Finally…a pure guitar album from John Fahey’s Takoma label, by Robbie Basho. The liner notes describe Basho this way…”of all the young guitarists who recorded for Takoma in the 60s and 70s…[he] was the least influenced by label founder John Fahey. In an age when non-conformity was exalted, Basho qualified as a true eccentric, and the way he played the guitar and sang was unique. His fascination with things Oriental led him to take his name from a Japanese poet, and the influence of Indian classical music is often palpable in his guitar work…” His playing on Bashovia is totally different from the playing of Jansch and Carthy. It will not be to every listener’s taste. Some might call it “noodling.”
All guitarists noodle. It’s what happens when you sit the wooden box, with the bronze strings on your lap; when you have some time on your hands and the sound of those strings ringing out is all that you hear. You move your fingers, you play things over again, you let your imagination go. Basho was a master of this kind of creative form. And where the average guitarist’s noodling can quickly become repetitive and boring, in Basho’s hands to play was to compose. He goes for feeling rather than structure, for intuition over form. Do the titles come first, or last? Are the images intended? Or are they fortuitous coincidence? Does it matter?
You can hear the influence of the East on these tracks. During “The Falconer’s Arm” Basho’s 12-string takes on the characteristics of a sitar. His precision and dexterity are obvious in the speed and clarity of the flurry of notes which comprise this piece. Bashovia is a compilation of chosen tracks from three different albums originally recorded in 1967-68. The title is Fahey’s tribute to the world Basho inhabited: his own country of music and concept. His real name was Daniel Robinson, but after a night of meditation (and peyote) on a mountaintop he assumed the Robbie Basho persona. He told Fahey that he was (and always had been) the 17th Century Japanese poet Basho. Fahey was amused, he confessed (in liner notes written in 1999) “as usual, when Robbie spoke to me, I didn’t understand what in the world he was talking about. To make matters worse I didn’t believe he knew what he was talking about.” Although it took many years eventually Fahey came to appreciate Basho as a guitar master, and a truly unique talent. He calls him “a goof” and then acknowledges that Basho’s music is “neither Oriental or Occidental, male nor female, human nor alien, young nor old, live nor dead, traditional nor contemporary, hip nor unhip, yin nor yang, apples nor oranges, plus nor minus, electric nor acoustic, but occupies an obscure and unique niche I cannot describe in conventional categories except to suggest that it is somewhere between the outside of all the descriptive categories we know.” That goes double for me!
(Takoma Records, 2005)
