Graham Reid | | 2 min read
Another Portrait
This year Elsewhere can reflect on a 20 year relationship with the music of the Pacific Northwest. Not Jimi and grunge which we'd been there for, but with more recent artists just off the radar for most people in this hemisphere.
It started in 2004 when, just before going to Seattle, a friend asked if we'd be seeing Green Pajamas when we were there.
“Never heard of 'em.”
But by the time we left we'd been brought up to speed and had contacted the band's Jeff Kelly whom we dropped around to see. We loved his band so much.
Since then we have written about new Green Pajama releases, their reissues and side projects, Jeff's solo albums and then – through the agency and enthusiasm of Tom Dyer of the Green Monkey label – been serviced with albums on that small but busy label like the Queen Annes.
And Jim of Seattle.
Recently we wrote about Tom's tribute in songs to his hometown of Portland.
It has been quite a journey in pajamas with a monkey on our back!
Tom was especially enthusiastic about the new album Dark And Deep and debut by Jeff Parkhurst which has apparently been 12 years in the making.
Best known to his peers as a drummer, here he is also credited with vocals, piano, bass, guitar, hang, bells and pedal steel.
Add in players on accordion, flute, organ, clarinet and guitars and you can get some idea of the musical reach of the album Dark And Deep.
But wait, there's more.
Because the opener Freewheelin' Souls is a collage of Beat poems by the late Charles Adler with jazz accompaniment.
Freewheelin' Souls, Jeff Pankhurst and Charles Adler
And the final piece Woods Are Dark and Deep is a piano ballad setting of Robert Frost's famous poem (whose voice is sampled at the start).
But between that Alpa and Omega are the jazz-influenced rock of GTO about the mystery of a note left for a woman and the follow-up Sister Julianne also refers to a car but is about a former friend who is now a young nun “and your man lives in Heaven”.
Parkhurst's world in these first songs is the lonely downtown, a solitary walking, lost lovers, private thoughts revealed and many lyrics alluding rather than openly stating.
But Something Larger leads into the equally abstruse, haunting Another Portrait. It's a ballad with pastoral flute which opens the mesmerising Dark And Deep Suite on that second metaphoric and metaphysical side of the vinyl which closes with the adaptation of Frost's similarly mysterious poem.
So here is a semi-autobiographical album which has its personal stories deeply encoded, couched in piano-based rock with its roots in Seventies singer-songwriters, gentle wafts of self-contained prog-rock musical settings (the edgy Forget This Craziness in the Suite) and with further touchstones in poetry.
Dark And Deep is an unusual album. Musically much of it sounds like a lost album from 1972 but, with references to “enter your PIN” and its underlying tension – 17 Layers is about Dante's Beatrice and the circles of Hell -- is clearly as timeless as it is contemporary.
Side one/the first half is grounded in this world, the Suite look to somewhere deeper and less easy to define.
As the text inside the album says, “deep sea, deep space, deep sleep, deep grief. They are all slower and attenuated in sound. They are not of our time”.
Twelve years? It was worth the weight/wait.
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You can hear and buy Dark And Deep from bandcamp here.This album is available in a limited run of vinyl which has a classy gatefold sleeve and an insert lyric sheet. Lovely package.
The extensive Green Monkey catalogue can be found at its bandcamp page here.
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