STEVE MORSE: MAJOR IMPACTS

This is a tribute album in which Morse pays homage to some of the guitarists and bands that influenced him, but instead of doing it by playing covers he does so by own original songs which remind us of the honored guitarists or their bands, being it by the guitar playing technique utilized, sound, song mood or style of the riffs, phrases and licks.

So in a way it's more like an academical exercise in which Morse shows us his versatility and his ability at analyzing what makes a certain guitarist have his personal style and then applying his own version of those elements in a composition of his own. However he does not simply create a clone song, it is always clear that it is Steve Morse who we are hearing, just that he bends his own trademark style to incorporate flavours of the guitarist he is paying homage to, which in my opinion is the right way to do it and much more interesting than creating a clone song. Supporting him are his Steve Morse Band fellows at the time Dave La Rue at the bass and Van Romaine at the drumkit.

It's no news that Morse is a guitar master and all the songs are good but from a prog perspective this album does not offer much because most of the honoured guitarists are just rock guitarists. We have songs dedicated to Cream / Clapton, Hendrix, The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, Leslie West / Mountain, The Beatles and The Allman Brothers, all of them interesting interpretations of their styles but hardly proggy.

The most interesting songs for proggers are TruthOla dedicated in tandem to Jeff Beck, Eric Johnson and Alex Lifeson (of whom I do not hear a lot except for a few chorus-drenched chords with open strings), Led On dedicated to Led Zeppelin which is perhaps the most accomplished rendition imo, The White Light honouring the acoustic soft side of John McLaughlin and Prognosis dedicated to Kansas and Yes. This last song is obviously the proggiest, with some odd time signatures and changes along its 6 minutes of lenght. Once again it does not really resemble the music by any of these 2 bands but it just incorporates some flavours reminiscent of them.

Interesting album but I have 5 of his real Steve Morse Band albums and they are all better. A couple of years later he released a Vol.2 of Major Impacts which I have not heard so far.

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