, though Bell's musicianship carries the day, making a few glitches worth tolerating in order to hear his superb music. Bell's talent and intensity are not to be missed, either in recorded form or live in person.

Westfall’s ‘Vokate’ Fertile Fusion of Vocal Ideas

Kate Westfall is a familiar face in northern and central Ohio from her appearances as musician and poet. Her new album "Vokate" gathers a wide range of influences to create a lush new musical world. Almost all the sounds on the album are directly generated by Westfall, whether it be through singing words, non-verbal vocalizing, breathing, clapping, clicking or stomping.

A track such as "Global Emotion" combines a chanted rhythmic base, not unlike some of the experimental vocal pieces by American avant-garde composer Meredith Monk, with layers of swaying, harmonized melodies and interpolated stanzas of poetry, sounding in the distance, yet read in a completely unaffected manner. Westfall's voice is bluesy in inflection, yet carefully polished and controlled. Her songs tend to build in layers of sweet, ecstatic harmony over a syncopated pedal-point drone, giving them something of a worldbeat/Afropop feel.

Indeed, the international association is apparent, as Westfall's music isn't so much emerging from one place or style as it is an ocean touching upon the shores of many lands. The aquatic element is strong in "Mermaid," featuring a mysterious, Neptunian musical background to a poem from Westfall's chapbook, "Ladies of the Sea." The musical seascape sounds like a cross between The Doors' "Horse Latitudes" and English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams' choral setting of Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five."

In the anxious but magical "Cloudstep," the main lyric is buried too deeply to discern a lot of the words, especially as another spoken layer covers it in places, and the wordless "background" vocals are front and center. But this all seems very intentional on Westfall's part, using the texts as springboards to creating a lush, seductive musical fabric that sweeps the listener away.

"Bucket A Water" is like a latter-day grandchild of a chain-gang work song, grown urbanized and sophisticated without forgetting its roots. Such skillful fusions provide considerable momentum throughout the album, though a sense of stasis can settle in on a longer track like "Please Don't," where the harmonic base never changes. Westfall can be obscure and remote in places, but it only adds to the mysterious allure of her music. She builds her world in loops and layers, pyramids of sounds and watery harmonies. Her vocal range is impressive, going from a throaty alto to a sweet soprano while at the same time freely traveling along the continuum from folk style to polished poise.

A little bit of distortion creeps into the recorded sound on a few tracks, with all the layering, looping and processing, but it's really remarkably clear for such intricate mixing of layers.

Mark Jordan - Mount Vernon News