Geoff Bartley plays the Sunday night bluegrass acoustic show at Smoken’ Joe’s in Brighton every week. Last night’s presentation of Geoff Barley & Friends made for three hours of pleasant, uplifting, and thought provoking bluegrass music, with an occasional acoustic blues number thrown in for good measure.
Bartley brought along for the ride banjo player Lauch Benson, mandolin player Howie Tarnower, and upright bass player Eric Levenson. The acoustic four piece spent three hours weaving nice, likeable textures of sound. They opened with the Hank Williams Jr. classic “My Buckets Got A Hole In It” with bass throb being the beat and the rhythm, its thick, bouncy feel keeping the brittle melodies afloat, letting them breathe.
Bartley and his boys launched into a tribute to the recently departed John Lincoln Wright, playing his “Long Black Veil” to great effect, melodies jumping around. Bartley’s low tenor paying out somber vocal lines.
Next up was David Allan Coe’s “Why Have You Been Gone So Long.” Marked by jaunty rhythms, the foursome got speedier, making an arc in a tight space. Mandolin notes darted through the space between melody and beat, tap dancing on top of the other instrumentation’s sweet high notes. It was certainly the friendliest music around, warm, sprightly, and accessible.
There were a few instrumental jams thrown into the set list here and there, and they worked to showcase the fine musicians in an ensemble fashion. The four men knew how to combine their energies and their flow in one solid direction and they hoofed it like race horses without ever hitting the wrong notes. To hear those three melody instruments each doing its part was like trying to decide which of three appetizing desserts to choose from. Each tugged the ear to listen in closer to the intricacy, speed, and warmth.
Tarnower had a chance to showcase his finest playing in a Jimmy Ryan song. His mandolin exuberance sent those high sweet notes flying forward and he created a tasty broth of sound when the acoustic guitar and banjo turned up their dynamics and the whole affair made you want to tap your feet and sing-a-long to the vocal harmonies.
Two-part harmonies between Tarnower and Bartley were lush, fulsome, and ultimately pleasing to the ear. They just blend well together and an occasional three-part harmony with Benson added more dimension. Bartley announced that they were going to play a drug song, and he and his boys went into an old Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys staple “Soldier’s Joy,” a cry for morphine when a man was wounded in battle. Their lush three-part vocal harmony had a country flavor and Benson’s banjo was racing lickety split, riding up over the mountain tempo.
These bluegrass boys did go into some blues material. They played an old blues piece by Leroy Carr from 1928, with Bartley’s handsome low tenor blended perfectly with Tarnower’s higher tenor. The four players/singers made me picture a scene from the 1920s in which a bunch of poor southern laborers hung out on someone’s wooden front porch entertaining each other with their acoustic instruments.
Bartley and his friends were probably at their most clever when they arranged The Beatles song “Things We Said Today” for a drawling mountain feeling. They certainly got a lot of melody going on during their interpretation. They soon followed with the Bessie Smith classic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out,” and they captured that breezy feeling of giving up and letting go when you can’t buy what you need. Bartley put his heart into the lead vocal here and he carried it with warm tongue in cheek humor.
Speaking of humor, the foursome went into Norman Blake’s “Ginseng Sullivan.” The guitar, mandolin, and banjo made their patchwork of melodic togetherness. There was something a little extra special in the rhythm coming from Levenson’s upright bass, an almost two step beat that lifted the higher instruments over his knobbiness.
“Walkin’ In Jerusalem” by Diamond Rio found the three-part harmony getting more involved. The boys also got feisty on Raleigh And Spencer’s “Ain’t No Liquor In The Town.” It had a mid-tempo charm that glided along aloft a cushion of bass before a speedy, intricate banjo built an arc out of its own organic beauty.
“I’ve Been All Around This World,” once covered by Bill Munroe but credited to Grandpa Jones, got a fulsome interpretation from Bartley and his boys. It was just bouncy fun to follow along with the ears. It’s merry go round groove created a spiral platform for another warm two-part harmony.
Murder ballad “Little Sadie” was a quaint, speedy work of lyrical terror that the boys whipped up in sprightly double time. Segue into Reverend Gary Davis’s “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” and Bartley sounded a hearty, guttural bellow that made the song sound even scarier than its theme. The melody instruments were fertile and dark as the bass notes swung at an old western pace.
It was an evening of challenging music that these four boys could easily handle. Vocals were perfectly blended and instruments gave one another a run for their money. The warm vibe they created, three of them standing in front of an old fashioned microphone designed to pick up two or more singers at once, made it a cozy night at Smoken’ Joe’s.
