Gideon King is a rare example of the modern-day Renaissance man.
King’s musical upbringing is a mosaic of styles and influences that stretch over a lifetime: parents who swore by Classical music, a jazz-piano prodigy brother, sisters who turned him onto Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. In a Steely Dan-inspired effort, King began the Gideon King & City Blog (GKCB) studio project to make the diverse colours and features of his musical history, his myriad influences and styles, shine to their best. Despite the project’s jazz-based roots, King aims to write guitar songs without a focus on genre, preferring to experiment with complex harmonic rhythms and abstract lyrical patterns instead. Featuring a rotating selection of accomplished musicians who participate according to a song’s needs, King welcomes an environment in which the song itself finds its form in dynamic collaboration with his fellow musicians.
City Blog is made up of the team of Bryan Reeder, keys and synth; Caleb Hawley on guitar and lead vocals; Alita Moses, also on lead vocals; Jeff Hanley on bass, and Jake Goldbas on drums. King plays lead guitar. Mike Stephenson also rounds out vocals.
“Silent Sirens,” the band’s newest single, releases October 2. A piano-led ballad carried by a three-person chorus, the band gently ruminates on memories long aged. On their official Facebook page, King called it a “sad song,” but the kind of song that should be written from time to time. “I wrote this song because it seemed to me that people are often prowlers in each others’s minds,” King continues. The song builds from a repeating set of descending piano notes, like walking down the stairs in the rain, over the trifecta of cooling vocal performances. “I broke into your mind, kicked down every door,” the vocalists sing. “Salty are the tears pouring from my soul.”
With the ease of master painters, GKCB weaves music that strikes the ear the way a Van Gogh masterpiece might strike the eye: boldly vibrant, yet oddly calming. From bassists like James Genus or Matt Penman, pianists like Kevin Hays, drummers like Willard Dyson or Donald Edwards, and vocalists from Marc Broussard to Saul Kurtz, GKCB might never stop evolving with their virtuoso musical experiments. With two critically-acclaimed studio albums under their belt — the bright-hearted debut City Blog (2015), its more aggressively experimental brother, Upscale Madhouse (2018), and the cathartic, homely jazz of the Love Knot EP (2020) — Gideon King’s highly-regarded passion project seems to be only just beginning.
A New York City native with a shrewd eye for both monetary investments and artistic talent, King worked initially as the CEO of the investment firm Loeb King Capital Management. He closed the business in 2015 to run his own capital, focusing his prospects to serve his truest love: that of music.
Now that’s something we can get behind.
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