Search - Chris Duarte :: Tailspin Headwhack

It's pretty hard for Chris Duarte to escape comparisons to the late Stevie Ray Vaughan. After all, Duarte is also a Texas blues-rock guitarist with overwhelming instrumental technique and underwhelming vocals. Duarte even uses Vaughan's former keyboardist, Reese Wynans. On his 1997 album, Tailspin Headwhack, Duarte tries to put some distance between himself and Vaughan by adding more funk and fusion flavors to the blues-rock recipe. He adds more effects to his guitar sound, boosts the bass tracks in the mix, trades in shuffles for on-the-one funk, multiplies the chord changes, and enlists David Z of Prince & the Revolution as producer. The results go a long way toward dispelling the Vaughan cloud that has always hung over Duarte's career, but fails to solve the artist's more fundamental problems. He remains a prodigious picker, able to rip through notes at breathless speeds, even as he smoothly changes chords as if he had an automatic transmission. These performances will surely please those who think guitar solos are an athletic event, but they won't do much for listeners who expect such solos to deliver an emotion deeper than bravado. It doesn't help that Duarte's voice is thin and cramped, nor that a conspicuous gulf yawns between the blandness of the originals and the tunefulness of the songs borrowed from B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, and the Meters. --Geoffrey Himes