All-covers albums by composing musicians have been almost inevitable for many of them. For guitarist Shane Parish, this isn’t a side alley for him as his interpretations contain just as much originality as the songs he makes up on his own. It’s a good thing Parish has a lot of ingenuity to go with his guitar virtuosity, too, because his new covers album Repertoire (Palilalia) requires a lot of both.
The musical interests of Shane Parish are wide-ranging, and thus, so are the songs he selected for this collection. Parish’s chosen assortment of songs speak loudly to the kind of artist he is, by signaling who and what inspires him. Jazz dignitaries Charles Mingus, Roland Kirk, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra and Eric Dolphy swam against convention and blazed their own trails. Surveying the composers who accounted for the rest of the fourteen tracks, it’s evident that they were all bold innovators, too: The Minutemen, John Cage, Kraftwerk, Captain Beefheart, and even Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood fame.
Many of these composers aren’t that easy to transcribe for an unadorned acoustic guitar, but Parish rises to the challenge and comes up with songs that are rejuvenated in his hands. At the great risk of understating this, Shane Parish just does covers differently.
All that would make for an interesting collection already, but it’s helpful to recognize that Parish himself isn’t ever going to be content to play songs the way it’s already been played. He alters these compositions by inserting bass lines, playing stylistic feels novel to the song, employing alternate tunings or even substituting chords.
The composing and bass giant Mingus is a favorite, as three of his songs were chosen (no other composer had more than one song selected). “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” gets transformed just from a few chord alterations but Parish also changes the time signature, making this a quite different tune but it remains recognizable. Just from Parish’s emulation of the bass part, “Pithecanthropus Erectus” has Mingus’ earmarks, but Parish also plays it first in a high register and then a lower one. One of Mingus’ more colorful numbers, “Reincarnation of a Lovebird” is made even more so by Parish’s sudden flamenco intro, and shows a lot of dexterity in unwinding the extended lines.
In just forty-six seconds, Parish manages to completely transform the seemingly un-transformable “Out To Lunch” by putting in chords that were only obliquely implied by Dolphy’s original. You might not recognize it all in Parish’s hands, it sounds like a whole new composition, one that’s full of the complexity that previously only existed in Dolphy’s mind.
Parish bears out the universal attractiveness of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” by putting a set bass line to it and casting it as a folk-blues, making it seem it was written that way. An intro based on a handful of other songs is tacked on to the start of Kirk’s “Serenade to a Cuckoo,” before settling into the familiar strain anchored by a walking bass pattern.
Parish starts with Cecil McBee’s hypnotic bass figure for Alice Coltrane’s enchanting trance “Journey in Satchidananda,” then manages to shoehorn portions of Coltrane’s and Pharaoh Sanders’ part to make this appear it’s being played by two guitarists. “Lights on a Satellite” by Sun Ra is subjected to some imaginative rearranging by Parish, but retains the heart of the song.
The non-jazz selections show no pattern in Parish’s chosen sources, as he finds inspiration from unlikely origins. Sometimes ingenuity is called for even from the most rigid source material, as in electronic music. Kraftwerk’s “Europe Endless” presented unique challenges for Parish because of the key changes, an obstacle he overcame with a tuning specific for this song.
Aphex Twin’s two-minute delicate piano piece “Avril 14th” is a two-minute delicate fingerpicked guitar piece in Parish’s hands, and he justifiably made the call to not alter what was already perfect. “Cohesion” is a two-minute Spanish guitar piece from D. Boon and the Minutemen also presented that way here, but placed in a lower key and played with a richer-toned guitar.
Avant-garde music pioneer John Cage gets representation here via the Kronos Quartet with “Totem Ancestor,” Parish mimicking the staccato motion of Kronos’ strings. “One Red Rose That I Mean” in its initial iteration on a Captain Beefheart album is Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad) on solo guitar playing a proto-math rock guitar that anticipated by a couple of decades Parish’s own take on the style with the Ahleuchatistas. Despite that, the song has an emotional center, and Parish brings that out as well.
Parish didn’t pick anything out of Tin Pan Alley, but Mr. Rogers’ “It’s You I Like” is more than a suitable stand-in. It’s got that sentimental melody that’s actually well-conceived and this rendition wisely lets that do all the talking.
In making the sometimes-hidden genius of these wide assortment of composers visible, Shane Parish showed some of his own genius. Get Repertoire now, from Bandcamp.
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