Kelly Joe Phelps: Tunesmith Retrofit
The road from a jazz bass player to acoustic singer/songwriter was a long and twisting road for Kelly Joe Phelps, but it still feels like home.
Phelps started out on guitar as a teenager, but found out that there was more work available for a bass player in the jazz scene in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.
"I just wanted to play music. It didn't matter what instrument," he said. He found his way into the local jazz community, regularly working the be-bop clubs and hanging out with other musicians, but when he was home, playing for his own joy, he still picked up the guitar.
"The last few jazz years, I ended up moving back toward guitar," he said. "I felt like I needed to make a commitment one way or the other and decided that guitar made the most sense for me."
So Phelps started seeking out gigs as a jazz guitarist. Then he took another turn.
"I have always listened to all kinds of music," he said. "About the same time I was moving back toward the guitar, I started listening to a lot of early country blues stuff - Robert Pete Williams and Mississippi Fred McDowell. I really dug it, especially the acoustic stuff. I started listening to them as improvisers more than anything else. Pretty soon, I was figuring out their tunes and all of a sudden, I started singing and playing acoustic guitar, then because of that, I felt like I wanted to start writing songs.
"Every step of the way, it wasn't like I was shifting around, but just adding on to what I do," Phelps said. "I was still improvising a lot, keeping the song forms loose and took a jazzy approach to writing lyrics."
By 1994, then in his mid-30s, Phelps released his first album, "Lead Me On," a mixture of classic acoustic blues and original compositions. By 2001, his fourth album, "Sky Like a Broken Clock," was filled with all original tunes. His eighth set, "Tunesmith Retrofit," came out earlier this week on Rounder Records and features his first recordings playing banjo as well as guitar.
The Portland jazz musicians "were surprisingly very encouraging," he said. "I expected the opposite reaction. Six months into it, they started coming out to my gigs, which is a testament to them as musicians.
"Portland's really a great musician's town, but now I only play there once or twice a year. I'm traveling instead, which is a lifelong dream being fulfilled on a steady basis.
"I was always headed in that direction."
A version of this story originally appeared in the JournalNews Go! Arts and Entertainement supplement, Aug. 11, 2006,
