The Ampeater Review

In what now seems like another life, I used to man­age the Post­crypt Cof­fee­house in the base­ment of St. Paul’s Chapel at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity. The venue has a sto­ried his­tory of per­form­ers, includ­ing Simon & Gar­funkel, Suzanne Vega, and Jeff Buck­ley, but its real flair is mak­ing the every­day singer-songwriters that drift in and out seem as mag­i­cal as these leg­endary musi­cians. Its bare rock walls, peel­ing wooden tables, and sturdy can­de­labras drip­ping with wax cre­ate an atmos­phere of intense inti­macy. No ampli­fi­ca­tion or elec­tric­ity of any kind is allowed. A small plaque on the wall reads “Max­i­mum Capac­ity: 35,” which may have even been an opti­mistic assess­ment. It was, and remains, a truly spe­cial place, one of those increas­ingly rare nooks that pro­vide New York­ers with a com­plete escape from the chaos of upper Man­hat­tan. It’s there that I first met Zeb Gould.

When you’ve spent the last two years lis­ten­ing to folk music every Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, you come to expect that a cer­tain per­cent­age of the per­for­mances are fueled largely by strong emo­tions and good inten­tions. Every once in a while some­one arrives with decent chops, but by and large it’s a silent com­pe­ti­tion to see who can make the most of three chords and recy­cled folk motifs. Then one evening Zeb Gould showed up with his 12 string gui­tar, and changed my per­cep­tion of what I even thought pos­si­ble for a per­for­mance of this mag­ni­tude. I felt as though John Fahey and Neil Young, in an effort to simul­ta­ne­ously squeeze through the door of our minus­cule club, had some­how fused into a sin­gle inim­itable force of vir­tu­osic play­ing and nuanced com­po­si­tion. Zeb Gould seemed to have come from nowhere, and I was com­pletely floored. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Years later, his albums are still in reg­u­lar rota­tion at Ampeater HQ, and I’m only now unrav­el­ing the mys­tery of what’s gone into Gould’s devel­op­ment as a musi­cian. Mostly self taught, he appar­ently honed his chops in col­lege on Leo Kot­tke, Michael Hedges, and the afore­men­tioned John Fahey, and went on to work as an archivist for Philip Glass. If I were mak­ing a musi­cal recipe for Zeb Gould, I might have for­got to add a dash of Philip Glass, but it now seems to obvi­ous and so essen­tial to Gould’s approach to com­po­si­tion, that I’m almost embar­rassed to have missed it. His explo­rations in Glass’s stu­dio pro­duced his solo album “All of the Morn­ing­birds,” and earned Gould open­ing spots with Gillian Welch, David Rawl­ings, Kim Ritchie, and Sue Gar­ner. His follow-up album “Stalk That Myth” was released under the name Bow­ery Boy Blue, and this became Gould’s per­ma­nent ves­sel for tour­ing and fur­ther releases. His side projects include work with the Monika Jalili Per­sian music ensem­ble, and com­po­si­tions for the White Wave Dance Com­pany in Brook­lyn, New York.

I’m not one to argue for the purity of folk music–it’s sup­posed to rep­re­sent the con­flu­ence of influ­ences in any given cul­ture, and the Amer­i­can mix­ing pot pro­vides an incred­i­ble range of inspi­ra­tion. It’s not sur­pris­ing to learn that Gould has col­lab­o­rated on projects with choreographers–his sense of sound­scape, of cre­at­ing a self-contained emo­tional space within each song, is extra­or­di­nary, and rec­om­mends itself in com­bi­na­tion with other media, be it dance, cin­ema or visual art. I’m reminded of Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters) and Neil Hal­stead (Mojave 3) in his del­i­cate approach to song­writ­ing. A-Side “A Day at the Fire­lakes” is a mag­nif­i­cent intro­duc­tion Gould’s art. There’s a space to it, even an empti­ness. Orig­i­nally writ­ten as the title track for an unpub­lished album, this is its first offi­cial release. Sam Craw­ford and Megan Gould join Zeb on piano and vio­lin, and float atop the song with restrained melodic fig­ures that qui­etly enforce har­monic ideas out­lined by Gould’s vocals. His style of singing is char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally frag­ile, and its pleas­antly nasal tone achieves in a sin­gle voice the kind of bal­ance between strength and qui­etude that’s nor­mally achieved by a male/female duo singing in har­mony. I’ve been told that music has the abil­ity to “trans­port” the lis­tener in an almost lit­eral sense, but I’ve never fully felt this to be true until I heard “A Day at the Fire­lakes”. It’s impos­si­ble for me to get past the first piano note with­out being sucked into the world of song that Gould’s metic­u­lously con­structed. I find myself going back, again and again, just to enter this space and revel in it. It gives me a kind of peace above and beyond any ratio­nal musi­cal explanation.

Side B “The Theft of Light” was writ­ten specif­i­cally for this 7-inch, with the thought in mind that it should both con­trast with and com­pli­ment “A Day at the Fire­lakes”. Gould pulled the title from a Tsimshian Indian tale explain­ing the ori­gins of day­light. He recalls, “I was struck by the phrase and it seemed, in some intan­gi­ble way, to fit with the music, so I put the two together.” As much as Gould owes a debt of influ­ence to the var­i­ous fin­ger­style gui­tar­smiths that have come before him, his approach to the genre is entirely refresh­ing. Though he’s kind enough to ori­ent lis­ten­ers with an open bass note every 8 beats or so, his pick­ing pat­tern on “The Theft of Light” is deftly syn­co­pated, and gives one the feel­ing of being pro­pelled through the song, car­ried atop a wave of sound. While his pre­de­ces­sors have drawn largely on the Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of blues and folk for com­po­si­tional inspi­ra­tion, Gould’s songs are inflected with an almost Balkan har­monic influ­ence, which I sus­pect might actu­ally be Per­sian, drawn from his work with the Monika Jalili ensem­ble. The syn­co­pa­tion reminds me of an Irish reel that’s been cut adrift with­out its foor-on-the-floor back­beat, and there are undoubt­edly fur­ther global influ­ences at work here that I can’t even begin to grasp. Mean­while, the 12 string gui­tar is pro­duc­ing so much sound, and with such a rich inten­sity, that as a lis­tener I’m inclined to ignore the usual con­sid­er­a­tions of melody, har­mony, and rhythm in favor of a broad appre­ci­a­tion of the song’s intri­cate texture.

Gould’s music has uni­ver­sal appeal. That’s not to say that it’s uni­ver­sally liked, but rather that it’s uni­ver­sally lik­able. There’s some­thing about it that wholly tran­scends its roots in Amer­i­can tra­di­tional gen­res and com­mu­ni­cates suc­cess­fully in a lan­guage that need not be trans­lated into any other for one to imme­di­ately grasp its poignant and beau­ti­ful essence. Ampeater’s read­ers include cit­i­zens of Iran, New Zealand, Malaysia, Alba­nia, Ice­land, Esto­nia, and Turkey. To all of you around the globe, I’m hon­ored to serve as the musi­cal ambas­sador to Zeb Gould. I hope his music works its way into your thoughts the way it did mine, and brings you the same last­ing joy.

Ben Heller

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