We went to see Del Rey at the Good Coffeehouse on Friday night, which has to be one of the single best concert venues in the city. A gorgeous room that sounds beautiful, an eclectic roster of performers, and an intimate setting.
Del Rey is billed as a fingerstyle blues guitar player, but she's a lot more than that. Her guitar playing is well beyond the basic blues techniques, with intricate moving bass lines, incomprehensible (to me, at least) chords and unexpected changes. Her repertoire extends from classic blues to Louis Jordan to 20s and 30s bawdy-house jazz tunes. At one point she performed, alone, a guitar duet that Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe used to do.
While she doesn't make a big deal of it, she writes a lot of originals and puts new and pointed lyrics to songs like "Mississippi River Blues," ("Mister mister, hurry call up Washington, tell 'em Louisiana about to drown / You know I can't get no answer telephoning Mr. Brown / The President sure don't treat me right / You can't get no good assistance unless you're rich and white") or crafting instrumentals that take wildly unexpected turns. The best way I can think to describe her is a meeting of Gary Davis and Richard Thompson.
She's a great personality, too, standing up there alone with a parlor-sized steel resonator, laughing, commenting on her own solos, standing up on her tip-toes and throwing her head back. "I saw something reassuring today while I was walking around Manhattan," she said after the first song. "A genuine crazy person, talking to himself, and he wasn't on a cell phone." The room burst out laughing and she shook her head. "It used to be, you could tell."
She's playing again on Tuesday night at the Living Room, in an evening of blues organized by the Second Fiddles. (Jon Vesey, of that band, was in the audience, as were Parrish Ellis, Mamie Minch, and enough guitar players that Del Rey said she was "tuning her guitar more than I'd do for the regular folks.") Blues mandolin player Rich Delgrosso is also on the bill, as are Blue Harvest, so that will be a great way to forget your taxation blues.
Del Rey is billed as a fingerstyle blues guitar player, but she's a lot more than that. Her guitar playing is well beyond the basic blues techniques, with intricate moving bass lines, incomprehensible (to me, at least) chords and unexpected changes. Her repertoire extends from classic blues to Louis Jordan to 20s and 30s bawdy-house jazz tunes. At one point she performed, alone, a guitar duet that Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe used to do.
While she doesn't make a big deal of it, she writes a lot of originals and puts new and pointed lyrics to songs like "Mississippi River Blues," ("Mister mister, hurry call up Washington, tell 'em Louisiana about to drown / You know I can't get no answer telephoning Mr. Brown / The President sure don't treat me right / You can't get no good assistance unless you're rich and white") or crafting instrumentals that take wildly unexpected turns. The best way I can think to describe her is a meeting of Gary Davis and Richard Thompson.
She's a great personality, too, standing up there alone with a parlor-sized steel resonator, laughing, commenting on her own solos, standing up on her tip-toes and throwing her head back. "I saw something reassuring today while I was walking around Manhattan," she said after the first song. "A genuine crazy person, talking to himself, and he wasn't on a cell phone." The room burst out laughing and she shook her head. "It used to be, you could tell."
She's playing again on Tuesday night at the Living Room, in an evening of blues organized by the Second Fiddles. (Jon Vesey, of that band, was in the audience, as were Parrish Ellis, Mamie Minch, and enough guitar players that Del Rey said she was "tuning her guitar more than I'd do for the regular folks.") Blues mandolin player Rich Delgrosso is also on the bill, as are Blue Harvest, so that will be a great way to forget your taxation blues.
