Concert Preview: Rees Shad and the Conversations at Unihog in Hoosick Falls 2/2/24

“The Galahad Blues,” title of Rees Shad’s new album, may suggest Muddy Waters waving “Tales of King Arthur & The Knights of the Round Table” at his band and saying, “Let’s play this.”

Fans who turn out to see Shad introduce the new album Friday at Unihog will find a far more complex reality – an ambitious genre-jumping effort.

Shad and his band the Conversations (drummer Rob Kovacs and bassist Jeff Link) headline an Americana triple-bill with Andrew Dunn, and the Quixote Project.

Drop the “a” from “Americana” and things get clearer.

“Galahad Blues” rambles through much of American musical history, and it represents a giant musical mood swing from Shad’s last sparse solo album “Six Strings and a Story.” If the solo simplicity of “Six Strings” suggests sincerity in conventional terms, the complex and compelling songs on “Galahad Blues” spring from a still-personal outlook, but feature sounds that feel more expansive and ambitious. He beefs up his small band with guest stars including strings master Larry Campbell and horn player Tony Aiello, to make blues of several kinds.

Swashbuckling Round Table hero Galahad appears most directly as an alias that a ne’er-do-well hero wears into a new town where picaresque adventures and mishaps await. An extraverted blues and album title track, it opens the album with a rowdy blast of horns. Then, as Shad explains in the album notes, he adapts elements of the Round Table mythology (the Thomas Mallory version) into a depression era gangster saga. But this music hardly needs such a recycled narrative framework; it soon wears thin, anyway. Instead, it etches a film-noir atmosphere as a soundtrack to an unseen movie.

This widescreen story uses varying musical moods to portray all manner of human interactions, happy and honorable or vividly otherwise. It also becomes a travelog through America’s musical history, ambitiously springing from the blues.

“Mustard in the Gravy” shrinks the world to the size of a main street diner, but ambitious big dreams lurk by the grill.

“Breathless, Alarmed and Confused” casts a spell in easy waltz time that belies the heartsick trouble of a love too shy to proclaim itself.

“Take it on the Chin” revs the swing and the confidence; it’s party time, but with a price.

The title “With a Smile” suggests uncomplicated good times, but it’s bad news delivered with deceptive gentleness.

“Rattlin’ on the Tattlin’ Line” goes all Cab Calloway big-band swing; party time, like “Take It.” “Ghosted” has an eerie feel as a torch-y lament – another lost-love moan, just down the radio dial from “With a Smile.”

Karma rings soft but inexorable in the ominously slow “Hands of Dice and Wire.”

Poignant guitar sets up the jaunty “Don’t Knock the Music,” borrowed from Shel Silverstein and Fred Koller. They don’t need to cite Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra to set its nightclub mood; a tempo shift tells us we’re in a classy, smoky dive.

Guitar also stars in “Working On Working it Out,” a love-is-trouble, or at least turmoil, blues. This time, the guitar is plugged in and punchy, proclaiming purpose and persistence.

Finally, in “Forgive Me,” a co-write with Lance Cowan, Shad narrows the sound to just strummed guitar and voice, but opens up emotionally to tell a complex tale of redemption, or not.

Tying everything together is Shad’s swinging way with arrangements and soulful voice, often bluesy as it carries feeling so plainly.

Shad’s voice carries us around like a Yellow cab through the streets of a neon nightclub district, bright with romance or doomed by sin.

For Shad, that film-noir place lived in his imagination, while living and working here.

“While I grew up in the Big Apple, I really came of age up in Washington County,” he said last week by email.  “I moved there while in college, and it is where my wife and I raised up our family, where I built Sweetfish Recording Studio and established myself as a music professional, and its where many of my closest friends still live.”

Now settled in Great Barrington in the Berkshires, Shad mused, “Driving back through the rolling hills of Washington County has always made me feel welcome and comforted.”

Shad may boast regional origins and current address, but his work has earned praise from national music journals including this one. “From start to finish, Rees has produced an impressive amalgamation of sounds and genres,” reported Nippertown a few albums ago. American Songwriter noted, “His music is powerful and often provocative but never bereft of heartfelt feelings and earnest intents!” Americana Highways observed, “Rees takes you into another era;” and Goldmine called him “a consummate artist and entertainer!”

Rees Shad and the Conversations play Friday, Feb. 2 at Unihog (2 Center St., Hoosick Falls). 7 p.m. Andrew Dunn, and the Quixote Project open. Jersey singer-songwriter Dunn played trumpet and worked in a factory before turning troubadour and becoming a finalist at both the Kerrville Grassy Hill Songwriter’s Competition and the Great American Song Contest.  His latest album is “House Above the Factory.” The Quixote Project also hails from Jersey, a self-proclaimed neo-roots outfit. $12.51. 518-205-5607 www.unihog.org