Jerry Douglas – Lookout For Hope
If you think of the dobro, you think of Jerry Douglas. Anyone who picks up the instrument follows the many-forked trail he’s laid down at least since his 1978 solo album Fluxology. For his latest record, Douglas surrounds himself with musicians who, each to their own instrument, occupy similarly pre-eminent places in contemporary acoustic music. Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Bryan Sutton, Barry Bales, Chris Thile, Byron House, and Larry Atamanuik all join in crafting the full, round sound of these nine instrumentals and two songs.
Douglas calls the album an “amalgamation” of bluegrass, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and classical music; indeed, all of those genres are tackled with a virtuoso’s experience and insight. To what degree they cohere into a single musical vision is a tougher call.
The disc’s most tuneful and melodic moments are the most engaging and memorable. The Allman Brothers classic “Little Martha” starts off with Douglas’ signature intense warmth and multilayered chording — he overdubs three different dobro models — before being joined by Barry Bales’ strolling bass lines. “Footsteps Fall”, while a showcase for Maura O’Connell’s vocals, has some winsome, elegant phrasing on both dobro and lap steel.
The sprawling title track (by Bill Frisell), on the other hand, plunges into jam jazz. Over Sam Bush and Chris Thile’s mandolin chops, Sutton and Douglas trade spacey, refracted scale runs. The effect is only intermittently mesmerizing; by the nine-minute mark, the result is background music.
Though it clocks in at two minutes, the one traditional (and only solo slide guitar) number, “The Sweet By And By”, like much of this quietly ambitious project, has the poignance and articulate lyricism that a master alone knows.