In the News
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2001
An excellent, surprising record
BY NORMAN PROVENCHER
Tony D thought he knew what he getting into when he unplugged his Strat and picked up an acoustic guitar. What he wasn't ready for was the loneliness of the acoustic bluesman.
"It's scary, doing this stuff alone up there," D says of his work on his new, unplugged record, The Size of Your Shoes.
"I'm developing a whole new respect for these guys like John Hammond. I can't just turn to Zeek and say: 'Save the show'." he says, referring to his long-suffering sax player Zeek Gross.
But a bluesman's gotta do what a bluesman's gotta do and D's got no one to blame but himself for the new record. Of course, he also gets to claim most, if not all, of the credit for an excellent, and surprising, piece of work.
It was something that had been rattling around in the back of his head for some time, he explains, as his appreciation of the blues got deeper and deeper over the years.
It was the same sort of process that led him to the blues in the first place.
"It's like a lot of guitarists, I started with the folkie stuff but I couldn't wait to get into the heavy stuff and be in a band and get chicks.
"But I also started looking' at the writers' credits on the songs and appreciating the beauty and art of the material and began listening to the originals and drawing deeper inspiration from them."
Still, he didn't complete the cycle back to acoustic until fairly recently, starting with a few solo shows here and there, notably at the Blues Festival's acoustic stage. And that's when he started to appreciate the work that lay ahead.
"I can listen to a guy like Lightnin' Hopkins all day, 24/7, and you think sometimes it's simple stuff- But you really start to see, if you pay attention, that there's a ton of stuff going on there and it's not always in the notes or the number of notes or the tricky chording. A lot of times, it's building a feeling or establishing a beat that doesn't stop, doesn't move, no matter what you do or what's going on around you."
An electric guitar can draw attention to a substandard player's mistakes but it can also muffle little slips by a superior player. Press a little lightly on a string in
Tony D's CD release party is this Sunday at the Black Sheep Inn.
an Ottawa musician and producer who specializes in all things acoustic, from straight blues to Middle Eastern wedding tunes. The album was mostly recorded in Nesrallah's studio.
"I know what I sound like, but I needed that second set of ears," D says.
"Victor's got huge ears and I couldn't get away with anything. He's got a deep knowledge of the material and his only interest was in making me sound good."
The album also shows D (ne Diteodoro) with a brand new maturity as a songwriter and a singer. For example, the album opener, My Baby So Far, played here as almost a bayou duet with New Orleans' star John Mooney, is a driving little unit that could easily show up in other arrangements by other players or D himself
"The basic song was with Johnny Kovacs (harpist "Johnny Universe") and myself, and then I worked on it more with Anders Osborne when I was down living in New Orleans on a kind of writing assignment."
The Osborne input - not to mention Mooney's snaky slide guitar - helped add some funky, deep-mud flavour to the tune, but D knows it has other possibilities and he's pretty sure it'll end up electrified on his next album with the full band.
The Size of Your Shoes briefly explores another of D's new passions, Spanish guitar, with a couple of duets with his professor, Ottawa maestro James Cohen. Thankfully, the D-penned numbers La Tormenta and Little Saint (dedicated to D's little boy, Santino ("Tiny D"), who starts school this year) are neither pure flamenco, nor pure classical, nor that irritating
OTTAWA CITIZEN BLUES
NORMAN PROVENCHER