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| Featured Artist Link REALLYMUSICRADIO presentsJACKIE GREENE
When DIG Music owner Marty DeAnda happened into a local Sacramento folk pub's Monday hoot night in the autumn of 2001 to meet up with his friend and label-mate, the legendary singer Sal Valentino (The Beau Brummels, Stoneground), DeAnda was clearly not expecting to hear anything impressive beyond Valentino's fabled voice. But he did. A scrawny young kid with a big old-soul voice, guitar chops and plenty of musical confidence stepped up to the mike and made all room conversation cease. A few more club visits, a few more dawning nights of insight, and DIG Music had their first new artist signed to the label.
Jackie Greene had blown into Sacramento only months earlier from a tiny old Northern California gold rush town that was, in it's day, called Hangtown, but now is more discreetly named Placerville. Greene, a local just turned 21 then, sounded like a displaced Delta boy, picked up by Guthrie's dustbowl winds and set down in Harte, Steinbeck and Saroyan Country. Born in Monterey, California, Greene grew up in small town Cameron Park, thirty miles east of Sacramento. Along with his mom and three younger siblings at home, Greene had a piano and an old guitar his father had left. Mostly self-taught, Greene began playing in public at age 16, then moved onto local Placerville coffeehouses nearby, just after high school graduation. The move to nearby Sacramento, armed with a self-produced CD, was the next logical step. It paid off fast. Greene is strikingly unself-conscious in the way he envisions his time-out-of-mind place. His voice is big and casually seductive in the way that Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and Gregg Allman's voices are. His tone and inflections seem naturally born, from an old soul inhabiting a skinny body. When he needs to wail and growl, the words pour out like smooth whiskey; when he offers intimacies, they can almost seem too private. Like his heroes, Dylan and Waits, he inhabits his jeans and pork pie hat comfortably. His compactness of phrase with feeling is impressive. He can turn a beautiful line, he can lay down a lowdown lick and leave you wanting some more. He's a smart kid who is an accomplished musician on acoustic and electric guitar, harmonica, acoustic and electric piano and Hammond B-3 organ. Greene has moved from hoot nights to coffeehouses to blues clubs to festival stages in a short amount of time since the November, 2002 release of GONE WANDERIN' (DIG 106) Currently he is on select tour dates with singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi, and is playing high profile festival dates across the country the summer of 2003. With his sympathetic rhythm section of junior high pal, Ben Lefever on drums and Hence Phillips on bass, Greene has lifted audiences to their feet, with encores and standing ovations following nearly every performance. Together, they offer up a sound and vision that is gathering audiences his age and also importantly, fans that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Like Raymond Carter or Leadbelly, Greene has taken the time to fashion poetically formed teardrops of songs along his journey. |
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