WINNEMUCCA - Slide guitarist David Jacobs-Strain will perform at the Martin Hotel tonight at 7 p.m.
Bending notes with a slide guitar elicits the most invigorating, emotional sounds in popular music. Witness today's slide explorations in songs by such contemporary guitarists as Chris Whitley, Jack White and the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach. Add to that list David Jacobs-Strain, the twentysomething singer-songwriter who brilliantly brings the rich roots of slide guitar to the millennials generation with his eclectic styling that melds the blues, folk, rock and indie pop into a tasty Americana brew inflected with pockets of funk and reggae.
"There's a primal sound to the slide," he says, "I like how I get the slide to sneak around in my songs, showing up in unexpected places, from mellow tunes to hard rock."
In addition to his compelling instrumental prowess, Jacobs-Strain also proves himself a literate lyricist, as evidenced on his latest album, "Live From the Left Coast," a duo date with harmonica ace Bob Beach.
While Jacobs-Strain can't exactly put his finger on what style to call his singular music, he has jokingly named it "gangsta-grass" and "one-man arena rock," while also hazarding the term about himself as a "magical realist of the Delta blues."
But he largely steers away from the "blues" label - otherwise, he says, "people would be disappointed if they came to one of my shows, even if the blues does form one component of my music. I'm tired and not interested in the clichés that pass for blues today where so often the songwriting is poor and the crowds are sedated by machismo and cheap beer."
Indeed, Jacobs-Strain's music breaks from today's blues mainstream by being more playful, hauntingly beautiful and self-revealing. Jacobs-Strain is well-versed in the slide guitar tradition in roots music, country blues and folk, stretching back to Delta blues fathers such as Robert Johnson, Son House and Charley Patton and later to next generation sliders such as Mississippi Fred McDowell and Taj Mahal continuing the practice today.
But he feels an equal affinity for the likes of Whitley, Ray LaMontagne, Steven Stills and Steve Earle.
"That's the kind of music I'm creating," he says. "And I'm inspired by people like Taj Mahal and the Stones, who have a playful sensuality in their music as well as a sense of nuance."
Today calling himself a "homeless musician" who has moved among such geographic locales as northern California, Nashville and Portland, Ore., the 27-year-old Jacobs-Strain was born in New Haven, Conn., and moved to Eugene, Ore., with his parents when he was young.
As a teenager, as his prowess as a guitarist began to develop, he started to explore more slide players like McDowell and set out to develop his own voice.
"I didn't want to imitate," he says, and adds, "Then I started working on lyrics. I didn't want to be thought of as some kind of a blues prodigy. I hated that. I knew that audiences perceived me as a good guitarist, but I also wanted to move people."
The songs started coming faster the more he played, and while still a teenager, he began to record his own albums, including 1998's "Skin & Bones," an album of blues covers he made when he was 15. Soon he was busking, making enough money to buy a National steel guitar, and a few years later after being mentored by blues ace Otis Taylor recorded "Stuck on the Way Back" (2001) and "Ocean or a Teardrop" (2004).
Jacobs-Strain recorded a live album ("Santa Fee Bootleg"), then 2008's "Liar's Day," an album with the Joe Walsh rhythm team of bassist Kenny Passarelli and drummer Joe Vitale. The buzz Jacobs-Strain generated earned him a spot opening for Boz Scaggs on a lengthy tour in 2008.
The latest studio recording for Jacobs-Strain came in 2010 with "Terraplane Angel," produced by Ray Kennedy at Room & Board in Nashville.
Jacobs-Strain's latest album, "Live From the Left Coast," captures him collaborating in an organic way with Beach. It was recorded at the Rolling and Tumbling temporary juke joint in Eugene in 2010. It features him sliding on Traugott six-string, Pogreba resonator and Yamaha 12-string.
"I had made three studio albums with a full band," the guitarist says. "But I also play solo or duo live a lot. It's quite a unique thing that people requested I document on a record. I asked Bob and told him we would do it with old mikes and tubes in the amplifiers. I wanted to make the sound aggressive, but also wanted to give the record a jazz feel, to sound real."
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