Freewheeling Vance

Gilbert's on the storytelling edge

by Don Fluckinger

Bank robbers, Amelia Earhart, "young women coming of age and getting their due in a story" -- they are just a few of the characters who come to life in Vance Gilbert's songs. All compelling, all interesting, and all with their own tale to tell.

He doesn't overpower you with political platitudes like many folk singers. But the sociopolitical messages are there. Like in "Jenny and the Tower" from Gilbert's most recent album, Fugitives. Jenny, a young woman about to get married, climbs a hundred feet up her small-town's FM broadcast antenna and contemplates the upcoming transition in her life. The song's ambiguous, will-she-jump ending gives us pause -- is this guy good enough for her? She doesn't have to take this off-the-shelf husband just to get out of this off-the-shelf town.

All this came to Gilbert as he was driving across Pennsylvania to a gig, trying to find something interesting on the dial but not having much luck. He started thinking about the people who lived outside his window -- what were their influences, what moved them? What if someone grows up in that area and is a bit of a rogue, sees things a little differently and is trapped?

"That's why people are trapped in our society today," Gilbert says. "How do they find their way out? And what kind of compromises do they make? A gay person in an extremely conservative family or a very conservative black person in an urban black family, or so on. All those things."

And what about other singer/ songwriters to come out of Boston who write intelligent lyrics that delve into the complex emotions of the human soul, another name comes to mind: Tracy Chapman. On rare occasions people try and make a connection between her and Vance Gilbert. But Gilbert was singing cocktail-room jazz when Chapman hit in the late 1980s. Where she's raw, Gilbert is smooth, soaking his music with soul stylings learned as he grew up in Philadelphia. And his awesome guitar technique betrays his years on the jazz scene.

"I bought and listened to Tracy Chapman's first album and got what was going on and saw where she was coming from, so I sort of saw the evolution of it all sort of ex post facto," says Gilbert, who arrived on the folk scene several years after Chapman became successful. Seeing Shawn Colvin perform inspired him to switch gears from jazz to folk. The hat trick of Colvin's strong singing/ songwriting and energized performances spurred him to perfect his own songs.

He billed himself as a cross between James Taylor and James Brown. Although Gilbert says he's well-grounded in pop music, he also performs a handful of old a cappella English tunes. Gilbert is also known for his freewheeling, humorous on-stage dialog with audience members. At most shows he's armed with just a guitar and his wit. Will he go as far as twirling a baton for laughs like Philo labelmate Christine Lavin?

"No, actually, I'm more like Cheryl Wheeler, in fact, more comedic, maybe a little acerbic," he says. "Go after somebody a little bit, see what they're about, and do a bit of a little routine with somebody and then launch into another song. I owe the audience more than just a myriad of tunes. I bring a lot of myself into what I'm doing -- I don't do my little bit of comedy to cover for anything, like for any shortcomings musically. You're going to get a little truth, a little music, some comedy, a real mix."

As a teen, Gilbert listened to popular soul, the likes of Kool and the Gang, the Isley Brothers, and Earth, Wind, and Fire. Add to that the Shawn Colvin epiphany, his jazz experience, as well as vocal range and expressiveness that just cannot be taught. It sounds a little Sting, a little Al Jarreau. His cover of Smokey Robinson's "Just a Mirage" features an electric sitar and tambourine, not a common combination. Yet the mix works; the old song becomes something new in Gilbert's hands.

His new CD, Shaking off Gravity, comes out in February. Recorded almost entirely in Boston -- in the living room of gifted singer/producer Vinx -- the CD features Gilbert, his guitar, an upright bass, a smattering of percussion, and an all-star line-up of acquaintances such as Cliff Eberhardt (dobro), Everett Pendleton (guitar), and Patty Larkin (accordion). Additional Boston jazz musicians round out the roster.

"Each one of these people is on one tune -- I never stacked anybody," Gilbert says. "[The album]'s got its raggedy edges, which we were happy to keep because we were getting great performances. It's like some of those mid-career Van Morrison albums that just obviously sound very live, and yet there's no way to reproduce the performances that you got."

Vance Gilbert performs at 8 p.m. on December 2 at WPI's Riley Commons. Tickets are $3 for students and $5 for non-students. Call 831-5509.