Holshouser, Will - Reed Song
SKU
CLEANFEEDCF005
David Phillips, bass/Ron Horton, trumpet/Will Holshouser, accordion.
"The songwriter Arto Lindsay once said that it was pretensious to cite one's influences, that to suggest a line of descent was wishful thinking. With that in mind, I ask you not to catalogue the influences of the Holshouser Trio they're hidden in plain sight. (If you're all about tracing the abstruse genealogy of some riff back through the history of tenor giants, this will disappoint). But citing, citing, citing doesn't get at the heart of the mystery (every great record has a mystery that keeps you coming back): how the unique mimics the familiar as a form of camouflage. The pieces on Reed Song seem always-already known. But then memory is a tricky thing. When I try to remember where I first heard a piece of music, I am generally wrong, recalling something deeply unlikely (Fear of Music in a Chinese restaurant in deepest Brooklyn?). What I've really done is soundtracked, found a memory to match the tune. So you may remember hearing some of these, perhaps in a smoky basement on your first teenage sneak-in to a jazz club. Or maybe a concert hall. A fish fry in a small town on a long-ago road trip? A drafty wooden church at the wedding of an attractive cousin you never got over a crush on? There_s a wealth of cognitive mismatches here the singalong melodies, the majesterial sonorities. Track after track, Reed Song comes on so easy, and then gets more and more implausible. What_s implausible about, say, the earthy "Blue Light Special" isn_t that it starts out an homage to Louisiana's legendary Canray Fontenot ends up in one of Olivier Messiaen_s organ works. (The big free-bass accordion is capable of complex chordings in both hands, and Will Holshouser works the bellows as loud as a New York traffic jam.) Genre recombination is surely no big deal in the c21. What's weird is that the progression seems inevitable. It helps to know that Holshouser knows his Fontenot from years gigging in a zydeco and Cajun band popular honky tonk, not to mention weddings, corporate functions, and parks. ..."