The guitar is commonplace. This commonality can make it easy to forget what really good guitar playing sounds like. The signal to noise ratio often isn't high enough to let top performers stand out, and this makes the impact of a really great album all the more powerful.
Beppe Gambetta's Blu di Genova is one such really great album. From the upbeat and intricate "On the Road with Mama" to the martial "Marcia Americana/Under the Double Eagle" the album never disappoints. While the other instrumentals and the singing are good, the guitar work is the album's real strength. Every song's foundation is a strong guitar performance, where Gambetta shows his compelling ability to draw just the right emotion out of each song.
The CD gets off to a great start with "On the Road with Mama". Layering 12-string and 6-string guitars, Gambetta skillfully evokes the song's traveling theme. The melody does its best to lead you out the door and onto the road, while the infectious rhythm makes it difficult to listen and keep still. The computer-animation video that accompanies this song adds a humorous and light-hearted air as well.
Every one of the other eleven tunes on this album is also a gem. Gambetta is on the mark time and time again with performances that set exactly the right emotional background. On "A Night in Frontenac", a guitar-banjo duet with Gene Parsons, he conjures up a warm, convivial feeling that clearly convey the "joy of a meeting between two friends" that Gambetta explains on his Web site as the meeting behind the tune. Gene Parsons contributes to several songs on Blu di Genova, the most notable being his surprisingly good Italian in the harmony vocals for "A Cimma".
"Church Street Blues" and "Shenandoah Valley Breakdown" show how thoroughly integrated American traditional music is in Gambetta's repertoire. "Shenandoah Valley Breakdown" is a fantastic duet with flatpicking legend Dan Crary. Gambetta's arrangement of Norman Blake's "Church Street Blues" is an illustration in how to smoothly incorporate Italian musicians and influence (such as Mario Arcari on the oboe and Gambetta's son Filippo on the melodeon) into a song within the American blues tradition.
The blues focus on Blu di Genova doesn't prevent Gambetta from introducing a bit of whimsy in the martial "Marcia Americana/Under the Double Eagle". The march's familiar strain in the first few bars will have you grinning almost immediately. Introducing a tuba on any other song on this album wouldn't have worked at all, but playing a march (even on the guitar) makes it almost inevitable. The upbeat tuba playing underneath the march's melody on the guitar is an easy cure for any down mood, with the loud tuba blast that closes the tune punctuating the feeling.
Beppe Gambetta shows a master's hand in the guitar work on Blu di Genova. Conjuring the appropriate emotions and setting on each tune, Gambetta goes from strength to strength with pieces that touch on Italian and American themes. The emotive skill is matched with technique to produce a great album that belongs in the CD player of any fan of the guitar.
