Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker - Live at Judson & Moore - Chicago, IL - July 27, 2023

Описание: Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker playing live together for the first time in five years, at Judson & Moore in Chicago, IL on July 27, 2023.

Setlist:
1. Grand Old Trout
2. Pretty Weeds
3. It Takes A Quilt
4. Dragonfly
5. Lonesome Traveler
6. Promise Me
7. Raga

Websites:
Bill MacKay: https://billmackay.com/home
Tyler Walker: https://www.ryleywalker.com

Local guitar heroes Ryley Walker and Bill MacKay reunite onstage for the first time in five years
(by Steve Krakow for the Chicago Reader – July 24, 2023)

When Bill MacKay told me it’d been five years since he played with Ryley Walker—something they used to do all the time—it reminded me once again how badly the pandemic era has shaken our collective grip on time. Getting back to real life, relationships, and projects has been slow going, and on top of that everyone has seemingly been working to establish new routines and playing mad catch-up with one another. But at long last these two journeyman guitarists will meet again.

Anyone with good taste in local guitar heroes is familiar with Walker, the Rockford boy turned globe-wandering bard and progster. The same is true of MacKay, a man of one million sublime six-string projects—last month his supergroup with bassist Douglas McCombs and drummer Charles Rumback, a trio called Black Duck, released their debut album. Both guitarists are perpetual multitaskers, and Walker also runs the ambitious Husky Pants label (which recently released a collaboration with sadly defunct Japanese psych band Kikagaku Moyo).

MacKay says he and Walker will perform songs from the duo’s two LPs together, 2015’s Land of Plenty and 2017’s SpiderBeetleBee, plus a few brand-spanking-new compositions. He says he’s “looking forward to expanding on our repertoire improvisation-wise, and with new arrangements for various songs.” I’m especially excited to hear him mention improvisation—MacKay and Walker’s exalted guitar interaction lends itself divinely to spacey exploration. Both of their duo albums dig into the past and complicated present of roots music, and their endearing tunefulness and sparkling beauty recall other famous pairings—British folkies John Renbourn and Bert Jansch, for instance, or American stoner heroes Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

“Come watch me get smoked by Bill,” Walker says, in a classic bit of midwestern self-deprecation. “I’ll do my best to keep up!” MacKay and Walker may be humble about it, but as far as I’m concerned they’re two of the most talented musicians not just in the heartland but in the whole freakin’ world. Watching them spar once again should be a gas of epic proportions. Opening night one is abstract pop singer and pianist Azita Youseffi; opening night two is multi-instrumentalist Jake Acosta, who released an album of kosmische guitar-and-synth explorations, Rehearsal Park, on Husky Pants last fall