July 22, 2006 in SatValley

Guitar master Leo Kottke will give free concert

• Print
• Email
• Share

Music critics and historians throw around terms like “virtuoso” and “innovative” all the time. Without context, they’re just ambiguous words hanging in the air.

You have to hear the artist to understand the terminology.

Leo Kottke is one of those artists who has to be experienced to be appreciated – and after more than 30 years as a recording and performing artist, his following has taken on something of a cultish flair, especially among guitar players.

Kottke, 60, considered one of the world’s most innovative acoustic guitar virtuosos, will play a free concert at 6 tonight in Liberty Lake’s Pavillion Park.

Fans of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” will recognize the name and the artist.

Describing the Kottke’s finger-picking, syncopated sound is a challenge. Most often his music can be found listed under folk, considering his singer/songwriter status. It could just as easily be catalogued under jazz or blues.

“For me, it’s all in the rhythm,” he said in a 1997 interview with Guitar for the Practicing Musician magazine. “My stuff isn’t that hard to play, when it comes down to it, but if there’s not that rhythm, it sounds totally ineffective – fatuous, even.”

Kottke’s style allows the resonance of the guitar to add complexity to his music.

“A lot of my music sounds like there’s more going on than there is,” he told the magazine. “But the fact that the guitar is so ringing and full sounding with simple figures can actually be a problem when arranging for it, because things really pile up in there.”

One of his most impressive, and famous, recordings is his version of the Allman Brothers’ “Little Martha,” with Kottke playing the parts originally played by both Duane Allman and Dickey Betts on one guitar.

At first primarily an instrumental artist, Kottke altered his playing style mid-career, from a folk style using finger picks to a more classical style using his fingertips after developing tendonitis and related nerve damage that threatened to end his career.

Kottke’s 1969 album, “6- and 12-String Guitar,” often described as the “Armadillo Album” because of the album art, continues to be one of the most influential of the era. The all-instrumental album features all original compositions, except for Kottke’s arrangement of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

Partially deaf since a childhood firecracker mishap, Kottke has explored the range of tunings for the steel-stringed six- and 12-string acoustic guitar, especially early in his career, and will detune his guitar as many as two full steps below standard.

Over the years, Kottke’s albums have featured collaborations with artists like as John Fahey, his mentor, Chet Atkins, Lyle Lovett and Rickie Lee Jones, and his music grew to include surprisingly strong vocals.

What albums, including live tracks, do not capture is the “Kottke Experience.”

A Kottke concert is made up of roughly equal parts music and monologue. Kottke riffs about life on the road and anything else that crosses his mind. The stories are laugh-out-loud funny and occasionally bizarre.

Kottke’s current concert tour takes him to some surprisingly locales. Friday night, for example, he played at the Oregon Zoo in Portland and Sunday he will perform at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.

No comments on this story so far. Add yours!