Photo Credit: Danny Work
To see the Koch Marshall Trio is to view an almost comical set of contrasts.
Milwaukee's internationally renowned blues guitar hero, Greg Koch, stepped onto Shank Hall’s stage Saturday night wearing his trademark multi-colored skull cap. His drummer son, Dylan Koch, strides to his small kit looking like the reincarnation of Ginger Baker in his Cream prime, with his bushy dishwater blond mane, thick under-beard and sideburns topping a torso covered in a flowery, blousy shirt. In an electric blue suit and red-tinted glasses, organist Toby Lee Marshall resembled nothing so much as a young Elton John.
Though they made an amusingly motley collective fashion statement, their semi-improvisatory sonic assault was unified. Familial vocal harmony has contributed much to popular music throughout its history, but instrumentally talented kin within the same group are less storied. The two generations of Kochs drove each other on: dad with the dazzling technique and eclectic musicality spurred and supported by his son's rhythmic intuition. The younger Koch plied his skill like a tightly-wound coil, venting sporadically effective release in accord with the melodic amblings of his colleagues.
Marshall added dimensionality. Though he played a Hammond B3 on the trio’s 2018 debut album, Toby Arrives, a more easily maneuverable organ worked as well to bring the bass parts and other aural ornamentations that deepened what would already have been a combustible combination. And the Minneapolis native is no slouch as a singer, either, as his lone local solo for a run through Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” evinced.
The elder Koch handled what little other vocalizing was done. His singing bore the same loose, comfortable sense of nonchalance and humor as his stage banter and commentary on his many YouTube guitar instruction videos. His hefty version of Johnny “Guitar” Watson's “A Real Mother for Ya” befits the original material from Koch's history as a solo headliner and leader of the Tone Controls in numbers such as “You Just Can’t Get There From Here” and “Them’s the Breaks.”
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The bulk of the evening’s music, however, was instrumental in nature. Though that is the nature of Toby Arrives as well, the guys went further afield into the elder Koch’s catalog. In a nod to the impending holiday, he insinuated melodies of Christmas hymns into “Welchz Grape” from his 2017 album, Unrepentant. And elsewhere, he incorporated the spirit of the trio's album by showing off his facility at country, surf, flamenco and other genres within his electric blues base.
Greg Koch promised a return to Shank Hall within the first half of next year. Whether with his offspring and Marshall again or in another configuration, it should be a welcome return of a local institution who shouldn’t be taken for granted.
