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BY JOHN GRAHAM
Hochenkeit,
Loren MazzaCane Connors, Capricorn Knight
New Haven, Conn.'s most famous and wealthy export to the music world is Michael Bolton. But in 1949, five years before the birth of that throaty MOR balladeer, a babe emerged in that same town under the eyes of a far more thoughtful angel. For unto the world that day was born a child who, when full-grown into manhood, could make a guitar gently weep while causing an amplifier to quake with waves of feedback. That man is Loren MazzaCane Connors. If that sounds like a ridiculous overstatement, don't take my word for it. Listen to the slow explosions of Calloden Harvest or the low-lying clouds of acoustic guitar on his new album, Evangeline (both on Portland's Road Cone label). You will hear a single note played with the passion and pathos of a searing qawwali singer. You will comprehend the slow tectonic movement of time's passage. You will sense colors, texture, tension. With nothing more than six strings, Connors will make you feel a strong instinct for composition and a delicate touch. As Connors explains, he tries to transmit a sense of beauty being truth and truth beauty. "It's not a matter of expressing your feelings but discovering truth within yourself: what we physically see, what we can only sense, and what is non-sensable," he says. "Truth is somewhere in the middle of that, perfectly balanced among them." Experimental and improvised music frequently searches for such truth amid the white noise, the space between mainstream transmissions. Yet these explorations, being intellectual exercises, usually come at the expense of emotion. With Connors, the experiments are merely a side effect of his wish to make contact with hidden realities. You may not hear it in his more avant-garde works, but the warm sensations emanating from Connors' guitar begin with the blues. As a boy, Connors dabbled with trombone and violin (the latter influencing his left-hand vibrato technique); in discovering Delta blues, he found a form of music that was simple yet intense. It is this plain honesty that most informs his playing, so a bent note becomes a quiet cry of sadness, an extended rumble of distortion becomes a hurt wail. "All my music is gentle, even the loud stuff, because there's kindness within it," Connors says of this perceptive aesthetic. Connors' tendency to base his compositions on thematic subjects guarantees that his expressiveness has direction, one that he says moves "from the inside out." His new album, Evangeline, is founded on the fable that inspired Longfellow's poem of the same name. The tale follows a young 18th-century woman from her early days of love through her separation from her betrothed and subsequent lonely wanderings until, as a Sister of Mercy, she re-encounters her long-lost love only to have him die immediately in her arms. Connors' performance is restrained and lyrical, less abstract than his experimental works and quieter than anything he's done since his early Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations series of recordings. It's moving, desolate and unadorned with affected pretensions. In short, it's another beautiful album from Connors. He discovered the story of Evangeline Bellefontaine when his wife, Suzanne Langille, first learned that Evangeline was a distant relative of hers. "It was a tale of lost love, and it appealed to me," he says. "Don't tales of lost love appeal to everyone? The imagery of the poem, combined with the folk tale itself, got into my head. I thought about the Keats poem, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.' So the literary ballad form was in my mind.... That's why I opened and closed the CD with the theme of 'Evangeline.'" Despite the intense sentimentality of the record, Connors insists he isn't trying to be maudlin or manipulative. "Everything I play is improvised," he says. "Expressed feelings are not the end product. I only use my emotions to discover truth. If you're successful, then the feeling becomes universal, touching on something that's common to everyone rather than one individual's expression of personal emotion." By all accounts, Connors has reached that plateau. Even in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that he works in the improv/instrumental genre, he writes with music as a poet does with words. Music, as they say, is the universal language. Connors speaks with a tongue that's both sweet and sharp--singing, stinging and eloquent as the most stirring elegy you've ever heard.
originally published August 26, 1998
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