08/03/2006
Daily Hampshire Gazette
Category: Column


Don Peris lets the strings sing
An ace guitarist takes the stage at the Iron Horse next Thursday
Byline: JOHN STIFLER

Consider the solo guitarist: the musician who promises to stimulate your aesthetic nerves with nothing but six or 12 strings (or, in the case of Leo Kottke, sometimes 10). Jazzmen like Wes Montgomery and John Scofield; classical artists like Eliot Fiske and Sharon Isbin; blues players from B.B. King and Memphis Minnie to Rory Block and Chris Smither; acoustic folk geniuses like Doc Watson and Bert Jansch; inventors like Kottke, John Fahey and Larry Coryell; visionaries like John McLaughlin and Pat Metheny.

In the middle of the mix is the guitarist who simply plays a song on the instrument, usually without any vocal accompaniment, and makes both the tune and the instrument sound like a larger musical event. When it comes to masters of this art, there's no better example than Chet Atkins, who could take any musical idea and enliven it with rich, bell-like, perfectly pitched and plucked cascades of notes and a brilliant sense of rhythm.
Atkins' name comes up in the context of the imminent appearance, at the Iron Horse, of guitarist Don Peris. Familiar to music fans as the guitarist in the band Innocence Mission, Peris recently recorded an elegant, languid set of instrumental pieces separate from his Innocence Mission material, and now he's touring in support of the new recording, "Go When the Morning Shineth." One of his stops takes place Wednesday at the Iron Horse.
Peris' first serious guitar, obtained when he was 10, was an Atkins model Gretsch electric, and it's still Peris' main instrument. On it he plays unhurried, gorgeously clear notes with no added effects except sometimes a delay, and the results are definitely respectful of this guitar's namesake.
"Chet Atkins? I like the comparison," said Peris on the phone last weekend from his home in Lancaster, Pa. "Some of my favorite records over the years have been Chet Atkins' records. I was amazed that records could exist like that: beautiful instrumental versions of cool tunes. There's always a really touchable sense to what he's doing. You can feel the notes."

You can feel the notes in Peris' sound too, and he attributes a good deal of the tonal quality to the instrument itself.
"More than anything, that guitar is the key to the way I play," he said. "That guitar sounds so good without any processing."

Every note counts.

Like Atkins, Peris is very much a picker. "I'm not a very good strummer. Almost everything (I play) is arpeggiated. I feel better picking, and I can create better harmony picking." He picks, but he rarely actually uses a pick.  "I use my fingers almost entirely," said Peris. "I really have striven to find the cleanest sound possible. I'll go into the cleanest amp I can find, looking for clarity. I always feel like the guitar is another voice, and on the CD it becomes the only voice. I wanted the songs to have a strong melody to them, a singable melody, as opposed to being just the background part to something that's not there."
Another indicator of Peris' skill is that he plays almost everything in standard tuning, achieving variety by the width of some of his chords rather than by retuning strings to extend the instrument's range.  "I'm always looking for voicings that are colorful and kind of wide in the way the chords are structured," he said. In other words, instead of playing a standard triad chord, he'll straddle the chord over five or all six strings so that the bottom note of a standard chord is played on a higher string than one of the other notes in the same chord.

During a brief college career before Innocence Mission took off, Peris got some classical guitar training. "I didn't get far into it," he said, "but I liked the idea of using a guitar to do both melody and bass."  A noticeable effect of those classes is the one track on "Go When The Morning Shineth" that's not a Peris original. It's a pavane by Maurice Ravel, the French impressionist whose work tends to be as easy to take as ice cream, and if you'd never heard the piece before you'd easily assume Peris wrote it himself.

At 42, Peris is a master of the jazz artist's skill at making a statement without playing too many notes. "The guitar makes every note seem like it has great worth," he continued. "It allows for a lot of space. You don't have to show off, you don't have to play a lot of notes to feel the part is valid. Even the smallest grouping of notes rings in a particular way."

Like Innocence Mission, Peris conveys sweet, understated emotion beneath the acoustics of the six strings. Two particular themes in his songs _ two tracks on the CD actually have sung lyrics _ are the Peris family and the seashore, captured in simple lyrics like,

Your mother and your dad
the North Atlantic sand.
Try to understand how much we love you.