Author: Michael Witthaus

Stephane Wrembel brings Triptych to UNH

By Michael Witthaus
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Triptych is the latest album from French guitarist Stephane Wrembel. The expansive 20-song collection is a meditation on life, represented in three musical movements. It’s a collaboration with pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, which came together after Wrembel’s manager suggested that the two connect. Initially, Wrembel was reluctant.

“Piano and guitar are very difficult to marry,” he said by phone recently. “It’s a difficult match because we kind of occupy the same space, and it’s very easy for tones to clash.” He decided to give it a try anyway, and quickly became enamored of the pianist. Pilc is renowned for his improvisational skills and has an impressive resume. His credits include time as music director and pianist for Harry Belafonte.

At the time, Wrembel had a concert series at Joe’s Pub in New York City coming up to celebrate the release of Django l’impressionniste, a collection of 17 preludes for solo guitar.

“Django is also influenced by Claude Debussy, so I wanted to do something around him,” he recalled. That’s when Pilc’s name came up; the two had not yet met.

He was recruited for the shows, and “the chemistry was immediate and so powerful that we decided to record together,” Wrembel said. “I had the instinct that we needed to go to the studio and record a triptych. I had the vision of a triptych. I didn’t know why, but I could see that it was the right thing to do.”

It’s a true collaboration, with both Wrembel and Pilc contributing new songs. Overall, the album is anchored by selections from Django Reinhardt like “Douce Ambiance,” which is transformed by Pilc’s piano flourishes in the intro before settling into a joyous jazzy rhythm familiar to fans of Reinhardt.

Wrembel is a devotee of the legendary guitarist. As David Fricke wrote in 2009, he “studied Reinhardt’s fleet precision and soulful swing the hard way — playing in actual Gypsy camps.” He lived in the Paris neighborhood where Reinhardt spent his final years and considers him an essential musician.

“Django is to the guitar what Bach is to the keyboard,” he said. “When you practice Django, you become a better guitarist; it’s automatic. You will understand the guitar better, you will see things better, you have a better technique, so everything about your playing is going to be better. Django is an archetypal source like that.”

Triptych’s first movement begins with “Ecco Homo” — an introduction, Wrembel explained. “It means ‘here is the man,’” he said. “It’s the birth of the triptych.” The next section starts with “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” a Wrembel composition that provides insight into what informs him beyond gypsy jazz.

The first song Wrembel recalls hearing as a very young child is Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” He’s progressed past rock, but “those sounds are still there, I make no difference between Debussy, Pink Floyd, Chopin,” he said. “All that’s the same for me.”

There’s a link to the ’70s literary touchstone in Floyd’s song “Echoes,” Wrembel continued. “It’s about an albatross hanging motionless upon the air,” he said. This led him to Richard Bach’s novel, and “the idea of a floating seagull that tries to find what’s noble in its own nature rather than just finding food. It’s a beautiful tale.”

The third section of Triptych is its most ambitious, beginning with “Life In Three Stages Part I: The Child and the Desert,” continuing with “Part II: Building a World” and concluding with “Part III: Old Age, Grace and Wisdom.” The last offers an elegiac cadence that’s gorgeous and haunting, with Wrembel and Pilc the only musicians.

The final movement’s tone reflects Wrembel’s own sentiments.

“I’m 50, I’m entering old age,” he said. “That’s the third stage, where I believe that as an artist, if you keep working and concentrating and studying philosophy, it’s possible to reach very high levels of consciousness. You don’t think the same when you are 50 than when you are 20, and probably you don’t think the same when you are 80 than when you are 50. Every time there is more and more wisdom coming.”

Triptych – Stephane Wrembel Band with Jean-Michel Pilc
When: Friday, Sept. 13, 8 p.m.
Where: Johnson Theatre, 50 Academic Way, Durham
Tickets: $10 and $12 at stephanewrembel.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Rocking up the blues with Anthony Gomes

Anthony Gomes stands where many tributaries meet to feed a river. “Painted Horse,” originally released in 2009 when the guitarist was a member of Nashville-based New Soul Cowboys, is indicative of this. The power trio paid tribute to country music in a decidedly rocking way, while keeping the blues influence front and center. In late 2021 he revived the song for a new album.

Gomes, in a recent phone interview, remembered a time when detractors from both sides called him either too rock for blues or too blues for rock, and deciding then to use that to his advantage. Now he’s signed to a new label that includes several heavy metal bands. To celebrate, he went into the studio with Korn’s drummer Ray Luzier and Billy Sheehan, a bass player whose resume includes David Lee Roth, Mr. Big and The Winery Dogs.

“Painted Horse” was one of five old songs that Luzier and Sheehan helped rock up for High Voltage Blues, though Gomes chose to leave in the banjo — twang on that! Last year Gomes’ new label, Rat Pak Records, remixed 2018’s Peace, Love & Loud Guitars, adding three bonus tracks. The guitarist is wrapping up work on a new album called Praise the Loud.

There’s a rocking message behind all of this, and Gomes delivers it on tracks like the AC/DC doppelgänger “White Trash Princess” and “Fur Covered Handcuffs,” though the latter, a chugging boogie punctuated by fiery solos, provides clues to the Toronto-born blues rocker’s origins.

His big break came when someone from B.B. King’s staff heard Gomes playing at an open mic where good players were given a beer, and invited him to meet the blues legend. “It was a two-beer night, I was playing really well,” Gomes said. “This guy came up to me and said, ‘Who’s your favorite guitar player?’ I could have said Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix, but I just said, ‘Oh, that’s easy, B.B. King.’ He said, ‘I thought so. I’m his bus driver.’”

Given the locale, Gomes was a bit skeptical, but he went to the show and found four front-row tickets waiting for him and his friends. He was prepared to meet his idol after. “I made business cards; I wore dress pants and dress shoes. It was like I was going to meet the Pope,” he said. King would become a lifelong mentor. “He was so gracious with his time, such a gentleman, so humble.”

At the time, Gomes was attending the University of Toronto, completing a master’s thesis on the racial evolution of blues music that was later published as “The Black and White of Blues,” but the next day he quit school, telling his parents that he wanted to be a professional musician.

He discovered music via Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, but songs like “Train Kept A Rolling,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” only made him more interested in the music that informed those classic rockers.

“I started to go back to Stevie Ray Vaughan, then to B.B. King, then Muddy Waters,” he said, adding that this experience was leading him to where he’d end up eventually, straddling both genres.

“In some ways, I felt like if I listened to blues, I was only getting half the picture. If I listened to rock, I got the other half,” he said. “Both these musics coexist and have a shared DNA, but oftentimes there’s a strict line dividing them. Maybe that was based on marketing to a certain race initially. To me they’re just two sides of the same coin.”

That’s one reason why Gomes was drawn to Rat Pak, which is based in New Hampshire.

“The president of the label heard our stuff and said, ‘Hey, I know this is blues, and you’ve been marketed [that way], but I really feel that there’s a wider audience here in rock. How would you feel about that?’ I was like, ‘Throw me in, coach, let’s go!”

From his 1997 debut, Primary Colors, to High Voltage Blues, which spent 58 weeks on the Billboard charts over 2022 and 2023, Gomes has successfully blurred the lines between traditional and contemporary blues and rock, purists be damned.

“What I’ve come to realize is that what you may perceive as a liability is actually your superpower, and the more I focused on being who I was and less interested in fitting in … it resonated true to people and to our audience,” he said. “It’s been an interesting journey, and by doing this we’ve created our own lane — and it’s an open road, which is a lot of fun.”

Anthony Gomes
When: Friday, Sept. 6, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $39 at tupelomusichall.com

Featured photo: Bees Deluxe. Courtesy photo.