Peter Parcek’s lightning-strike guitar playing has been electrifying audiences in America and abroad for years.
"You’re as bad as Eric Clapton," Buddy Guy once told him. "And I know Eric Clapton."
Now — after appearing as a sideman with such great bluesmen as Hubert Sumlin and Pinetop Perkins, and playing rock with the international band The Singhs — Parcek is winning scores of fans fronting his own Peter Parcek Band and his duo Forty-Four.
Both groups are powered by his daring, incendiary, and soulful electric guitar and a singing style that, like his original songs, fuses the vitality of today with echoes of the Delta, mountains and prairies where the greatest American music was born.
Parcek’s debut album Evolution sold-out multiple pressings, so recently he’s been taking time from his busy touring schedule to record its follow-up, which features rock legend Al Kooper, blues guitar great Ronnie Earl and mandolin wizard Jimmy Ryan among his stellar guests. The forthcoming disc is an emotionally charged summary of Parcek’s unparalleled ability to blend influences that embrace blues ’n’ roots, folk, country, rockabilly, surf, jazz and gypsy music into his own distinctly original hybrid.
Although he’s a masterful studio musician, Parcek is happiest on stage. There his Zen-like approach to improvisation leads Ray Charles’ “Busted” from its R&B birthplace to the outer rings of Saturn as envisioned by Jimi Hendrix. His slide speaks directly to his audiences’ hearts in smartly written numbers like his “Mathematics of Love.” And overall his fluid, expressive playing simply leaves jaws dropped to the ground.
At home Parcek’s virtuosity has been recognized by the Boston Blues Society, which has sent both Forty-Four and the Peter Parcek Band to represent the Hub City at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis.
Parcek’s musical story, however, begins on the stages of ’60s London, where his early bands were contemporaries of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and groups featuring Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Peter Green.
The young guitarist watched and learned well, finding a path that’s led him through an evolution all his own. It’s taken him through smoky dives where he’s played for a dozen patrons and onto huge stages where he’s played for 100,000. And over the years Parcek’s opened for a smorgasbord of prestigious artists including the Grateful Dead, Sheryl Crow, Susan Tedeschi, the Holmes Brothers, Koko Taylor, Robben Ford, Son Seals, Johnny Copeland, Charlie Musselwhite, Ronnie Earl, Duke Robillard, Roomful of Blues and many, many more.
Today Parcek is their musical peer — with the artistry and originality to become a legend in his own right.
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