Photo credit: Tony Novak-Clifford
Ready to leave behind your everyday world? Fancy a magic-carpet ride to a land of mystery and intrigue, where belly dancers undulate and sari-clad beauties sway to the cliché-free, can’t-get-it-out-of-my-head sounds of a guitar-slinging swami? Yeah? Well, then, we’ve got a place for you: kingparis.com.
King Paris’ electric sitar and guitar playing is nothing short of brilliant, his sub-continent-tinged slide figures fresh and sublime. As his homepage rightly asks and explains, “Who before has ever fused the influences of Ravi Shankar’s sitar with Johnny Cash, Martin Denny’s Island romance with Nat King Cole, Ustad Ali Khan’s Indian sarod with Screaming Jay Hawkins, or Olatunji’s African drums with the Rolling Stones? What musician has ever forged his craft listening to as diverse artists as Alvino Rey, George Harrison, Elmore James, Mohan Bhatt, Les Paul, and Muddy Waters?
“King Paris combines musical elements of American Rock and Roll, World Beat, Exotica, Bhangra, House, and Slide Blues Guitar into a uniquely Universal and original style that is all his own, and dazzles with the newest, boldest, most exciting concert show to emerge from the imagination in centuries. His ‘west-meets-east’ entourage also includes exotic Bollywood and Belly dancers backed by the pulsating rhythms of his astonishing, internationally-flavored band, ‘The Hip-notics.’” In other worlds, under another name, the King, a.k.a. Rick Vito, has graced the recordings and performances of Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, John Mayall, Little Richard, and many others. We give his King Paris project the Pure Guitar double thumbs up and hope record companies take notice.