Inside Out Lures Audience into Shadows

Subtle stylings highlighted by endless invention

Inside Out with guitarist Lorne Lofsky, bassist Kieran Overs and drummer Barry Romberg is a subtle act. The surface of their music is deceptively quiet, dominated by Lofsky’s mild but not quite neutral sound. His fingers float over the strings, while his mind skates around whatever tune he is playing, peering into the corners, racing along the margins. Overs plays a steady pulse as he sketches in the harmony, and Romberg, a drummer with big ears, doesn’t just support Lofsky’s rhythmic patterns while kicking the beat, but compliments them, shadowing the rhythms of improvised melodies. Romberg knows that the genius of a shadow is its simultaneity. It doesn’t follow, it appears at the exazct same time. His rhythmic shadowing is uncannily and consistently immediate. The trio play standards from the Great American Songbook, but as they work through a tune like Some Day My Prince Will Come, they will (and did) find themselves playing Coltrane’s Giant Steps. A fragment of dialogue illustrates their comfort zone. “What are we going to play next?” asks Romberg. “Oh, I don’t know,” says Lofsky. “We’ll think of something.” In the middle of the concert, two tunes particularly stood out: Lofsky’s beautiful ballad in tribute to Canadian guitar legend Ed Bickert (One for Ed), and an astonishingly brilliant trio take on All the Things You Are. Lofsky’s effortless phrasing, his way of turning a harmony into the right track at the last possible moment, Overs’s ringing notes establishing a baloon of tone to cushion the tone, Romberg shadowing Lofsky’s rhythms – all make an audience lose itself in the endless invention.  ~ by Stephen Pedersen for The Halifax Chronicle Herald