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Show Reviews Shane Jackman at Studio One Shane Jackman's live radio performance on KRCL aired while I was writing a brief overview of the local acoustic music scene. I gave Shane a call, and discovered that his first concert in Salt lake City was scheduled for February 12. Perhaps the most striking thing about the preconcert purview was the absence of familiar lAMA faces. Granted, it was Jackman's first local concert, held in a remote venue (Studio One in Murray). But for a Utah-bred performer, a recording artist whose 14 Intermountain Acoustic Musician, April 1994 work is heard on KRCL, and erstwhile moonlighter in the local folk circuit, Jackman's full-house audience of what seemed a fairly homogeneous Mormon crowd was surprising. It was both an example and the flip side of what is said about a person "not being honored in his own land." In an assured, personable demeanor, Jackman suggests the listener "pull in the sails and drift" for stories that are to follow. The listener is soon aware that at the helm is a powerful storyteller, a master songwriter. He spins poignant tales of twice encountering a Rockies sheepherder turned L.A. vagabond, where the sidewalk, the city is "bleeding his soul away'' (Without a Word), a historical retelling of circus elephants' last Banzai-trick stand in an effort at grace as they waste away in abandoned wartime circus rings in Japan, and Jackman's own ancestor's inadvertent fatal shooting of his wife during a religious raid. The broadly chosen stories are engagingly told, yet Jackman's strongest suit shows up in his depiction of life in the Western U.S. His songs summon a vital sense of the relationships between landscape and ethnology and inner life Jackman's new material, much of it not on the 1992 release, attests to the growth and reflection of a man who spent 1993 on the road maintaining a schedule of close to 1 00 performances from Arizona to New Hampshire. Along the path of the national folk circuit, Jackman earlier gathered material in New England, convincing him that All The King's Horses ... couldn't make New England this old cowboy's home. Jackman's guitar style-its nuances that shift and modulate to accentuate the sense of each particular song-is impressive. In the rollicking tune, Adobe Run, he uses a Chuck Pyle style with the alternating pick and striking of the strings with the backs of his fingers. In sensitive-issue songs he strums and gently strikes above the sound hole, adding well-placed harmonics. In Tribal Line, we hear frame drums, bells, native American flute and a finish with up strumming on the downbeat. In the Donner Party piece, he finishes with the haunting refrain on the harmonica. For a man of what appears to fairly tender years, Jackman present material that is substantive, soulful and artfully phrased. The "contrapreneur'' that he is, he has the ability to shift from songs of grim import to a jazzy, bluesy fish in' tune, from vulnerability to•gutsy rendition of the outlaw on the run. With Jackman, the sailing can be gnarly or moonlit, evocatively lining details of the horizon, but each segue holds us throughout the voyage. The man is indeed going places. -Lin Ostler SMOKEv·s RECORDS 1515 S. 15th East Salt Lake City, Utah 841 05 (80 1 ) 486-8 709 1 0°/o off with your lAMA card |
