Holdsworth follows Eric Johnson for one simple and musically irrelevant reason: I also heard him first on one of those thin floppy plastic recordings included in an issue of Guitar Player. Unlike Johnson, his recording didn't capture my attention. He seems to mainly work in jazz-rock fusion, which is not a genre that appeals very much to me. So I really haven't heard all that much of his work, and when I do listen to him I find myself just listening for the solos. But they're extraordinary. In case you are of similar mind, here's a clip which someone apparently extracted from a longer one just for the guitar solo.
According to a reviewer at AllMusic, Metal Fatigue is Holdsworth's best album. Here's the title track; it's more on the rock than the jazz side of fusion:
And if you're up to a 14-minute track, here's another from the same album. I really like this one, "The Un-Merry-Go-Round":
As a perenially failing guitarist, I have occasionally over the years read Guitar Player magazine. I even subscribed to it for a few years in the mid-1990s or so, though I was always a little uneasy in doing so, as if one day I might get a letter saying "Inasmuch as our magazine is called Guitar PLAYER, we are obliged to discontinue your subscription...."
There was a period--in the '80s, I suppose--long before the Web and electronic distribution of music, and when it was still reasonable to assume that anyone interested in music owned a record player, when the magazine had an insert that was a piece of flexible black plastic which could be played on a record player. That was how they distributed samples of the music of some of the artists they wrote about. One of these was an instrumental by Eric Johnson, of whom I'd never heard, called "Cliffs of Dover." It's possible that it was this performance, (possibly an edited version, as I don't recall the intro being quite this long).
I thought it was fantastic, and managed to make a cassette copy of it. I kept an eye out for an official recording of it, but when I finally heard it, I was disappointed. It was a studio version that somehow lacked the excitement of the live performance. And that pattern has more or less continued in my acquaintance with his music. I like the live album Live from Austin, TX, which is an Austin City Limits performance, better than the two or three studio albums I've heard. The studio work is more polished--too polished, many would say--and the playing is superb, but something's missing.
Here's another live track, "S.R.V.", which I assume stands for Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Like a lot of virtuoso instrumentalists, Johnson wants to do it all, including singing, but unfortunately neither his compositions, for the most part, nor his vocals really appeal very much to me ("Cliffs of Dover" a striking but sadly rare exception). I can't help wishing he had found a place in a band with a singer and writer(s) as good in their specialties as he is. But I do love his playing. Obviously he's influenced by Hendrix (who isn't?), which he acknowledges in interviews, and he covers Hendrix tunes, but much of this performance seems so Hendrix-like as to be a homage.
You knew he would be next, didn't you? Well, no, I guess you didn't, but if you're familiar with British folky guitar players, you've probably heard of him. He's not that well known outside of that world, but he's very highly regarded within it, and is said to have been a big influence on Jansch, Renbourn, and others. Here's his signature tune, "Anji", which has been recorded by a number of other people as "Angie." You may be familiar with it from Paul Simon's version on the Sounds of Silence album.
I confess that I haven't sought out his music, because he sings on much of it, and he has a very uninteresting voice. (To be honest, I think his blues vocals are worse than that--they're among the most unconvincing I've ever heard.) But in looking for samples of his work on YouTube, I'm discovering that there is quite a lot that is purely instrumental. Here is a fascinating take on the classic short story of uncanny love, "She Moves Through the Fair." (If you don't know it, you might want to listen to this performance by Anne Briggs so you know the tune.) The sound is not especially good, and I don't see any indication of what the TV show is. From the '60s, I guess.
As that clip shows, he shouldn't really be classified as a folk guitarist, because he ventured far afield into jazz and what's now called "world music" ("foreign" began to sound bad at some point). In fact his first album was mostly jazz. Here's another example. You can say it was trendy for its time, 1968, but I don't think I've ever heard as convincing an effort at a raga-style instrumental from any other guitarist.
His Wikipedia entry indicates that there is some inconsistency in whether his name should be "Davy" or "Davey."
Renbourn's name is associated with Bert Jansch's, not only because they worked together in Pentangle but because they were basically doing very similar things. Their voices even sound somewhat similar. Also, as with Jansch, I had a little trouble finding YouTube videos that emphasized his guitar work. This is in part because he seems to have made a lot of music under his own name which emphasised strings or keyboards as the main voices. Or at least I seem to have come across a lot of it. But here's a solo (plus tabla) piece, from 1968, which sort of explains the tabla (Indian drums, often heard with sitar).
And here's a maybe better one, although it's not solo--an electric guitar comes in part way through, which according to AllMusic is Renbourn overdubbed.
I always wanted to like Pentangle more than I did. They were great musicians, and I did like them, but their singer, Jacqui McShee, through no fault of her own just didn't appeal very much to me. So one of my very favorite Pentangle tracks was one on which she only sang a bit of background, with Renbourn taking the lead: "Lord Franklin," a ballad about a lost Arctic expedition. I had always thought Jansch was the singer, and only in recent years learned otherwise. Here is a video which not only contains a great performance of the song, but also tells you how to play it. (I'm very excited about that because it turns out not to be as difficult as I thought, and I might even be able to play it. It's even in standard tuning, which I thought surely it was not.)
I learned from this performance that for lo these many years I've had part of the words wrong. I thought it was "Through cruel hardship they made a stroke / Their ship on mountains of ice was broke." But it's "Through cruel hardship they vainly strove / Their ships on mountains of ice was drove."
Here's Pentangle's version. It's really quite lovely, with the accordion or concertina or whatever that is, and the bit of electric guitar. I've always loved that combination of distorted/compressed electric single-note lead over an acoustic background.
You can read the sad story of the Franklin expedition here.
It hasn't been very long (by my standard) since I wrote about Bert Jansch on the occasion of his death. That was less than three years ago, and I don't have a lot to add to it in the way of commentary, so please read it if you're interested. There are also a couple of music clips there. And here are a couple more. I wasn't able to find many videos on YouTube that showcased his guitar but didn't include other players, most notably John Renbourne, who was the other guitarist in the acoustic folk-rock-jazz group Pentangle. But these two versions of Reynardine, recorded almost thirty years apart, certainly leave no doubt as to his ability. I'm not sure which I prefer.
"Reynardine," a studio performance from 1971:
And a live performance from a 2000 documentary, which I really want to see; I assume this was recorded not too long before the release date.
Here is a good bit of interesting lore about the song. I can't quite make out all the words that Jansch sings, but as far as I can tell they are very close to the variant attributed to Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention (on Fairport's masterpiece, Liege and Leaf, released in 1969). Even when you get all the words, it isn't entirely clear just what has happened.
It can't be said that Jansch has a good voice, but I like it a great deal. I haven't really heard that much of his solo recorded work, but these really make me want to explore it further.
In case you didn't read the older post--an obituary, really--that I linked to above, one thing that really must be mentioned about Jansch is the extent of his influence. He was a bit of a legend for a while in the mid-'60s--people heard of him, but not him. Many of us first heard his name in the title of a Donovan song. It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that every serious player of folk or folk-based guitar who came after has listened to him and learned from him.
When I decided to do this series I immediately started a list of people I wanted to include, and I got up to about thirty or so entries about as fast as I could type. Richard Thompson's name was among them. But I've actually been sort of dreading the post on him--not because I don't like him a great deal, but because I knew it was going to be difficult to pick two or three things to post, and for that matter just to focus on his guitar work, and not discourse at length on his songwriting.
At this point in his career I think it's very justifiable to put him in the rank of popular musicians that includes Dylan and Cohen and Waits, those who have created a body of work that has remained of high quality over a span of decades (ok, Dylan has some lengthy lapses, but he still makes the grade). I don't think I've heard more than half of Thompson's work, perhaps less. But on the basis of that, I think the songs he wrote when he was half of Richard and Linda Thompson represent his absolute best, which means they're among the absolute best, period, with later work perhaps not quite as consistently good, but still better than most everything else out there.
Back to Thompson the guitarist: his playing is usually at the service of a song, so you can't find a lot of stretched-out jams or purely instrumental pieces among his work. And how do you pick, out of...how many?...a couple of hundred?...songs that he's recorded, two or three that really show off his guitar work? And you want to do justice to his writing while you're at it.
As it turned out I got lucky when I started looking on YouTube, and found these three videos almost immediately. I didn't want to concentrate exclusively on the Richard and Linda Thompson period. But it would be a shame to leave it out, too. And here is a live version of a song which is one of the best-known of that period. It happens to be one on which Linda plays a lesser part, and partly for that reason is a perfect instance of RT's own sensibility, or at least of his harder-rocking side (not to mention the grim theme). I don't know how you'd describe his vocabulary but it doesn't sound like anyone else's.
"Shoot Out the Lights"
To head off any impression that his guitar skills aren't what they used to be, here's a recent performance of a song from Hand of Kindness, his first post-Linda album.
"Tear-Stained Letter"
Had he chosen to, he could have made a career as a folk-acoustic guitarist like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Here he is live at the Cambridge Folk Festival, 2011, acoustic.
"Uninhabited Man" and "Johnny's Far Away"
I figure he wears that beret all the time because he's bald.
I do have one reservation about him, and it's probably caused me to listen to him less than his songs deserve: I don't care much for his voice. A lot of people love it, and I've tried, but I just don't care a great deal for it. He's perennially described as "under-rated" and "under-appreciated," and I've wondered if perhaps part of the reason for that is that a lot of people have my reaction. Well, in any case, I think by now most serious music fans recognize his achievement, and there are enough people who appreciate his work to keep him doing it.
There's a reason, by the way, for his appearing immediately after Blind Willie Johnson. When he was with Fairport Convention (you know them, right?--the greatest of the folk-rock bands), they did a thing based on "Dark Was the Night" which they called ""The Lord Is In This Place...How Dreadful Is This Place":
Here is the third (not in any significant order) of the Windham Hill guitarists who attracted so much attention (well, relatively speaking) in the late '70s and early '80s. I can't say he is my favorite, but he's pretty spectacular from the technical point of view. Breakfast in the Field and Aerial Boundaries were in the collections of the same people who liked Ackerman and de Grassi. I always wondered how he made the sounds in "Aerial Boundaries" (from the album of the same name), and didn't really see how it was possible for one person with one acoustic guitar. Well, here's a live performance proving that it is. I think he has some electronic help in creating that huge booming sound, but the actual production of the notes seems to be all him.
I was not previously familiar with this one, "Because It's There," but I think the strange instrument he plays does appear on some of the albums.
Hedges apparently didn't want to be known only as an instrumental virtuoso, and his later albums included vocals, and his own songs as well as covers. I haven't heard much of that; it's good, but not as appealing to me as his guitar work. He died way too young, in a 1997 car crash, at the age of 43.
The founder of Windham Hill and one of its best-known artists, Ackerman's guitar style is less complex than Alex de Grassi's (see guitarist #13 from last week), or Michael Hedges's (next week). But he has, at least on his early albums, a gift for sweet, wistful, memorable melodies. Both these pieces are from his second Windham Hill album, Childhood and Memory. (Before founding Windham Hill he made an earlier album, The Search for the Turtle's Navel, which in both its music and song titles is clearly heavily influenced by John Fahey.)
"The Velvet Gentleman," which I believe is a reference to Erik Satie:
"The Wall and the Wind"
I have not by any means heard all of Ackerman's work, but from what I have heard it seems to me that the albums that came after these first three or four are considerably less appealing. I own one of those later ones--I can't remember which one, and don't want to dig into the closet to find out--and remember listening to it several times, waiting for it to click, and being disappointed. It included other instruments, and seemed bland and New-Age-y in a bad way, lacking the sort of post-flower-child prettiness of Childhood and Memory, which I suspect is his best overall. Like, apparently, much of the best of the Windham Hill catalog, it's out of print, but I believe most of it is included in this YouTube playlist. I would have included those versions but embedding is disabled on them. Used copies on both vinyl and CD seem to be pretty readily available at reasonable prices.
The term "New Age music" has long since become somewhat pejorative outside of the quasi-religious circles which supplied its name. But there was some very good music that more or less fit that category. There were three guitarists who appeared on the Windham Hill label (more or less synonymous with New Age) in the late '70s and well into the '80s who were and are very widely admired: William Ackerman (the label's founder); Michael Hedges; and Ackerman's cousin, Alex de Grassi.
de Grassi's Slow Circle was the first of these I heard, and I think still my favorite. If I remember correctly, I bought it in a guitar shop mainly because I was intrigued by the cover. Which sounds a bit odd now, so maybe I don't remember correctly--perhaps there was also something I'd read, or a recommendation from the shop. That would have been around 1980 or 1981. I'm pretty sure I had not heard the term "New Age" and would probably not have found it appealing if I had.
What I do remember very clearly is that I loved the music. de Grassi has an unusual style constructed of arpeggios that move in a sort of slowly flowing dance. The harmonies are somewhat atypical for guitar, at least for non-classical guitar, enabled by non-standard tunings. I haven't heard the album for many years, but I found on listening to these clips--the first and last tracks from Slow Circle--that they sound as fresh and wonderful as they did more than thirty years ago. I'm afraid the sound quality on these live performances isn't so great; the guitar sounds a bit wobbly. That's too bad because the sound of the LP is stunning. I must delve into the closet where the LPs reside behind a rack of coats and listen to it again.
My apologies to midwesterners who at the moment probably regard snow with horror. Clearly de Grassi was thinking of a welcomed snowfall.
Slow Circle is out of print. Windham Hill was bought by BMG some years ago, and holds the rights to this and other Windham Hill recordings. I learn from de Grassi's web site that BMG won't reissue the recordings, and they won't relinquish the rights. Nice folks. I would be pretty enraged if I were one of the artists whose work had been made inaccessible that way. Amazon shows used copies of the LP at reasonable prices, of the CD at not-so-reasonable ones:
Paul Galbraith and his amazing 8-string guitar, nicknamed "the Brahms guitar," because Galbraith developed the idea in order to be able to transcribe and play a Brahms piano work more effectively. I wasn't able to find the Brahms piece on YouTube, but here is a beautiful Bach prelude. And the video, which seems to have been produced by Mr. Galbraith, is very well-done, giving us a good look at the instrument, the unique (as far as I know) position in which it is played, and the performance itself.
Many (many) years ago I had an LP by Julian Bream called 20th Century Guitar, and I especially liked a long piece by Benjamin Britten on it, "Nocturnal, after John Dowland." The LP escaped me somehow long ago, and I've had my eye out for a CD reissue for a long time, but it only materialized recently--as part of a 40-CD set of Bream's complete recordings. Fortunately, the set is available on Rdio, so I was able, finally, to hear the piece for the first time in something close to 40 years. Almost immediately afterward, I discovered Galbraith's recording. And I think I may like it better. It's an angular, astringent, "modern," work, based, in ways too esoteric for my limited musical sense to grasp, on a song by the Elizabethan composer John Dowland, which in more or less its original form concludes the piece.
I see on Wikipedia that it was written for Bream in 1963, and is highly regarded, as well it should be. You can read more about the guitar, and the artist, at Galbraith's web site.
Serious classical guitar aficionados may think this piece overexposed, but I'm going to bet that most readers of this blog haven't heard it that often. And it's very beautiful, as well as technically impressive: "Recuerdos de la Alhambra" ("Memories of the Alhambra"), by Francisco Tárrega.
I mentioned last week that I had once given away a cd of Christopher Parkening playing Vivaldi lute concertos (on guitar) because it seemed to lack something. A couple of these concertos, along with one or two for mandolin, were among the first classical music I ever came to love, and mentioning them made me want to hear them again. So here's Williams doing one. I like this performance better. Thinking back on it, I believe part of the problem with the Parkening recording was that the orchestra was too big and lush. Williams plays here with a very small ensemble, and it works better with the guitar. This video is visually enjoyable, too, for the setting. I believe it's from a dvd called The Seville Concert. Instrumentally the concerto is not a great showpiece, but it's very enjoyable. And deservedly popular: you may well recognize the music even if you don't recognize the title.
Want to hear that concerto on an actual lute? It sounds a bit smaller and brighter than the guitar, with a distinctive resonance. This performance seems rather...caffeinated, and almost abrasive in comparison to the one above, but I like it, too.
When I set out on this series, I didn't think about the quesiton of Lent. I generally either give up music entirely for Lent or cut way back on it, and this year I'm giving up pop music entirely. But it will mess up my plan if I shut this down for six weeks. So I'll continue it, but no more rock guitar until after Easter, and probably no more jazz. It will be all classical guitar, maybe supplemented with folk or something else of a non-rock nature, as I'm not sure there are enough classical guitarists whose work I know and admire well enough to fill every slot.
So: here's Christopher Parkening with a transcription of the famous opening chorale from Bach's cantata 140:
And here's a pretty impressive transcription of the second movement of cantata 29.
I had a cd of Parkening doing Vivalid lute and mandolin concertos on guitar, pieces that I've loved for many years, and eventually gave it away because it just didn't seem to have the spark I wanted in that music. But these are excellent.
The renowned flamenco/jazz guitarist Paco de Lucia died this past week. I don't have much acquaintance with his music, but what I've heard has been pretty impressive. So, in memoriam:
I'm always struck by the sheer physical force of flamenco players (not that this is pure flamenco, exactly, but it's rooted in flamenco). Sometimes they just seem to be beating the hell out of their instruments. I used to know a classical guitarist who didn't think highly of flamenco players in classical repertoire, and I was a little puzzled b ythat, as it was all the same to me: nylon-string guitar, Spanish-sounding. I understand now--when he plays classical music, de Lucia does sound a little coarse. But that's almost irrelevant; flamenco seems to be much more about passion than subtlety and finesse. Here's a 17-minute concert clip that makes that point pretty well. It includes a singer, and a dancer, male, who I suspect will raise female pulses. As you can see, there is a 35-year distance between the two performances, but de Lucia's technique seems intact.
Does that singing sound Middle Eastern to you? It's not an accident: flamenco has roots in the region of Spain that was Moorish for hundreds of years. I don't know what he's saying but it's powerful stuff.
RIP.
A little something extra: Paco may be most widely known in this country as one of the members of a rather stunning guitar trio which included John McLaughlin and Al di Meola. Each of those may get his own post in this series, but here is a performance by the trio. I doubt there have been many occasions when so many notes were played on guitars in six minutes and thirty-nine seconds.
The obvious next person to feature is Jimmy Page. (For the less pop-music-obsessed: Clapton, Beck, and Page were all members of the Yardbirds, in succession except for a brief overlap of Beck and Page.) But I half-intended to skip him. Why? Because most of his best-known work was with Led Zeppenlin, and I never liked Led Zeppelin.
And why didn't I like Led Zeppelin? Well, initially because I just didn't care much, in general, for the loud, heavy, aggressively macho brand of hard rock that they helped to pioneer. It was more or less blues-based, and I love the blues, but it took the humor and sense of play out of it, and made it ponderous, with the good-humored sexuality of the blues transformed into something that seemed to have more to do with greed and power than desire. I admit I never listened to Zeppelin much; I lumped them in with bands like Grand Funk Railroad whose music seemed shallow and insignificant, and its popularity indicative of the collapse of the hopes of the mid-'60s.
But there was something else: Zeppelin always seemed somehow sinister to me, not in the manner of, say, the Velvet Underground or the Doors, who were consciously exploring darkness, but in a deeper way: not as if they were looking into darkness, like the Doors, but as if they were of the darkness. I couldn't put my finger on it (not that I listened to them enough to try), but there was a something dark abroad in the last couple of years of the 1960s, and the sound of Led Zeppelin seemed a part of it. I know this is an idiosyncratic reaction, but I was not the only one at the time who felt that way. I remember a friend describing it as "insect music," and I knew what she meant: yes, the sound was heavy, but it also had a shrill quavering element that seemed vaguely unhuman. I don't know what if anything that quality had to do with Page's interest in the occult and in particular the very sinister work of Aleister Crowley, but I wasn't surprised when I learned of it.
Over the years, hearing their music here and there, I've come to realize that I was mistaken about them in many ways, and come to appreciate them. They were superb musicians, and there's much more to their music than I gave them credit for. They deserve their reputation as one of the great bands. And Jimmy Page seems to deserve a lot of the credit, not just as guitarist but as writer and producer.
Still, I just don't care all that much for them. So here are a couple of tracks featuring Page that don't sound much like typical Zeppelin. Page was (is?) a very fine acoustic guitarist, as is sometimes apparent in Zeppelin's work. This has a lot in common with the acoustic tracks that appeared on the last Yardbirds album ("White Summer") and the first Led Zeppelin album ("Black Mountain Side"). The opening melody is from the ballad "She Moves Through the Fair."
I think Page differs from Clapton and Beck in that his playing is more about color and texture and harmony than lightning-fast leads. Here's a track from the 1998 Page-Plant collaboration, Walking Into Clarksdale. I had not heard this before I went searching for Page's music on YouTube. From what I've heard, it's pretty good. This tune isn't a guitar showpiece, exactly, but the guitar is crucial, and that solo that begins around 3:15 is remarkable.
Well, ok, one Zeppelin song. I've heard Led Zeppelin III more than their other albums, because I worked in a record store when it came out. I always liked this very atypical song (no drums!) a lot. Color and texture and harmony.
While he was as innovative as Jimmy Page, as tasteful as Eric Clapton, and nearly as visionary as Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck never achieved the same commercial success as any of those contemporaries, primarily because of the haphazard way he approached his career. After Rod Stewart left the Jeff Beck Group in 1971, Beck never worked with a charismatic lead singer who could have helped sell his music to a wide audience. Furthermore, he was simply too idiosyncratic, moving from heavy metal to jazz fusion within a blink of an eye. All the while, Beck retained the respect of fellow guitarists....
"Respect" is an understatement, I think.
What little I heard of his brilliant playing over the years was in musical settings that didn't greatly appeal to me, like the jazz-rock fusion of Blow by Blow. But while digging around for material for this post, I found an embarrassment of riches, especially in live performances. There's a live disk called Live at Ronnie Scott's which I think I'll get. I'm not sure whether this clip is exactly the same performance as the one on the CD, but both are knockouts. "Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat," as you may know, is Charles Mingus's elegy for Lester Young.
The baby-faced bassist is the prodigy Tal Wilkenfeld, who was somewhere around 21 years old at the time of this performance. I would have guessed 15.
Here's a fairly recent live version of one of the better tracks from Blow by Blow, "Freeway Jam." I assume it's roughly contemporary with the Ronnie Scott performance, since Tal Wilkenfeld is with him; she seems to have been in his band off and on in the latter part of the last decade.
The funny thing about Jeff Beck is that he looks pretty much the same as he did in 1966. I seriously doubt whether that's his real hair.
Well, this was sort of inevitable, after Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues":
That's pretty much the definition of blues-rock, and probably my favorite single Cream track. As good as they were, much of their music, at least as it made its way onto records, seemed to lack something. This "Crossroads" is a live performance.
As good as Eric Clapton is, he's never been my favorite guitarist, and I think that's in part because he was sort of limited in Cream, and in part because he's put out an awful lot of very tame (at best) music over the years. But he's still got it. In searching YouTube for clips to include here I found a surprising number of really excellent live performances from the past ten years or so. Here are two, apparently from the same Crossroads Festival concert.
These are available on DVD and are well worth seeking out if you're a guitar fancier.
Everybody interested in the blues knows the story about the crossroads, but not everybody is interested in the blues, so, for you: there's a legend that Johnson met the devil at a certain crossroads and sold his soul in exchange for musical ability.
And here's one of his most potent songs, though the guitar isn't as prominent.
When I thought "Time for a folk guitarist" the first name that popped into my head was John Fahey's. Then I thought, "Nah, it should be someone more authentically folk, not someone who came to the music from outside"; Fahey was a middle-class guy who discovered blues and country in his teens. But his presence was insistent. No, blues and country weren't his native language, but he took folk material and did something wonderful with it. I can't think of anything that sounds more like rural and southern America than his music. He himself referred to his style as American Primitive, and that's exactly right.
I recall seeing and hearing one of his albums when I was in college. If memory serves, someone brought it over to my apartment and we listened to it, but I think I was at least as interested in the strange text that came with it, and the general vibe: a strange mixture of musical folklore, whimsical fiction, philosophy, and religion. His first album, self-produced and distributed in 1959, was called Blind Joe Death, and that fictional bluesman appeared occasionally on other albums. There was a series of similarly-designed LPs on his own Takoma label through the early and mid-'60s, and it was one of those that I heard.
The only one of that series that I own is the one from which the following selection, its title song, is taken. The title communicates a good deal of Fahey's spirit.
Unfortunately my copy, found in a bin of used records somewhere many years after its release, does not have the accompanying text, but thanks to the Internet it can be found. Reading it will give you a better sense of the strangeness I'm talking about than anything I can say. And here is his Wikipedia entry, which will tell you about his life and career and also has links to other interesting stuff.
Here's one where you can see him playing up close.
I wish I'd bought some of those Takoma LPs in the '60s, though they were not widely available. They can still be found but sell for $30-$50 (they're available on CD at normal prices). I have a couple of others that were released on more widely-distributed labels, Vanguard and Reprise. The one on Vanguard, The Yellow Princess, is my favorite. In addition to Fahey's typical work, it contains some intriguing experiments like the sound collage "The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee."
I discovered while researching this post that sometime in the 1970s he put out an album called Fare Forward Voyagers, which is a phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets. It consists of three pieces, each of which bears a phrase from Four Quartets as its title. I'll have to
Time to touch base in the jazz world: Joe Pass, "Blues in G". Next week, a folk guitarist, and after that whatever strikes my fancy from week to week.
Ok, one more, somewhat livelier:
I wish I could say that I understood this kind of improvisation. I appreciate the enormous skill, and I enjoy what I'm hearing melodically, but I know I'm missing a lot by not getting the harmonic relationships.
Jimi Hendrix may not have been the absolute most proficient guitarist, in the sense of playing extremely fast and complex stuff, ever to play rock. But no one has ever been more expressive. And no one been more influential. More than forty years after his death, he's still revered by guitarists, and even with today's electronics nobody, as far as I know, has ever managed to sound exactly like him.
Some of the stuff on the Experience albums strikes me as weak, apart from the guitar playing--many of the songs just aren't that good, and there's some gimmicky stuff that doesn't hold up well. I've often wished he had recorded other people's material more often. Maybe we would have more killer tracks like "All Along the Watchtower." From this distance in time now it seems to me that his blues playing was some of his best work, though it was not much noticed during his lifetime. There's an album of blues tracks, mostly never intended for release, called simply Blues, (or :Blues?) that might in fact be my overall favorite of his albums. It includes this version of "Red House," one of a number he recorded. I think it's the Experience backing him (Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell).
I didn't hear his music for many years after his heyday in the '60s, but about ten years ago I bought a copy of Blues which renewed my appreciation for him and provoked this blog post.
I've been doing a regular weekend music post for several years now, and the choices have generally been pretty random, reflecting whatever I happened to be listening to. But for the next year, just for fun, and just because I love the guitar in all its forms, I'm going to focus on that instrument, and present a different guitarist every week. I don't think I'll have too much trouble coming up with 52 of them. Most will be rock/blues, but I'll do classical, jazz and folk, too. It'll be a lot of fun for me and I hope for you as well.
To get things started on a classy (heh) note, here is a piece from the first classical guitar album I ever bought, back in 1966 or '67: Julian Bream's Baroque Guitar. It was a lucky choice, I guess, because I probably had very little idea of what I was buying, but it's still one of my favorite classical guitar albums. This fugue is from one of Bach's violin sonatas.
For that matter, I think Bream is my favorite classical guitarist. Not that I am a serious connoisseur of classical guitar; the guitar is actually not that high on my list of favorite classical instruments, below the bowed strings anyway. But I do like a lot of it. There's something very pure and strong about Bream's playing.
