Vibrational Emergences #1 [Folk Guitar-Heroes, British Folk Vortex]

Vibrational Emergences is a rambling new music journal attempting to interweave the scattered threads of my listening habits and media consumption, hopefully connecting the most resonant vibrations with curious ears in the process.

I’ve been stuck in a(nother) British folk vortex due to a series of recent convergences. Not least of these was recently diving back into Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, a 600+ page book that digs into the roots of British folk music, where ancient paganism, revolutionary socialism, pastoral romanticism and 20th century occultism are all deeply entangled. It also happened that my favorite podcast Drifter’s Sympathy recently dropped two heavy episodes about Nick Drake. The host, Emil Amos, welcomes guest Pat Sansone (Wilco) for an existential therapy session where they process the sensitive and sometimes tragic new Nick Drake biography. It was heartwarming to hear both Emil and Pat give some well-deserved love to Drake’s overlooked, under-loved debut record, Five Leaves Left, which was recorded before the mechanisms of the music industry started to sicken and depress the young songwriter. For certain listeners, this record’s lush orchestrations give the impression that the music is somehow less personal and intimate than the unadorned Pink Moon, but I personally find the string arrangements to make his inner landscape even more vivid.

A caffeinated weekend listening to folk-guitar heros with an old friend

The folk vibes only deepened during a long weekend while an old friend was visiting me out in Joshua Tree. After an exploratory living room jam session, my friend’s intricate fingerstyle guitar improvisations left me inspired me to spin some of my favorite folk-adjacent guitarists each morning while we caught up and drank a few rounds of coffee.

Michael Chapman – Rainmaker

First off was Rainmaker, the 1969 debut from the English guitarist and singer/songwriter Michael Chapman. Originally trained as a jazz guitarist, Chapman was already deft at multiple guitar styles by the time he recorded his first album, organically weaving influences from both sides of the Atlantic into his own personal style—including folk baroque, jazz, folk-rock, American primitivism, blues, and occasional hints of raga.

JJ. Cale – Really

After Rainmaker, I jumped across the pond to Oklahoma to spin another underappreciated guitarist/songwriter—the inimitable and unpretentious J.J. Cale. A true musical craftsman, J.J. drew from a rich wellspring of country, blues, swamp rock and roots music in order to develop his distinct Tulsa Sound. While Cale generally avoided the spotlight, his songs frequently became hits when covered by rock stars like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Cash, Captain Beefheart, Deep Purple and most popularly, by (the unfortunately xenophobic/racist) Eric Clapton. While they may have tried, none of these famous artists could touch that back-porch swagger seeping out of J.J.’s muted grooves. You really can’t go wrong with any of Cale’s first five albums; this time I pulled out his second LP, Really (1972).

Robbie Basho – Song of the Stallion

By the time of his seventh album, Song of the Stallion (1971), Robbie Basho was already deeply practiced in his personalized sonic alchemy of western raga guitar and mystical folk song. Emerging from an abundance of fingerstyle guitar soloists in the 60s, Basho established his unique voice through, well, literally his sensitive, yearning vocals that sometimes soared over his ecstatic fingerpicking. He sang with sentimental sincerity and heavy vibrato, with lyrics expressed devotion and awe for the panoramic landscapes of California, as well a deep, even if sometimes awkward, respect for various cultures and their ancient myths and spiritual practices, whether they come from India or are indigenous to Turtle Island.

Basho’s flamboyant style and earnest sentimentality made him the perfect foil to his Takoma label mate and fellow “American primitivist” guitar pioneer, John Fahey, who was know to be somewhat of a cantankerous trickster. Fahey’s music had a masculine, rugged quality, with hard thumb-picking rhythms inspired by old country-blues. On the other hand, Basho’s raga-inspired playing had a more feminine flow, like a swirling wind with occasional flashes of drama. While both guitarists often reflected the natural world, Fahey’s music tends to look inwards in a more brooding, psychoanalytical way, exploring the shadow of the self and the ghosts of America. Conversely, Basho seemed a bit more idealistic and animistic, looking outwardly for the light and soul in everyone and everything.

My guitarist friend (who I knew was into John Fahey because we had enthusiastically watched a Fahey documentary when we were roommates years ago), surprisingly had never heard Robbie Basho. Upon hearing this record he admiringly said Basho sounded like the “dream guitarist [he] always aspires to”.

Bert Jansch – Avocet

The following spin was Avocet (1979), the reflective and pastoral twelfth album from Scottish fingerstyle pioneer Bert Jansch. For this instrumental, acoustic trio record, Jansch is joined by violinist/producer Martin Jenkins and the ubiquitous British upright bassist Danny Thompson. Taking up the entire first side, the 18-minute “Avocet” is a drifting daydream that really sets the impressionistic tone for the five shorter tracks on side B, which are also named after various water birds. These folky themes and intertwined improvisations find that perfect balance between serenity and adventurousness that would feel right at home alongside the ethereal chamber-jazz you might hear on ECM Records. Martin Jenkins violin drifts through Jansch’s tangled guitar with a subtle phaser sound; on other tracks he switches to flute or mandocello. So far, this record is one that really caught my friend’s ear, especially Danny Thompson’s lyrical bass melodies and loping grooves, which he held down without any grounding from drums or percussion.

As I’m prone to do, I immediately started nerding out about Danny Thompson, one of my favorite upright bassists of all time, who has laid down his singing low end on many masterpieces throughout the decades, not limited to John Martyn, Talk Talk, David Sylvian, Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, COB, Pentangle and the aforementioned Michael Chapman. Much to my surprise, my friend revealed that he’d never heard of Thompson, Jansch or their group Pentangle before, which launched us into a binge of live Pentangle videos:

Pentangling…

What’s really strange is that, later on that same Sunday, not one but two musician acquaintances that I ran into coincidentally brought up how much they loved Pentangle. The synchronicities were too great; for the next few days after my friend left, I got in the habit of starting each day off with a different Pentangle album. It became really funny to me remembering that, while I was working at Rasputin’s records in Berkeley during college, I would often see these dime-a-dozen albums by artists like Pentangle, Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention and wonder what kind of dork would buy these…and now that dork is clearly me.

Somewhat of a folk supergroup by the time they got together, Pentangle ended up recorded six albums from 1968 to 1972. Their approach focused on interpreting and popularizing traditional songs from English, Scottish and medieval folklore, shaping them through a kaleidoscopic lens inspired by jazz, blues, and psychedelia. In addition to Thompson and Jansch, the quintet features jazzy percussionist Terry Cox, guitarist John Renbourn, and the transportive vocalist Jacqui McShee.

From the moment opener “Light Flight” bursts into its polyphonic thicket of tangled acoustic melodies and shifting time signatures, Basket of Light (1969) proves itself to be one of their most energizing, dynamic and rhythmic albums. I love the inventiveness of Terry Cox, whose hybridized percussion playing keeps things driving with a textured mix of brushes, mallets, drum set, hand drums and glockenspiel. John Renbourn also has some nice touches of sitar on a few tracks, especially when it’s paired with Jansch’s banjo on “House Carpenter”. Next up I decided to go back in time and spin their double album Sweet Child (1968), which pairs a live LP and a studio LP. Overall, Sweet Child is definitely solid but never really resonated with me as much as their others, although I can appreciate that the live recordings must have been a great representation of their performances in the pre-internet days. The two Charles Mingus interpretations on the live album are fairly interesting, and I always enjoy Jacqui McShee’s a cappellas. The studio LP has a few great tracks (“Sweet Child”, “The Trees They Do Grow High”), but none quite reach the heights of their masterpieces, Cruel Sister (1970) and Reflection (1971). If you’re just discovering this group, those records are where I’d recommend you start.

Cruel Sister is their most progressive and cohesive record, functioning like a time machine to the middle ages with its medieval courting songs, autumnal romanticism and epic balladry. McShee really shines on this record, especially with the tender, flowing a cappella “When I Was in My Prime”. Reflection, on the other hand, stands out in their discography because half the songs are original compositions rather than interpretations, while the traditional songs they did choose to include were more rooted in Appalachia than Britain. It’s also their most jazzy, relaxed and breezy album; originals like “When I Get Home” and the 11-minute title track are prime lazy afternoon jams.

Incredible String Band

“I know nothing, and know that I know nothing; All is in the eye, and in its blinks of seeing” – Robin Williamson (“The Eyes of Fate”)

After all this Pentangle, it felt only natural for me to listen to the other prominent Scottish folk-rock group of the era, Incredible String Band. To accompany my listening and a cup of freshly poured coffee, I read along with a chapter dedicated to the group in the aforementioned book, Electric Eden1. It turns out that in 1962 (six years before Pentangle formed), Bert Jansch shared an apartment in Edinburg, Scotland, with musicians Robin Williamson and English hitchhiker Clive Palmer, who would eventually go on to form the Incredible String Band with Mike Heron in 1966. After only one record as a trio, the group dissolved to allow each of them to venture off on their own worldly travels. While the nomadic Clive Palmer would continue his journeying for a few more years, Heron and Williamson reformed the next year as a duo and cultivated the most classic and fertile period of ISB. Returning to Scotland after four months in Morocco, Williamson may have had an empty wallet, but still managed to bring back a variety of new instruments, including a guimbri, oud, shenai, and various flutes, and, more importantly, a transformative inspiration from the Sufi mysticism and Gnawa ceremonies he witnessed there.

“There was a glimmering of a of a way forward forever and it involved the casting of bread upon the water, the facing up or towards danger or through hubbub or the humdrum or humiliation and indignity of the human state or the century of the fuming west”2

These new experiences and instruments would undeniably shape a string of releases in the late 60’s, starting with the quintessential acid folk LP, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. Robin Williamson explains that the title “seemed to be a symbol of consciousness. You know, you either think of it as layers and layers and layers of onion or thousands of voices”.3 While the group was undoubtedly experimenting with LSD at the time, the word “acid” in the “acid folk” designation implies not only a psychedelic chemical influence, but a complete melting down of musical and psychological borders, creating an ability for music to shape shift and produce new forms without losing that connection to the past. Electric Eden’s author Rob Young notices that:

“the Incredible String Band’s themes deal with the instant of becoming, the cusp moment when the cycle of growth sheds its slough and enters of phase of regeneration.”4

Rather than the clear dialectic of traditional folk song and contemporary musical styles that Pentangle achieved, ISB’s music was a living quilt-work, gathering material from epic myths, religious texts, mystical poetry, and personal revelations to create colorful new vibrational assemblages. Frequently making abrupt left turns into different musical styles, the music feels both whimsical and spiritual, taking a shape that Young refers to as “phytosonic”, in the sense that it resembles “vegetable growth patterns […] growing odd tendrils of melody or budding out fresh stamens”.

“If you answer this riddle, you’ll never begin” – Williamson (“Koeeoaddi There”)

As Rob Young explores their following and most popular album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, the author makes some interesting investigations into the mystical and occult symbols utilized by the group, expanding on how the hanged man and the empress tarot cards suggest resurrection and earthly paradise, or the way fire symbolizes interior vision, transformation, and ritual purification in the alchemical process.

“The genre-shifts across the whole LP, from Bahamian spiritual to Indian hymn, Elizabethen lament to acid raga, smoggy industrial blues to abstract neo-gamelan improv, act as scene changes for a living theatre people by an alternative Tarot deck of increasingly bizarre archetypes: the Minotaur, the Witch, the Monkey, the Emperor of China, the Wizard of Changes, the City, the Woman with a Bulldozer, the Amoeba….”5

If you dig either of these records by ISB, I also highly recommend their double album Wee Tam & The Big Huge (1969). These LPs reveal a more distilled, focused, and sometimes sparse approach to their sonic footprint; they refrain from excess overdubbing in order to create space for the mythopoeic lyrics that welcome you along on their spiritual quest. The surreal film “Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending” (1969) is also a vivid portrait of the band during this time, mixing documentary, intimate performances, theatric vignettes and poetic cinematography.

Unfortunately, the band’s journeying eventually lead them into the Church of Scientology, and the music thereafter displayed a gradual diminishment of their whimsical curiosity and creative fire. Albums like Changing Horses (1969) and U (1970) each have a few inspired moments but are inconsistent at best. Fortunately, Robbie Williamson eventually left Scientology a few decades later and went on to record a few majestic CDs of ethereal Celtic mysticism for ECM Records between 2001 and 2014.

COB (Clive’s Original Band)

In the years that ISB were releasing their classic albums and enjoying the peak of their career, Clive Palmer’s long, nomadic journey took him throughout Europe, West Asia, and India for a few years. Eventually he settled in Cornwall, playing with multiple groups before starting COB (Clive’s Original Band) in 1970. Unlike the relatively straightforward and distilled folk of Pentangle, groups like COB and the burgeoning progressive and acid folk bands were alchemizing their ancient influences into wild, new compositions rather than faithfully interpreting traditional song.

their material was composted from a variety of musical residues, but here the elements stretched further back in time. Pagan chants and Christian hymns; medieval, Tudor and Restoration Secular sounds; the nature-worshipping verse of the revolutionary Romantics; and an occult communion with the British landscape were all factors spun into the sonic web, along with the requisite dusting of foreign and exotic instrumentation.6

Their second and final album Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart (1972) exhibit a medieval surrealism that feels both ancient and completely progressive. Clive and his bandmates (Mick Bennett & John Bidwell) cycle fluidly through different roles as lead and background singers. Their mystical ballads and epic poetry are enhanced by the multi-instrumentalists’ harmonium drones, serpentine woodwinds, hand percussion, and a colorful collection of stringed instruments—guitars, banjo, balalaika, violin, and the dulcitar (a modified dulcimer that often sounds like a sitar). The wild-eyed dragon and crusading knight on the cover painting might make the band appear fantastical and anachronistic, yet the heart of the music is full with passionately present feelings of spiritual longing and wistful romanticism. “Let It Be You” expresses a deep, sorrowful devotion with its tender reminiscing, mournful whistle, and melancholy arpeggios on the guitar and dulcitar, mirroring each other from opposite stereo channels.

Closing the Circle on a Sweet Sunday Morning

When the following Sunday eventually hit, it felt right to come full circle on this spell of Scottish folk rock with the album that started it all for me, Bert Jansch’s L.A. Turnaround (1974). As the title suggests, this laid back album was recorded in sunny Los Angeles and exhibits a warm infusion of country rock into Jansch’s refined style. The addition of lush pedal steel guitars and Michael Nesmith’s polished production to some of Jansch’s best original songs result in an undeniable collection of songwriting gems. I guess the music had to meet me here in my home state of California before it could transport me elswewhere.