Folk with a Flamenco Flare.

After all these posts, I imagine that you've picked up that I really enjoy the sounds of an acoustic guitar.  Much of that probably came from growing up listening to 70's singer/songwriters, but part of it is also my love for fingerpicking.  It's a style of play with very quick complexity.  The first time that I heard it was when I caught a glimpse of MTV one afternoon in the 90's and saw the video for Bryan Adams's "Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?"  Like with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves , Adams, Michael Kamen, and Mutt Lange had been chosen to write the romantic theme song for the Johnny Depp film Don Juan DeMarco.  The music was enchanting, and adding to that effect (along with the music video being shot in a beautiful Spanish villa) was the guitar playing by the late Paco de Lucía.

For about fifteen years, I went without hearing guitar picking again.  It just wasn't the type of music that you hear on the radio.  Then I heard Laurence Juber, Jorma Kaukonen, Tommy Emmanuel, Sungha Jung, and the slack-key guitarist Makana.  Then, one night, I'm listening to the Eva Cassidy Pandora station, and I hear this guitar picking.  It had aCastilian style different from Juber's or Kaukonen's, and a little bit different from Makana's.  It was the flamenco style of guitar playing.  The Canadian guitarist Jesse Cook spent a good deal of his childhood in Spain, and that's where he fell for the style.  Joined by jam bands and guest singers, Cook travels and plays shows.  The first Jesse Cook recording that I heard was from when he and Melissa McClelland covered Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe."

The song and the lyrics are a well known staple from the Dylan songbook.  It's written about trying to dissuade  a woman convinced that he'd be a devoted and chivalrous lover.  McClelland reverses the genders in the lyrics so that she's not saying that she's the man's ideal devoted woman of chivalry.  McClelland's singing already sounds lovely, and she slows things down a little.  Cook tastefully adorns the lyrics with flamenco flourishes with an incredibly ornate solo before McClelland is finally turning the man (she's singing to) away.

I enjoy Dylan's songs when he sings them, but I also enjoy the covers.  My heart sings when I hear Cook and McClelland together.