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Howe Gelb (US)

Let me set the scene – irresponsible lovers are canoodling in semi-lit booths, the jukebox is playing some old tunes by Frank and there’s some people over there who never want to fall in love again. It’s the last bar still open and the piano player mooches over to the battered grand. This guy, we know, is great. He expertly and succinctly slides in words like “iconoclast”, “apropos”, “tumult” and “ludicrous”, he even name checks Constantinople – that’s proper old school.

For those celebrated guys who hit on the standards – Monk, Cohen, Bacharach, even Merle Haggard, Howe Gelb is creating new tunes with cathartic one-liners and malleable melodies that suggest any singer could interpret these dozen American piano ballads and take his offbeat worldview and make it their own. Who wouldn’t want to begin the beguine with the line “World peace declared, no problem spared…”?

These are ‘Future Standards’ by The Howe Gelb Piano Trio, taking an outsider view of early gospel and rhythm and blues both part of the American musical socialization that he touched on with 2006’s ‘Sno Angel’. Now he’s on a jazz-tinged trip, bending the genre, taking it back to his shack.

Don’t forget, Gelb is a man who’s done acoustic sets where he sings into the pick up of his guitar, he’s rocked out with Giant Sand, re-shaped alt-country and has a back catalogue that’s nothing short of “im-press-ive”. He knows a melody when he plays it.

Now, he’s searching for a way to re-imagine an important genre in the history of song construction and, as ever he’s throwing a spanner in the works, making up words “un-em-barkable” and coming off like Mose Allison on downers, touching on Brubeck’s hand patterns, holding court as a Django-like strummer – Naim Amor – drifts by on an abandoned caboose almost just out of earshot.

On ‘Future Standards’, Gelb duets with the equally laconic Lonna Kelley as the pair come on like a seasoned duo managed by Broadway Danny Rose in Woody Allen’s film of the same name. Gelb’s piano sinks to a pedal-depressed ambience as his cavalier vocal boasts of new love and faded times, all In the best tradition of the American Songbook that he’s pretty damn cleverly adding a new volume to.

"This is an attempt at writing a batch of tunes that could last through the ages with the relative structure of what has become known as "standards".  The likes of Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael done up by Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday," suggests Howe. "Julie London had a lot to do with it."

"The challenge with this kind of session lies in the culmination of 3 essential elements;

1st, writing a sophisticated chord structure that allows the melody to weave beyond its confines. Something cohesive and familiar, but still alluring and uncharted.

2nd, a lyrical playfulness. The science of love revealed and reveled, the celebration and the lament, while remaining vulnerable and still intact with new knowledge of where it can only go.

3rd, an offhanded execution. To display each song as if it's already an old standard. Keeping it intimate and communal in one go. Making it a party instead of making it precious. To deliver the lines with natural serendipity, lingering behind the beat, offering a pause in love's resignation through resonation.

These moments of melody framed in rhythm and rhyme along the pathway reproducing the species, if only to remind us, to validate, to assure; 

We never choose to fall in love ...
It's always love that chooses us."