The Chicago band Califone and Tucson-based singer-songwriter Howe Gelb will be coming to Japan next month to do a club tour together. Both artists record for the same Chicago indie, Thrill Jockey, which has a licensing deal with the Japanese company Headz, and they both happen to have time to kill in February, so the pairing is mainly the result of good timing.
Nevertheless, one is tempted to describe it as inspired. Califone and Gelb have brought the emblematic American rock sound of the late '60s and early '70s -- what a Japanese colleague of mine calls "heritage rock" -- into the new century without resorting to the kind of pastiche that characterizes so-called alt country.
For 20 years, Gelb was the heart and soul of Giant Sand, a Tucson collective that channeled Neil Young through the whacked, cosmic sensibility of Sun Ra, and which in one incarnation or another included Lisa Germano and the members of Calexico. Gelb made amateur recklessness into an art form, and since "disbanding" Giant Sand a few years ago he has extrapolated on his basic garage country-rock by exposing it to all sorts of environmental stress. On his latest album, recorded under the nom de disque the Band of Blacky Ranchette, he brought his country-western songs to a variety of indie superstars (Neko Case, Cat Power, Jason Lytle) and had them perform them on the spot, in whatever way they wanted. He even recorded one song with Lambchop's Kurt Wagner in a car in the parking lot of the Nashville Airport.