Show Review: Jason Vo

Sunday was quite an excellent day for me with regard to music. Hopefully by the title of this post, you realize that this is not about the Grammys. I didn't watch them, nor do I really care. Aside from not watching the Grammys, yesterday was great in music for 3 reasons:

1. Matt Stevens' cafe noodle free streaming concert
2. James Corachea's Second Life free streaming concert
3. Jason Vo @ Prince St. Cafe

Unfortunately, I only caught the tail end of the first two streaming events. However, I caught all of Jason Vo at Prince St, which is what the focus of this review will be.

Jason Vo is a guitarist out of Scranton, PA, who I met through reverbnation, talking music and such. He's a percussive fingerstyle guitarist, and a rather exceptional one at that. Apart from myself, some other, more prominent percussive fingerstyle names include: Andy McKee, Antoine DuFour, and Guitar Republic. However, Vo doesn't care for these comparisons, and would describe his music to be much different from their works. The main difference that Vo cites, which is rather apparent, is the focal point of his music. While Andy McKee and the candyrat gang (everyone else I mentioned are signed under Candyrat Records) compose around melodies, Vo chooses to center his compositions mainly around rhythm and the percussive nature of "percussive fingerstyle." To beef up the percussion, he often times plays gigs with a percussionist, whose name is, conveniently, Jason (Yablonsky - sorry, I'm not looking that up again to spell later in this).

"The Jasons," or "Jason and Jason," or whatever else you want to call them, reminded me a lot of The Andreas Kapsalis Trio as far as the shear amount of percussion involved. The duo used thick chord progressions and really had good taste for using a variety of time signatures in them. In talking to them afterwards, it made sense that percussionist Jason has been playing progressive styles for years. This influence was seen by a more cautious approach to the use of otherwise obscure timings that made transitions fluid and unforced. He even provided a percussion solo during a short set break.

Despite the connotations behind, "thick" chord progressions, there was a great amount of variety throughout the night. There were some more "mainstream" (to percussive fingerstyle) melodic motifs explored, but there were also some very prominent Celtic themes in the melodies as well. Apparently it's all the rage in Scranton? That basically means that I'd be sick of Celtic music if I were from there, but I'm not, so it was awesome and refreshing. Any type of "traditional" folk music I usually find rather intriguing and inspiring. Again, there were some Kapsalis-like qualities exhibited with this.

These guys really reinforced what I've been seeing more and more often lately: that the percussive fingerstyle genre is simply a framework for experimentation and innovation.



So I leave you with a video of Jason's work. I'm currently writing this while watching The Colour Revolt play at B-Sides, so I haven't gotten to preview the video (though I'm sure it's great).



-Alex