The American Primitive guitar tradition is more than just alive, it’s beating with a heart of striking vitality, and this circumstance is one of the nicer musical surprises of the 21st century. Furthermore, in providing this calendar year with some truly exceptional music, it’s happily obvious this development is far from slowing down. The latest example comes from Daniel Bachman, a young Virginia-based guitarist with a level of skill that far exceeds his age. Jesus I’m a Sinner is his second release for the estimable Tompkins Square label, and in displaying substantial artistic growth it nearly equals the high quality of his last effort.
Already in 2013 we’ve had Glenn Jones’ masterful My Garden State, a grand expression of late-period American Primitive-style splendor from one of the planet’s finest current guitar instrumentalists, and the reissue of Don Bikoff’s terrific 1968 LP Celestial Explosion, a retrieval of a lost album that in its uncovering greatly deepened the breadth of this style’s early days. Frankly, the arrival of Daniel Bachman’s latest exactly one year after his prior record Seven Pines brought a significant boost to his profile can make it seem like we’re in the midst of a full-on progressive fingerpicking renaissance.
And after spending a little time mulling over names like James Blackshaw, Cian Nugent, and William Tyler (with the ghost of the departed too soon Jack Rose hovering in the periphery), I’m beginning to be swayed that this is indeed the case. And what’s most impressive, outside of the sheer excellence of the sounds of course, is how these progenitors retain the restless experimental spirit that’s long resided in the heart of the movement.
So it is with Daniel Bachman, a guitarist hailing from Fredericksburg, VA whose ability on his instrument, when considered along with his age (he’s yet to celebrate his 24th birthday), can be rather startling. And in a manner similar to Jones and Rose, Bachman has emerged from an underground sensibility, though his early efforts offer their own flavor.
In a manner similar to his cohorts, Bachman’s interest in the guitar was a result of getting knocked sideways by names like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Sandy Bull. It’s a story very familiar to this contempo “school,” and far more interesting is the influence on Bachman from his fellow Fredericksburg resident Rose, who cut his teeth playing experimental rock in the ‘90s u-ground band Pelt before revealing a finger-style talent of uncommon versatility.
Rose, along with Jones and a handful of others, was a big part of this music’s creative resurgence, a phenomenon that spans back to the early ‘90s as largely instigated by the rediscovery of Fahey and his cohorts as something other than just a pack of pleasant instrumentalists. Bachman was four years old when Rose joined Pelt, solidly placing them in different generations within the form’s historical narrative, but the stylistic bond is strong, evidenced by the younger guitarist contributing the cover artwork to Rose’s excellent posthumous Thrill Jockey release Luck in the Valley.
So while the drone/raga elements of Bachman’s 2010 debut Apparitions at the Kenmore Plantation (issued under the revealing moniker of Sacred Harp) drew some inevitable and understandable comparisons to Basho’s spiritual heft, citing Rose’s precedent seems even more appropriate. And while many post-Takoma players have landed criticism for being too blatantly “in the tradition,” Bachman’s combination of cascading acoustic strings and drifting yet edgy sonic environments (including some full-blown excursions on the sitar) made his first disc a far cry from any standard Guitar Soli replication.
To the contrary, that release was often quite far-out, and in part due to its being captured by a boom-box, the next year’s Grey-Black-Green (his debut under his own name) only strengthened his atypical approach. But Oh Be Joyful, one of a pair from 2012, found Bachman bolstered by a more conventional recording strategy as the adroitness of his playing flourished and the influence of young Fahey really came into sharp focus for the first time.
The subsequent appearance of the outstanding Seven Pines via Tompkins Square served to emphasize his continued growth and uniqueness as it obviously clued-in a larger segment of the general public to the worthiness of his work, and his Tiny Desk Concert for NPR from last December brought some exquisite visual stimuli to the equation.
That two-song set not only underscored his rapidly-blossoming technique but also revealed the source to be a plain-spoken, openly nervous, and downright likeable young man, so it’s quite understandable to find Bachman sometimes described as a prodigy. In May of this year, after completing eight months on the road including a European jaunt that found him performing as far away from home as Turkey, he completed this follow-up to Seven Pines.
And it’s a record that finds him impressively adapting his talents to new settings. Opener “Sarah Ann,” dedicated to his sister and companion on that often challenging Euro tour, is also noted in the Tompkins Square press materials as being Bachman’s first full song for the lap guitar, but you wouldn’t know it by the assurance of his playing. It starts out in a contemplative zone that deeply accentuates his unconventional and highly resonant tunings before picking up the pace for an ample dose of confident string dexterity.
“Honeysuckle Reel” is an equally spacious piece that will have lots of folks making comparisons to Vanguard-era Fahey, but what that association misses is the individual spark that Bachman brings to the table. Specifically, his loose-stringed tunings, notably distinct from Fahey’s early recordings, result in a level of dissonance that while never off-putting does establish the guitarist as having his own voice.
And if Bachman’s first couple releases illuminated his background as a searching instrumentalist who’s been occasionally portrayed as psychedelic, his stuff since Oh Be Joyful has significantly increased his ties to the music that served as the inspiration for the whole American Primitive shebang. With this album’s “Happy One Step,” an adaptation of a Cajun tune from Dennis McGee and one of Jesus I’m a Sinner’s pair of collaborations with fiddler Sally Anne Morgan of The Black Twig Pickers, the guitarist saunters up to some top-notch Old-Time grandeur.
Rather than try to burn the house down however, “Happy One Step” is a leisurely paced and pretty little number, but it also holds enough verve to keep the hounds of antiquity at bay. To elaborate, while it at first sounds like Bachman is ceding the floor to Morgan by backing the attractive atmospheres of her bow with some simple strumming, as the track progresses a palpable air of drone can be detected. This finds the song (ala The Black Twig Pickers music as a whole) easily transcending the quaint or overly polite atmospheres that unfortunately plague so much neo-Old-Time playing.
It also provides a strong link to the more exploratory nature of Bachman’s initial recordings. Like much recent music in this style, Jesus I’m a Sinner (from its title to the sounds it contains) might appear on the surface as being out of step with the great march of the Modern (and in some ways it is), but upon deeper inspection an up-to-date artistic vigor really asserts itself. And from there the succinct title-track shifts the album into high gear, reinforcing the strides made on his two prior efforts and deepening the thorny aura that sweetens his considerable proficiency.
Where the stated link between Fahey and company and the slowly emerging later tide of experimental guitarists (e.g. Thurston Moore and the Sun City Girls’ Richard Bishop) was often ascertained only after extensive listening, the aforementioned dissonance in Bachman’s playing makes the relationship much more overt as it remains securely inside the realms of fingerpicking style.
It’s not at all surprising that Bachman covered a piece from legendary if too seldom heard New York experimental guitarist Loren Connors on Seven Pines, and likewise it’s no shock that on “Variations on Goose Chase” he sets down his guitar for the banjo. A version of “Wild Goose Chase” as recorded by Virgil Anderson (whose 1980 LP On the Tennessee Line, a pretty killer document issued by the small County label, includes the tune), it finds Bachman handling the instrument with no perceptible loss of confidence and conjuring a moment of spare beauty that’s only fault is that it’s too brief.
“Under the Shade of the Trees” combines Bachman’s meditative guitar playing with qualities of drone that look back to his Sacred Harp period, but the second half of the piece blossoms into playing more indicative of his recent LPs, though a slow fade out brings everything together nicely. Interestingly, the cut contrasts very well with Jones’ use of environmental sounds on My Garden State. And “Chattanooga” finds Morgan returning with Charlie Devine on banjo for a jaunty slice of string band action derived from the obscure Harrisonburg VA-born fiddler Blaine Smith.
Again, Bachman is more than just solid in this seemingly new milieu, his playing hitting spots that in another scenario a bass slapper would service as Morgan and Devine saw and pick up a small storm. Penultimate track “Blenheim” finds the guitarist back in prime Fahey mode with a piece exhibiting some splendid tonal shifts, and “Leaving Istanbul (4AM),” clearly inspired by his recent tour, is marked by its surges of spiraling, agitated yet supple strings, bringing the album to an intense close.
Jesus I’m a Sinner’s gains through variety do result in the LP being slightly less massive as an overall statement than was the powerhouse blast of Seven Pines, though increased familiarity with the guy’s prowess likely has something to do with this as well. The truth of it is that Daniel Bachman is a major artist, and if we are in the midst of a fingerpicking renaissance his records are a huge reason why.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
