Very different approaches to solo acoustic guitar

The pages testify to the fact that I tend to go for guitar that's plugged in. Not necessarily loud - although, yes, that too a lot of the time - but electric. I have written about acoustic guitar here before, notably on this lengthy reflection on 14 Tracks' Takoma retrospective. But that was August 2009.

However, a couple of things have floated up into my attention space over the last couple of days which in turn reminded me of other releases and performances from this year, so in no particular order, here are five very different takes on solo acoustic guitar.

Glenn Jones is very much in the post-John Fahey school of American folk primitivism; he has a very lovely new album out on Thrill Jockey: The Wanting. You can sample it on the Thrill Jockey site, or buy it on LP or FLAC from Boomkat. Here's Jones playing live on 12 string; sadly the YT clip has no information with it, but the year appears to be 2007. Note how light a touch his left hand has.

Australian player Tommy Emmanuel had been just a name to me from various guitar mags, then I heard an engaging 20-minute interview with him on the BBC World Service arts show The Strand only last night. Christ, what an insanely virtuosic and imaginative player. Interestingly, in the interview he pointed out that YouTube had greatly enhanced his career, helping to spread the word in a way previously undoable - and there certainly is a lot of him out there. This is his interpretation of Mason Williams' 1968 "Classical Gas", with a few other tunes thrown in. File under "acoustic shred".

A million miles away philosophically and aesthetically, California's Bill Orcutt takes primivitism in a very different direction from Glenn Jones and the like, generating violent bursts of kinetics, or to quote Forced Exposure, he has a "classic face-melting style". He has a new album, How the Thing Sings, which indeed you can sample and buy on FE. Here's a brief improvisation filmed, I can only assume, at home.

Sarah and I went to see Alison Krauss and Union Station a couple of weeks back, at the third of three sold out shows at London's Royal Festival Hall. I have to say that while the show was everything you would expect, it was yet somehow lacking. The RFH is notoriously difficult to "warm up", and admittedly we were a long way back, but nonetheless, I felt curiously uninvolved in the show. There was was one stand out moment, however: dobro player Jerry Douglas' solo spot. It was much like this clip; oof.

And I have to close with this. Pat Metheny's second solo guitar album, What's It All About is a small gem, an object lesson in highly original re-imaginings of classic songs. I've argued elsewhere that Metheny is consistently misunderstood and misrepresented ("Ever easy on the ear, his is a kind of adult-oriented jazz, engineered to go down smooth," the BBC's Daniel Spicer called him in this review of WIAA, somehow completely missing the point.) Metheny is a sophisticate, an aesthetic peer of Caetono Veloso or Pedro Almodóvar. Anyway, I think the music speaks for itself and hardly needs me to defend it. This is Metheny himself discussing the album and playing some extracts from it.

Variously via Paul Schütze, PatMetheny.com and Boomkat.

Comments

[Mark Reep]

Here via MJH's link; thanks for this. Expect you're well familiar with Preston Reed?
If not, you're welcome :) All best.

[Peter]

surprised you've fallen for the Bill Orcutt hype. Rarely have I heard such unmitigated bollocks coming from a guitar, which is saying something.

[Zarin Tasneem]

Mason Williams is just on fire!! I loved it.

Thankyou!