Martin Harley and Daniel Kimbro, Kay Meek Studio Theatre, Tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets: $35 Adult | $120 Table of Four. 19+ event
(kaymeekcentre.com).
Like an undetermined number of children of the postwar era, Martin Harley’s musical career was conceived in the backseat of a car.
He was, as he puts it, “just having an adventure like you do sometimes in your 20s,” living in a Holden station wagon in Australia.
Speaking from his farm in England, Harley recollects on his days as: “a little bit of a lost soul.”
A former art student, he’d toiled in vineyards and worked as a gardener and tree surgeon, doing “pretty much anything anyone would pay me to do.”
Music was a big part of his life, of course, but certainly not a “sensible way” to make a living.
“I’m not sure I still do consider it a sensible way to making a living,” he reflects with a laugh.
During his Australia adventure, he picked up a 12-string guitar and promptly left it in the backseat.
The pawn shop 12-string warped in the heat.
The instrument was useless – or at least it was useless the way he’d been playing it.
“So I put it across my lap and started tuning it to an open B chord,” he recalls.
Strumming and sliding his hand across the strings as though disciplining an unruly kitten, he heard something new. It was awful, but it had potential.
“Slide guitar sounds pretty terrible when you first set out on that long journey,” he explains.
He’d jammed with bands, but the sound of that twisted 12-string made him think he’d just stumbled on his career.
“I don’t think I’d ever been paid before that,” he says of his musical career; before quickly adding: “It was a while before I got paid after that.”
He’s released five albums since then with a sixth on the way.His most recent release is Live at Southern Ground, recorded with Daniel Kimbro, a bassist he met on a U-Haul at a Crawford, Tenn. music festival.
For the second time, something important happened to Harley in the back of a vehicle.
The plan was to have Kimbro come onstage and play on “one, maybe two” songs, as Harley remembers.
Jamming on an up-tempo version of “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” Kimbro and Harley interact like strangers in an elevator, avoiding eye contact while always maintaining acute awareness of the other’s movements.
As soon as Harley shifts his guitar playing, going for a softer sound, Kimbro is there waiting for him, muting his jaunty bass riff into something understated.
“His ability to seemingly read my mind as to where we’re going musically and his incredibly deft skills on the double bass led to us doing a couple more festivals together and then eventually making an album in four hours.”
The album is Live at Southern Ground, which features a little Tom Waits, a host of new material, and the folk ballad “Goodnight Irene.”
While the ballad’s lyrics about drowning in a river could lend itself to an approach drenched in emotion, Harley does something more subtle. He doesn’t sound like he’s expressing sadness, exactly. He sounds sad the way a divorcee sounds sad, like there’s dust in his tear ducts.
The album is meant to capture a slice of Kimbro and Harley’s on-stage spontaneity.
“We wanted to try and bottle that in a studio environment.”
While he’s quick to praise covers like “After Midnight” by JJ Cale and Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” Harley generally eschews musical retreads.
“I don’t see the point,” he says. “If I do play something by someone else I do try to really turn it on its head.”
While Harley acknowledges that all performers claim they can’t wait to get back to whatever city they’re heading to next, he maintains Canadian audiences have proved particularly attentive.
“I find the Canadian audiences just generally listen to music. That sounds like it should be a prerequisite … but there’s plenty of places you go in the world where people don’t listen,” he explains. “I do my job so much better if people pay me the respect and I try to give it back tenfold. People’s attention and their cover charge means a lot.”
Harley’s performance kicks off Kay Meek’s Cabaret series, which continues in November with a show from Montreal Guitar Trio.
