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 Caught in the Carousel - "There will be music despite everything"
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The Dave King Trucking Company
Good Old Light
100% Womon
"April in Gary," the first track off Good Old Light, is as close as you're going to get to Dave King with a smoking jacket and a snifter of bourbon giving you some sort of welcome, an introduction, to his beautiful, off-kilter music.
The opening song played by anybody else would be a slow, reflective piece, filled with space and sparse, two-note chords, but King uses a drum stick or some other object—I really have no idea how he gets the sound—to strike and mute the actual strings inside the piano; half of the instrument sings and resonates as you would expect and the other half sounds like a rusty kalimba or some mutant banjo that King pulled out of the Mississippi. He makes the two sounds work together though, creating one haunting, Jekyll-and-Hyde instrument all his own.
King switches to drums for the remainder of the album, fronting a quintet featuring two tenor saxophones, an electric guitar, and an upright bass. The group moves from driving, rock-inspired songs, to pieces built over simple melodic vamps, to swing tunes, to loose improvisations, and each is a testament to King's humor and sincerity as a composer and his just-controlled, percussive mania behind the kit (guitarist, Erik Fratzke, does get the composing credit for the racing swing of "Night Tram").
The first cut with a full band "You Can't Say 'Poem in Concrete'" alternates between short, declarative horn lines and a circular background figure shared by guitar and tenors. It fades gently into the drunken anthem of "I Am Looking For Strength," with every player building up the singular melodic rhythm before dropping out for a searching Tenor solo over just drums and upright.
King's arranging often features both tenors harmonizing around a single melodic line, and because of this consistent doubling, on "Hawk Over Traffic," the horn solo seems to emerge from (and recede back into) a moving sheet of sound. The two horns do fade away though, briefly clearing space for Dave's drums and a crashing, angular guitar solo, before coming back to lead the song out and finish on their own, retreating into slow echoes.
There are no misses on Good Old Light, just beautiful, unique music, mixing rock, jazz, and a host of other sounds. Dave King is an outlaw. His music is hard to pin down and hard to describe, and I like it that way.
The Dave King Trucking Company is:
Erik Fratzke - Guitar
Adam Linz - Bass
Chris Speed and Brandon Wozniak - Tenor Saxophones
Dave King - Piano and Drums
...and they are all badasses.
—Mick Sherer
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