Results for "Lap Steel Guitar"

The Neighborhood Quartet

The Neighborhood Quartet’s music is as varied as its members’ résumés—as improvisers, they’re adept at navigating jazz harmony; as writers they understand the shape of folklike melodies—but, if they had to be classified, you could say they pursue a distinctly midwestern take on the tradition of R&B and pop instrumental groups. Such groups were thicker on the ground in the sixties and seventies: Booker T. & the MG’s, Young-Holt Unlimited, the Meters, and broadly kindred bands such as the more jazz-aligned Crusaders. On its self-titled debut album, the Neighborhood Quartet doesn’t explicitly sound like any of that—they aren’t retrogressive or imitative—but they tap into the tradition’s sensibility: sticky melodies laid on top of supple funk; clever, economical arrangements; tasty and succinct solos. For the group’s guitarist and lap-steel ace, Dan Schwartz, the NHQT has two principal modes, both evocative of motion: their groovy side, likened to cruising through the streets of the quartet’s native Twin Cities; and their ethereal side, likened to floating above the nearby prairie. Indeed, the album’s bright, hooky opener, “Hey Fellas,” written by the band’s vibraphonist, Steve Roehm, would sound great coming from a car stereo on one of the long commercial streets of Minneapolis (or Detroit, for that matter). Meanwhile, Schwartz’s plaintive “End of October” could soundtrack a country drive where with each second the windshield frames a new classic of landscape art.