you've heard his guitar grooves before.
Larry Carlton is in a new mode.
Larry Carlton is a friend of yours.
You might not realise this, but it's true. He's one of those musicians who has been around for ages, plying his trade, laying down the licks for the good of the you've heard his guitar grooves before, from incendiary to subtle in the blink of an eye, in the background of your favourite album, the one you play every night before you go to bed, when you break up with your partner, when you're recovering from a night on the town.
As a 23-year-old in the early '70s, Carlton featured on Crusader One with the Crusaders, and ended up making 13 records with the band.
He was a hotly in demand "session guy", playing on hundreds of records, including more than 100 gold albums, with the likes of Garcia and Dolly Parton. He's still a part of American jazz-pop career; his first record, With a Little Help from My Friends, appeared in 1968. He also wrote the theme to Hill Street Blues, for which he won his first of three Grammys.
Now 58, it's been some time since Carlton has graced a studio session, preferring these days to keep his solo career the main focus - and it's been deep in the slick, velvet confines of the jazz world where Carlton is at his free-and-easy best. Thanks to his time playing as a session muso, adaptability is one of his strengths, and this is why we find him nowadays stepping off the jazz train and grooving with the blues, back where it all began.
When he comes out to Australia for the first time this month, it'll be with fellow American guitar-slinger Robben Ford.
The Larry Carlton Blues Project is the name of the game, and they're peddling high-octane blues guitar for the soul.
"Well, it started in 2003 when I did the Sapphire Blue CD," he says from his farm, just outside Nashville, Tennessee, about his return to the blues.
"Jazz is just harmonically more sophisticated, but it comes from the blues.
A lot of my heroes were jazz heroes and blues heroes, so it kinda makes sense that the two fused together into my playing, because I liked both of them so much.
for the first time, with Robben Ford," he says with a chuckle. "It's an idea I've had for many, many, many years, and maybe 16 months ago, we were both performing for Les Paul's 90th birthday party, so I just approached Robben after the show and said, 'Can we go sit down and have a little talk?
', and I kinda invited him to do this project, and he embraced it and said, 'Sure.' "
comprising Toss Panos on drums and Travis Carlton on bass, is as you'd expect; two guitars duelling for blues supremacy, but with some serious style.
"That's right," he acknowledges with a laugh.
"It's going to be really guitar-focused, just the quartet. I think our experience now, as very, very mature musicians, just shows up in how we accompany each other, how we phrase with each other and how much we listen at all times to whatever is going on with the band. Yeah, our experience is what comes to the stage with us.
News RSS