Artist:     Leon Redbone

Album:     Strings and Jokes

Label:     MIG

Release Date:     4.27.18

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Leon Redbone was probably at the height of his popularity in the US when he ventured to Europe, as an opening act for another unique guitarist, Leo Kottke. This CD of two concerts recorded in Bremen, Germany in 1977, sonically demonstrates how he easily won new audiences over. One newspaper review carried the quote “ He sounds as if Dean Martin, after three bottles of Bourbon, tried to sound like Marlene Dietrich”

In the US, Leon’s visual appearance and quirky personality played a large part of his appeal, (several major network TV appearances, like Saturday Night Live and Johnny Carson certainly helped widen his audience.). He retired in 2015, and for those who never saw him perform, these live recordings have to rely on the quality of the music and performance of same. Listeners here get an ample dose of what was once popular ragtime, jazz, blues and Tin Pan Alley songs of the early 20th century, by writers like Fats Waller, Blind Blake, and Irving Berlin. As a bonus, it is recorded with technology that wasn’t available in the 1920s, i.e., no thin scratchy audio, and his vintage guitar is captured with all the tone only decades of playing and aging can bring to it.

On the first show Redbone is accompanied in part by Jonathon Dorn on tuba, which adds even more to the stew Redbone creates with his harmonica and vocal antics, which include murmuring, laughing, yodeling, and mimicking trumpet and trombone solos. Although much of the second concert, contains the same old songs, his personality and the fun he seems to be having carry it through.

Listening to this certainly brought back a very fond memory from this same era. It was my first date with a girl who had not heard anything like Leon Redbone before, or the headlining act Tom Waits. Waits was traveling with a full band and a tractor trailer full of stage props. I like to think that it was the combo of both, that might have led her to think “This guy is certainly interesting enough to go out with again.” And so she did, and we’re still together 40 years on. Timeless music begets timeless romance.

—Ken Spooner