3hattrio – Live At Zion
Okehdokee Records – 19 November 2019
Following on from their four studio albums, Utah trio 3hattrio featuring Hal Cannon, Greg Istock and Eli Wrankle dip into the well for this live album, recorded in a pre-Civil War adobe-and-frame church at the mouth of Zion Canyon to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Zion National Park, to which a percentage of the sales will go.
Working with just basic instrumentation of guitar, banjo, fiddle and double bass with some occasional percussion, as anyone familiar with past albums will know they conjure a heady, at times shamanistic peyote trip sound, one even more hypnotic and intense in the live setting. The nine tracks draw on all the three earlier albums, primarily 2016’s Solitaire, as well as adding two new numbers to a set they describe as a single piece of music, a desert symphony from their home. That’s certainly the feel you get from the introduction to show opener Wind, banjo blowing like a tumbleweed ball into the fiddle intro as the dry vocals and pulsing rhythm evoke the harsh sparse beauty of the landscape, building to an almost mazurka/tribal chant climax.
Written by Istock and named for the iconic outlaw duo of Ridley Scott’s classic film, the seven minutes plus almost experimental jazz Thelma & Louise is the first of the two new songs, double bass underpinning the wordless, impressionistic vocals and scraping fiddle, the latter affording a solo atmospheric bridge before building to the nervy, percussive denouement.
The second comes with Zion Song which, commissioned by the president of the Zion National Bank and sparking the concert concept, is a tribute to their homeland, banjo and fiddle again backdropping Cannon’s parched and cracked semi-spoken vocals. Opening with throbbing bass and initially scat vocals, the nasally sung Blood River follows, another desert lysergic mazurka blues with fiddle effects, and then comes the almost nine-minute Desert Triptych, a stunning amalgamation of three numbers, the symphonic and cinematic intro taken from Rose, preceding jittery rhythm instrumental Night Sky, Rose before the centrepiece Lord Of the Desert, Cannon giving it the full Jim Morrison spoken shaman invocation over a skeletal metronomic backdrop of effects and fiddle.
That, in turn, gives way to another lengthy hybrid with the seven-minute Texas Traveler interpolating a traditional banjo and fiddle first part call and response stomp and a loose interpretation of their own Texas Time Traveller that gathers in tempo and sonic storms to a minimalist experimental bridge before they involve the audience in a rousing handclapping and whooping mirror what I do finale.
They head to a close with the bass throbbing Crippled Up Blues building to a cacophonous crescendo and then the banjo-driven Flight, from their Year One debut, with its traditional folk roots and inspired by a dream Cannon had while camped on an Oregon river near where Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce is buried.
Finally, they end with the banjo dappled and more vocally sparse Zion Coda, a haunting paean to the power of the landscape and a terrific culmination of a remarkable live experience.
Order Live at Zion via Bandcamp