Location: Velden Am Wörthersee / Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Austria
Date: Wednesday, 7. 9. 2011
Carl Verheyen is a guitar wizard: a renowned, in-demand and hugely sought-after studio guitarist, a touring sideman for Supertramp back in the day (1985-1986) and again today, a guitar tutor, the author of rich columns for Guitar Magazine, a winner of best guitarist awards,…
Carl Verheyen is also a film score composer (The Crow, The Usual Suspects). Over his career, Verheyen has worked with blues musicians like Robben Ford and Joe Bonamassa, West Coast rocker Glenn Frey (Eagles) and jazz drummer Max Roachspäter, and he has lent a hand as a studio guitarist to plenty of other artists, including the Bee Gees, Dolly Parton, Cher, Little Richard and Stanley Clarke.
The man is one of a kind when it comes to carving out his artistic identity as a guitar player. He belongs in the league of guitarists like Steve Lukather, Michael Landau, Eric Johnson,.. Ever since 1988, when Carl launched his solo career with the album »No Borders«, he’s been working the stages in a hard-hitting trio format, and collaborations with jazz musicians are, of course, a given for him, if not downright unavoidable.
Verheyen first stepped onto the Bluesiana stage on 26.03.2010, so this time we were greeting him on his second visit to this one-of-a-kind temple of music. You could count maybe 50 people in the club, politely huddled around the corner tables and perched on bar stools. A shy Austrian crowd – nothing new, very much like the March one in 2010. The trio was Carl Verheyen (guitar), bassist Dave Marotta (who has played with Phil Collins, among others), and this time, instead of Santana’s and Winwood’s drummer Walfredo Reyes Jr, none other than Chad Wackerman, who played with Frank Zappa between 1983 and 1988, and hence, of course, his work with Steve Vai.
This time Verheyen’s show was split into two parts with a 20-minute break in between. Last year he put out the album »Trading 8’s«, which is still current, so it was only natural that he leaned more often on songs from it in the set. He quickly got Dave Marotta warmed up and running when he gave him a long solo excursion in the Beatles tune Tax Man, which, in the hands of such high-spirited improvisation, came off downright brilliant. From that record there was also On Our Way, and in the second half of the show they took on another highlight of the night, the lament New Year’s Day, and on top of that spiced up the gig with the excellent instrumental Eastern Steppes, which closes the album »Trading 8’s«.
Carl and his buddies covered the whole discography of his releases, too. So we enjoyed the coquettish and melodically infectious Passing Through (»Slang Justice«, 1996), where Carl showed that, when you compare him to singer/guitarist-in-one-person types (especially as far as the vocals go), he comes closest to Eric Johnson (thanks to Jernej for the tip). Then there was its younger “twin sister” (in the way the arrangement is figured), The Code (»Take One Step«, 2006), at times deliciously, adventurously “broken up”, where he really stretched out, especially in the middle section with Wackerman’s soloing, and the title track from the album Take One Step, where the band sophistically crept in on the verse and then dynamically burst open in a solid chorus. Arrangements like the one this song carries are reminiscent of the energy that Lukather’s musical perception catches from time to time as well. In Take One Step, the instrumentation of all three took our breath away again. Then there was the perfect feel of the “short-statured sidekick” Marotta, who has been working with Verheyen basically since the »No Borders« album. And there was the “Beatles”-flavored song Missunderstood (Slingshot, 1998), plus new melodically infectious engravings.
And let’s not forget Supetramp! The band kicked off with the »Crimes Of The Century« (1974) hit Bloody Well Right and honestly surprised everyone there! Verheyen closed the first part alone on stage with a cover of Ray Charles’s Hard Times, and with his witty yet multilayered channeling of information from the musical universe he confirmed that the blues can still be a whole lot of fun to play, since he gave the song a distinctive stamp of some unexpected, jazz-dismantled chords that added a new quality to the cover. And singing over such demanding arrangements, where the left hand doesn’t sit still on the guitar neck for even three seconds on a single grip, can be a real pain in the neck, yet Verheyen defies it routinely, all the way through, with seeming featherweight ease. In the acoustic part (the second half) of the show, the trio fired up a purely instrumental version of Peter Gabriel’s Mercy Street.. Carl Verheyen wrapped up this unique evening of musical sensuality, as expected, with the instrumental Highland Shuffle from his debut »No Borders«, which was inspired by Carl’s wanderings around Scotland long, long ago.
An evening that once again charmed us without limits and left everyone there open-mouthed and open-eared for quite some time after the show. An excellent blend of just the right dose of devilish acrobatics, with free improvisation from all three masters on stage, and a melodic compactness anchored in the focal point of our hearing especially and above all by Carl’s vocals, puts Carl Verheyen and his crew in a special place in the musical universe, the wizardry of an artistry all their own! The playing style itself, the incredible control of sound, the most polished grips, even fretting the low E string with the thumb,… Seeing him live is a must for all guitar gourmets and for those of you who revel in the freedoms the realm of music offers, whenever you look out over the horizon where the thought of school scales and every kind of musical limitation vanishes!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
