Rob't Randolph, Jimi Hendriz & Blogging

It’s not enough to be merely the best at what you do in music. You have to be compared to other great musicians before you can be validated in the eyes of critics and many fans alike.

So it is with Robert Randolph, who only five years ago was playing in a band in the House Church of God in West Orange, New Jersey, and today seems to be perpetually on tour while being heralded as the finest non-traditional pedal steel guitar player extant.

Which of course begs comparisons with other great guitarists, notably Jim Hendrix. But as comparison averse as I am (how many times have you heard that So and So is “the next Bob Dylan”), linking Randolph to Hendrix works.

Randolph, whose Family Band headlined at the 19^th annual Appel Farm Festival in South Jersey on Saturday, dipped into the Hendrix songbook on several extended solos during a gospel-tinged, funk influenced, soulfully delivered two-hour set, and I must tell you that in his hands, “Purple Haze” reinterpreted on his shocking yellow custom 13-string pedal steel, is a thing of beauty.

The pedal steel, an offshoot of the console steel and lap steel guitars, is usually associated with country and western swing music. I have long been a sucker for the incredibly sweet and often melancholy sounds it produces as the player constantly modulates the tuning with foot pedals and knee levers, tightening or relaxing the strings in combination.

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Appel Farm was a welcome opportunity to kick out the jams and forget about the world’s horrors for a while.

Organizers do not charge admission for kids 12 and under, and there were a slew of families – some with grandparents, parents and kids – mingling with the hard-core musos like the Dear Friend & Conscience and myself in the meadow that opens out from the main stage.

But I kept thinking about my buds in Iraq, specifically Alex Jimenez and Byron Fouty, so I tried hard to channel my sadness into Robert Randolph’s righteously good energy and joyful sounds and sent it all their way – wherever they may be.

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I'm going to be semi footloose and very fancy free for the next week with lighter than usual blogging since we’ll be on the road much of the time.

With Robert Randolph and Appel Farm out of the way, our next big stopover will be the world premier performance of a new version of Tchaikovsky's "The Sleeping Beauty" staged by Kevin McKenzie and Gelsey Kirkland for the American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Strange cultural bedfellows or what?