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Former Dire Straits singer plumbs his folk traditions
Songwriter and guitarist returns to the Fraze with a six-man band for a two-hour performance.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
KETTERING — Songwriter and guitarist Mark Knopfler's stylistic tastes have always leaned toward the atmospheric, story-telling folk traditions.
Even as the front man of the 1980s rock band Dire Straits, his songs struck melancholy chords of dreams derailed and loves deferred.
If not for his acuity on the electric guitar, we'd probably have been calling him a folk singer a long time ago. But what do you call a musician who blends a Leonard Cohen-like poetic sense of a lyric with a killer guitar lick?
Maybe the only thing to call him is simply Mark Knopfler.
Knopfler returned to Kettering's Fraze Pavilion on Wednesday night, July 16, sounding even more like a folk troubadour — and more vocally like Leonard Cohen — than he did on his last appearance here in 2005.
Contributing to the traditionalist ambience was a six-man band of multi-instrumentalists variously playing the accordion, the ukulele, the mandolin, a Celtic flute and the upright bass, along with keyboards, drums, electric bass and acoustic guitars.
They expertly blended with Knopfler, whose playing was always purposeful and precise, even in exploratory passages that extended and expanded the melodic themes of a given song.
The nearly two-hour set mostly featured songs from Knopfler's solo career, though the Dire Straits'-era "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Sultans of Swing" made a midset appearance. A highlight from the newer material was the achingly lovely "True Love Will Never Fade," from his most recent album, "Kill to Get Crimson."
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7309 or
csimmons@DaytonDailyNews.com.
