Phish bassist, guitarist Kottke flash understated chemistry November 15, 2002 - Chicago Tribune By Michael Parrish A couple of years ago, Phish bassist Mike Gordon introduced himself to acoustic guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke after a gig and handed him a tape of Kottke's tunes on which Gordon, a longtime fan of the guitarist, had overdubbed bass parts. That initial meeting ultimately led to a joint recording project and a Kottke-Gordon tour that stopped at the Park West Wednesday night. Although they generally inhabit vastly different musical worlds, the two musicians seemed to be of one mind, down to their matching slacks, knit shirts and graying brown hair. Both were performing in unfamiliar territory, because Kottke has worked as a soloist throughout his three-decade career, and Gordon's main band is louder and more improvisational than the intimate music the pair produced. During the often bizarre between-tune chatter, Kottke and Gordon often finished each other's sentences, and, at its best, their ensemble playing sounded like one musician playing 18 strings with four hands. Opening with "Arko" from the new CD "Clone," Gordon wove resonant, sinuous bass lines around the revisionist ragtime figures Kottke picked out on his 12-string guitar. The evening's most dazzling interplay occurred on Kottke's instrumentals, as Gordon's sympathetic playing and unerring sense of counterpoint spurred the guitarist to stretch out and improvise more than he does in a solo setting. On a few of Gordon's songs, Kottke seemed less comfortable, either resorting to simple repetitive figures or, as on "Clay," dropping out of the mix almost completely. Both musicians are passable vocalists, but the contrast between Gordon's thin tenor and Kottke's gruff baritone produced some truly weird harmonies on Gordon's eccentric "Clone" and an equally inimitable duet on "Collins Missile," the bassist's fantasy about firing a weapon at a neighbor's house. Kottke's voice worked best alone, notably on his left-of-center original, "Middle of the Road." Although Kottke and Gordon performed several tunes from their recording, these were fleshed out by a healthy dose of Kottke's other instrumentals. The stately "William Powell" was given a Jamaican lilt, and they went all out on a romp through Kottke's signature tune, the rapid-fire "Vaseline Machine Gun." Gordon introduced a new tune, the witty "Can't Hang," and indulged his passion for bluegrass by singing the Stanley Brothers standard, "Old Home on the Hill." To close their 90-minute set, the duo trotted out a Phish favorite, "Ya Mar," rendered as a breezy shuffle onto which Kottke grafted an unexpected, but perfectly complementary, chord progression. Copyright © 2002 Chicago Tribune