Author: Jen Monroe

Apologies for a few weeks of silence–I fractured a finger in a bike accident recently, and while I’m happy to be otherwise unscathed it’s made typing a nuisance. I’ve also been feeling so depleted by and sad about our ongoing Supreme Court drama that I haven’t had it in me to think about much else. But, it’s fall, which means I’m listening to Robbie Băsho, and maybe you should too.

Though Băsho’s life was tragically cut short by a freak chiropractic accident, he accomplished so much in his twenty years of making music and left us an impressive catalogue to celebrate. He went to military school, then pre-med. He painted, sang, played trumpet, played lacrosse, lifted weights, wrote poetry, and changed his name to Băsho after the Japanese poet. He went through phases of cultural and musical obsession, including Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu, Japanese, Indian classical, Iranian, Native American, English and Appalachian folk, Western blues, and Western classical “periods.” He “used open C and more exotic tunings and he developed an esoteric doctrine for 12- and 6-string guitar, concerned with color and mood. He spoke of ‘Zen-Buddhist-Cowboy songs’ a long time before Gram Parsons mentioned his vision of Cosmic American music.” He studied under Ali Akbar Khan. He pushed for a broader appreciation of the steel-string guitar as a classical concert instrument. He made 14 studio albums in 19 years. He wrote “a Sufi symphony” and another for piano and orchestra about Spanish and Christian cultures coming to America. He’s considered one of the geniuses of American folk and blues, and yet his name often gets lost in conversations about John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.

Visions Of The Country was recorded at what was arguably the peak of his musical power, two years before he played the concert recorded in Bonn Ist Supreme (you’ll  notice some of these songs show up there as well). It’s a sprawling love song to America, and it seems to exist fully outside of 1978, with Băsho’s voice and sensibility looking both backwards, to early Americana folk and blues; and forward, with his explicit borrowing from global music traditions. He contributes some gorgeous whistling, most notably on “Leaf In The Wind,” and his whistle is every bit as theremin-like and expressive as his singing voice would suggest.

This is a potentially blasphemous thing to say about such a singular guitarist, but my personal standout is “Orphan’s Lament,” which features only Băsho accompanying his signature quaver on a slightly out-of-tune piano being played with the kind of abandon you might expect to hear after a few drinks. I love that the piano part alternates between a very pastoral folk melody and sounding almost like a hammered dulcimer. His voice is at its most brutally effective and emotively pure here, which is to say, blast this in headphones if you want to do some real ugly crying: “Born for love and nothing more/Given away cause we was poor/Will you wait, will you wait for me?” Băsho himself was orphaned as a baby, and the liner notes dedicate this song as follows: “To all the little orphans of the rainbow; and may they find the gentle hand of the Creator.”

Still, though he gives airtime to piano, strings, voice, and whistle, he never lets us forget what he can do with a guitar. I love that Visions of the Country houses a few bare bones guitar parts that feel more in line with what a 2018 audience might associate with “folk music”–“Blue Crystal Fire,” for example, could hardly be more simple, and yet it’s broken wide open by, yet again, that plaintive and tremulous voice. Elsewhere, we hear more classic Băsho guitar construction: long builds of dazzling finger picking with big, cascading crescendoes, and always so much warmth. I’m reminded of his assertion that nylon-string guitars were suitable for “love songs,” but that steel-string guitars could communicate “fire.”

Take this for an afternoon walk if you’re able. I hope you enjoy it.

“My philosophy is quite simple: soul first, technique later; or, better to drink wine from the hands than water from a pretty cup. Of course the ultimate is wine from a pretty cup. Amen.”

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