“95 PER CENT OF TONE IS IN THE PLAYER”
The blues has been appropriated by every style of popular music but maybe it’s time for pop culture to repay the favour. Maybe it’s time for the blues to consume those styles and put them in a different context. If so, Eric Gales is the man to do it. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he is a player of catholic tastes and an uncanny ear for incorporating alien styles back into the realm of electric blues. With each passing release, it’s like he is redesigning the future of the art form, augmenting it with licks and phrases gleaned from funk, jazz, rock, Eric Johnson, Andrés Segovia – from whomever catches his attention.
Gales’ new studio LP, - produced by blues-rock’s premier production duo Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith - is an eclectic piece of work that torpedos the received wisdom that blues exists only inside a I-IV-V progression.
