June 28, 2013 – This is an amazing city for music with an incredibly diverse array of options on any given night. On Wednesday night, T-Mak World was at The Emmet Ray bar at 924 College Street at Dovercourt. This bar may be one of the city’s best kept secrets on a quiet section of College situated just west of the hustle and bustle of the Little Italy stretch of College. A restaurant at the front, the music is in a cozy room at the back.
Billed as The New Zeitgeist Ramblers, it was a wide range of the blues played by Peter Boyd and Noah Zacharin on guitars and sharing vocal duties and Malcolm Gould on drums, or rather drum singular. They played the Delta blues of Robert Johnson to Chicago blues of Jimmy Rogers to country-style blues. There was also a great cover of Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. It was a real treat to see some great players in an intimate setting.
Boyd, who was celebrating a birthday, mostly played a beautiful deep red wood grained Telecaster, along with a Strat and acoustic. Most notably though, he played it upside down. He didn’t play a right handed guitar left handed. That’s not that rare, Boyd played a left handed guitar (with a right handed neck/headstock) left handed, but upside down with the strings reversed with the low E string at the bottom and the high E string at the top. That is a unique way of playing that would be mean completely different fingerings for chords or individual notes.
Zacharin played an acoustic and amazingly didn’t break any strings. I’ve never seen anyone finger pick the string as hard and his playing was sublime. Zacharin and Boyd each played some fantastic solos. Gould kept everything on time and seemed to have a subliminal connection to Boyd and Zacharin. It was clear from the knowing smiles that each of them enjoyed how well they connected. One gets the sense they’ve played together way too many times to count.
Review and photo by Steve Mallinson
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