Mike Spencer always brings wicked guitar players to the Geomatic Attic. So the April 24 show featuring Gaye Delorme was no exception.
The Albertan born Delorme cracked jokes and played a lot of finger bleeding guitar licks traversing all styles and continents.
He played his first set on the acoustic guitar, concentrating on some mindblowing Spanish and flamenco influenced music which featured fast runs, crazy harmonics and beat some pretty impressive percussion out of his poor old battered acoustic.
He cracked crazy jokes about selling the tunings he was using and spoke of hanging out in Los Angeles with Cheech and Chong, played quite a few instrumentals and sang a couple numbers.
One of the most impressive numbers was three different versions of an old Chet Atkins’ song “Wind and Walking’ which has been performed by numerous different people including Paul Simon.
One of his stories about traveling around Alberta in -40 weather, lead him to segue into a couple different versions of the his infamous ‘Rodeo Song’ (made famous by Showdown) including a lounge version of it replete with ‘cheesy’ reverb which had the crowd howling in their seats.
Then he played an extended version of an old Mississippi John Hurt standard ‘Candyman’ which the audience absolutely loved then switched tunings to take them on an instrumental musical journey from Ireland to Japan and back to Canada.
His second set was played on electric guitar and was mesmerizing. It began with an extended blues jam which included the classic ‘Who Do You Love’ and a lot of other really sweet licks. But he soon expanded into an instrumental medley of French, Creole and swampy New Orleans blues.