Pop Music : Tinsley Ellis and His Dazzling Musicianship

Tinsley Ellis, guitar culture’s latest six-string hero, ambled casually onstage at the Palomino on Friday and unleashed a torrent of dazzling musicianship pitched somewhere between the exhilarating volatility of rock ‘n’ roll and the melancholic passion of urban blues.

Moving through a wide and imaginatively nuanced range of emotional tones, and supported by a solid foundation of keyboards, drums, and bass, the 33-year-old Atlanta native ranged from “Hey, Hey Baby,” an early Otis Redding tune, to Ellis’ own voluptuous ballads and feverish pumpers like “Highway Man”--a heated evocation of rapturous nights of visiting juke joints down a lonely stretch of Southern highway.

A mild-looking man with a serious, workmanlike stage presence, Ellis lacks the eccentric charisma that juiced the careers of other blue-eyed blues masters like Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan--two artists with whom the obvious comparisons were made earlier in Ellis’ career.

And though he boasts a fine, gruff blues shout, it’s his guitar that steps front and center, surrendering fully to the force, crying and singing a raucous blues in tongues.