Mike Keneally
Wooden Smoke

Mike Keneally is, in all probability, the best student of a great master: Frank Zappa. It only took him a couple of years in the Best Band to learn everything needed to become a great Musician.

After releasing at least 6 great albums between 1992 and 2000, in 2001 he came out with this acoustic gem titled "Wooden Smoke". Here Mike creates a vast musical sea in which the listener can only float and be happy. The album cover is decidedly fitting: the sea (calm), the sky (threatening) are the music, and we listeners are the little man on the boat.

It's hard to define Keneally's musical genre and especially this album. Usually, to define such works, terms like genius, brilliant, incredible, and beyond are used. Terms that are often overused and too often for musicians who aren't geniuses. So for me, defining Keneally as a genius and his music as brilliant seems diminishing. Keneally shows that he himself is music, offering himself entirely to the public and especially showing that technique is a means of artistic expression and not art itself.

The album flows with immense ease, 14 tracks in which Mike's voice is heard little to leave room for the music: sweet, sinuous, hypnotic. Seven songs (great lyrics in the title track "… from what I see the squirrel and bee/are totally happy, and they're free… ") and seven instrumentals in which references and cross-references create a soft musical cushion to rest your ear and dream on.

In summary. Who would I recommend the album to? I would say to no one with preconceived labels and ideas, I repeat, there is something new here. Music that no one else plays. Precisely because it is Mike Keneally making music, and there is only one Mike Keneally, unfortunately.

p.s. If anyone thinks there are better students of Zappa, let me know. And please don't say Steve Vai.