Kottke's Clone November 15, 2002 - Denver Post By G. Brown Master guitarist teams up with Phish bassist for surprising harmonic fusion Friday, November 15, 2002 - His career spans 34 years and more than 25 records. His skillful synergy of country blues, jazz and classical styles has provided him with renown and a fan base that encompasses generations. But Leo Kottke never had a musical partner or even fronted a touring band. The reason? The acoustic guitar master is close to a whole band unto himself. Yet the new album "Clone" finds the revered solo artist joined by Phish bassist Mike Gordon. The pair will perform at a sold-out concert Tuesday at the Boulder Theater. "It came out of dorking around," the idiosyncratic and literate Kottke told The Post. "It's surprising to me, because I'm such a busy player - I hog all the room. And Mike plays a lot, he's all over the place. It's funny that it worked so well for us, but it just does. It's effortless, really." The way Kottke, 57, and Gordon, 37, came together dates back to 1999, when Gordon had a minor epiphany. They had crossed paths a few times at jazz camps and festivals. "I was driving down the road, (and) Leo was coming to town the next day, so they were playing his stuff on the radio," Gordon recalled. "I'd been seeing him play for 16 years at that point, but it never occurred to me until that one moment that we'd play well together." Gordon wrote a bass part for Kottke's "Driving of the Year Nail," an aggressive acoustic tour de force from the guitarist's landmark 1969 debut, "6- and 12-String Guitar," and overdubbed it. He approached Kottke backstage and presented him with the tape and a copy of his book of notional rants, "Mike's Corner." "Maybe I figured I wasn't going to give the tape to him unless I liked it, but then I really did like it," Gordon said. "Leo said he'd gotten tapes like that before, but they were always cheesy. This one was different in that the bass part was a duet with the guitar." Kottke realized the augmented "Nail" was commendable, but it was only after he flipped through "Mike's Corner" that he reasoned anyone who used the word "eleemosynary" (it means "organized for charitable purposes") in his writing was someone he had to find out more about. They played off and on in their hometowns of Minneapolis (Kottke) and Burlington, Vt. (Gordon) According to Kottke, it took them a while to get into the same musical mind-set, but they finally clicked and locked in. Although Kottke has recorded and played with other musicians, Gordon was the first with whom he chose to fully collaborate. "I love playing with Willard Peterson, one of my favorite bassists. But it's more like two people negotiating their way through a piece, because he's a jazzer, a thoroughly schooled player who's done all his homework. So when we're improvising, he's going to go places that I can't go, and I'll automatically go to a place that he would avoid or not think of. "That's the difference between a guitar player who's self-taught and a bass player who's educated," Kottke added. "Mike's studied a lot of piano, knows harmony forwards and backwards, so we should get into trouble. But we don't. That tension of having to pay attention to what's going on is gone. You can be as stupid as you want to be and you still have a good chance of hearing something. It's really nice." The hiatus of Phish - one of the nation's most popular jam-rock bands - presented the ideal opportunity to develop the pleasant "Clone," which contains 12 alternately sturdy and fragmental compositions. The music, which runs a gamut from the splendidly graceful to the manifestly quirky, is built upon Kottke's virtuoso fingerpicking and Gordon's asymmetrical bass lines. "I don't think it would work out so well with anyone else," Gordon said. "With Leo, a traditional bass part doesn't always work - it almost turns what he's doing into a cliche by defining it too much. I always like bass to be the foundation, but if it can also dance around a bit, not to play as few notes as a bass player would necessarily play, it actually works better with what he's doing. It's tricky." "Everyone knows about each instrument having a defined space - there are whole orchestration books written about the range of an instrument, what's possible and not possible, what it can do and can't do," Kottke added. "We've violated all those rules for bass and guitar. We get in each other's way all the time, but there's something about the way our instincts work that doesn't cause a collision." To help them in the creative process, Kottke and Gordon drew on "kitchen percussion" (everything from cake pans to utensils). Splitting the songwriting and lead vocal parts, they shared a view of the universe - the lyrics are filled with tongue-in-cheek whimsy. "Leo's always a funny guy," Gordon said. "He takes cynicism to a new level, but always with a playfulness. I wouldn't know where I'd find him next - in the backyard lying at the base of the empty swimming pool " "Clone" should help Kottke attract yet another category of devotees, as it's being marketed to jam-band fans. "It feels real homey to me," Kottke said. "When we were first getting together, I didn't know squat about Phish. But that isn't because I wasn't paying attention to Phish. That's because I don't pay attention to anything. I'm not claiming that as a virtue When I have time to listen, I tend to read. If I want to hear something, I have a thing about recorded music, because I much prefer hearing it live - maybe because of how much it means to me with my own stuff. I would always hope to reach people that way before I ever reach them with a record." In concert, Kottke is dearly loved for his spontaneous outbursts on the wacky side of life, all told in his trademark matter-of-fact delivery. Now Gordon plays off him, carrying on like a reliable foil. "I feel like Conan O'Brien's sidekick, Andy Richter. Leo tells stories, and I can chime in for a punch line every once in a while. I was thinking I could do interpretive gymnastics," Gordon said. "I never imagined that this would be a live thing, because he always plays by himself, and it always sounds so complete. But now, even that is turning out to be fun for us. It's like getting up on stage with your guitar hero." With a new friend and vitality, Kottke appears reinvigorated. "After playing by yourself for 30 years, to do this is startling. It's amazing to me that something new can happen after so much time. On stage, I'm singing a lot of harmony, I'm being harmonized, I'm playing in one time signature and singing in another. Essentially, now I'm in a band. It's a two-man band, but we're both so damned busy, it might as well be four of us. "It's stretching me every which way, and it feels great - when it isn't scaring me to death." © 2002 The Denver Post