July 2008-Stone Crazy Blues Band

 STONE CRAZY BLUES BAND: Microstoned The three-piece Stone Crazy Blues Band, featuring accomplished guitarist Chris Morda, stands apart from the common herd of blues bands encountered in clubs and at festivals. Morda’s personality on 12-Tone Ultra Plus and Fretless guitars has all the communicative warmth one expects of a world-class blues artist, but there’s more: This recent transplant to New York City from Seattle goes beyond business-as-usual note-bending and boldly embraces alternate tuning systems, without losing any of the music’s innate sensuality. He relishes exploring the microtonal notes between the notes. With blues becoming more and more predictable and clichéd with each passing day, Morda’s creative efforts are, in a word, refreshing.

Supported by the expert rhythm team of drummer Todd Zimberg and bass player Forrest Giberson, Morda succeeds in working out his own distinct blues language on the new Microstoned album, the follow-up to the Stone Crazy’s acclaimed debut album, Barnyard Boogie. Combining pitches from the current Western system of tuning (equal temperament) with uncommon acoustical harmonics, he achieves marvelous musical results on a program of familiar songs that have transformed into fascinating and otherworldly reconfigurations.

Pulsing with new life are two classics from Chicago blues titan Muddy Waters: “I Can’t Be Satisfied” (Morda references the version on Waters’s 1977 Hard Again album, not the late-’40s Chess original) and “Trouble No More” (he builds on Duane and Gregg Allman’s recorded live-at-the-Fillmore rendition, circa 1970). Both songs glow with wondrous displays of the Ultra Plus-spawned “multi-temperament” combination of pitches. So does Morda’s minor scale-based blues original titled “Time Will Tell.” The song’s Jimi Hendrix vibe comes from the harmonic structure and the outlay of potent guitar lyricism.

Morda welcomes the interpretative opportunities offered in the music of other classics, as well. One can almost hear the tectonic plates of pop-music history shifting when the guitarist redesigns Oz visitor Dorothy Gale’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Again showing his mastery of the Ultra Plus, he tweaks the notes of the beloved melody into a kaleidoscope of shifting emotional colors—gentle awe, startling anxiety, suspense, happy energy. Never vain or egocentric, the former student of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington-Seattle treats blues-jazz maverick James Blood Ulmer’s “Are You Glad To Be In America?” with the radiant respect the 1980 UK Rough Trade single deserves while seeking out his own darkness-and-light revelations in an unnervingly controlled yet free-spirited performance–hard-to-please Blood himself might even crack an approving smile. Freddie King’s oft-covered “Hideaway” doesn’t wear out its welcome because Morda uses the evergreen unleashes an impressive showcase of guitar inspiration; note his special rapport with the rhythm section—the groove’s caked with Mississippi mud. Morda’s keen expressive abilities shine new light on “Harlem Nocturne,” the age-old r&b-jump blues number that’s been done to a fare-thee-well by a multitude of interpreters (including countless sax players in strip joints of yesteryear). Once again, the native Detroiter finds surprising kernels of insight in a threadbare song.

Morda employs Fretless guitar tuned to Open G in the Just Intonation tuning system (the distances between pitches represented by whole-number frequency ratios; don’t get it? don’t worry, just listen) for the remaining tracks. He commingles fervor, lyricism and sensuality in his improvised solo atop a droning loop on “Opening to G.” A student of classical Indian music, he’s no stranger to thinking of music from a modal or melody base rather than a harmonic structure; and he’s open to bringing scales from Indian music to blues. Artful surprises keep on coming when Morda weds the radio-friendly melody of Edgar Winter’s early-’70s hit “Frankenstein” to the chord change from late great soul blues guitarist Albert King’s “Flat Tire.” The resulting composite, “Frankentire,” blazes with steady flow, intelligence and emotional detail, resisting easy categorization though “blues-rock” makes for an acceptable match to Stone Crazy Blues Band music. “Stranger Blues” may be recalled from Johnny Winter’s Winter of 88 album but here Morda gives it an adventurous makeover and seizes it his own from the albino guitarist. Last but not least, his take of Robert Johnson’s world-famous “Come On In My Kitchen” attains an aura of concentrated emotional intensity. True with this song and all the rest on Microstoned, Forrest Giberson on bass and Todd Zimberg on drums add just the right amount of heft and depth without drawing undue attention to themselves.

With Microstoned, Chris Morda secures his place in the company of other committed, forward-looking blues artists of considerable talent: Jon Catler, Babe Borden, Elliott Sharp, LaMonte Young, Neil Haverstick, Otis Taylor, and Blood Ulmer, among others. –Frank-John Hadley