Musicians everywhere have had to acclimate to a new reality over the last year, but New Age guitar champ Carl Weingarten didn’t slow down. The global pandemic hit around the time Weingarten was planning to record his next album, but since he couldn’t have session players in his studio to help him record it, he shrugged and simply handled more of the instrumentation on his own and had other musicians tape their parts remotely from as far away as Uruguay.
Simply put, Carl Weingarten adapted and changed, but it’s really more about adapting because the end result is much the same that’s been appealing about Carl Weingarten music for over three decades. He continues unabated to make crystalline instrumental music that’s both soothing and stimulating, sweating all the details in making it all sound uncomplicated.
if anything, Ember Days largely picks up where This is Where I Found You (2018) left off, with many of the usual suspects carried over. It’s hard to imagine a Carl Weingarten record these days without elite electric bassist Michael Manring, and I’m happy to report that the coronavirus couldn’t keep Manring from participating in these sessions. The guitarist remains the main star, though, his guitars able to suggest so many disparate influences from rock to jazz to blues and folk, presented it in a way that perfectly serves the music and that soothing/stimulating mission.
Nothing at all is lost from the leader’s deeper involvement with the instrumentation because his vision remains precise. “Round Robin,” for instance, was all done by Weingarten, save for Manring’s basses, but he knows how to harmoniously layer in all his guitar parts, synthesizer and rhythm sequencing to craft his signature style that sounds richly celestial and terrestrial at the same time. “Brother Mountain” adds pianist Peter Calandra and gently waltzing number abounds in velvety tones, even when Weingarten is playing that slide or an acerbic-toned electric guitar.
Just as he often uses Manring to double with him on the main melodic line on other songs, Weingarten enlists Tate Bissinger’s wordless vocal to amplify the fetching theme on “What The Raindrop Saw,” helping to make it sound almost like it belongs on a David Crosby album. “What The Raindrop Saw (Cafe Mix)” is a stripped down version of the song that has more of Kit Walker’s piano on it.
Weingarten and David Udell uses contrasting electric lead guitars that give the otherwise willowy “Goodbye Sun” a rock sting. “Skying Out” grooves so good it’s easy to not notice there’s no percussion to it. Weingarten tops it off with a brief but tasteful electric guitar solo.
“Ember Days” is a song utterly made for the morning; the confluence of guitar, keyboards and Bissinger’s voice forming a bright glow like the slowly rising sun peeking over the horizon. The all-Weingarten “Blue Spaces” is distinguished from the other tracks in that it’s the only place drums are used, but rendered very gently. “Geola” is also Weingarten alone, using lonely-sounding electric slide guitar over a soft bed of acoustic guitar and keyboards.
Carl Weingarten’s long embrace of technology has paid off handsomely in the making of Ember Days, an album with his signature pristine sound and the perfect, stress-relieving, soul-satisfying elixir for these trying times.
Ember Days is now on sale; get it from Weingarten’s Bandcamp page.
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