Tag: classical guitar

Doji Morita – A Boy ボーイ, 1977

Gossamer folk ballads and cinematic string arrangements from musician, singer, and songwriter Doji Morita (stage name). Born in Tokyo, Morita-san began her musical career after the death of a friend, and made seven records in the span of her eight year long musical career. An intensely private person, Morita-san chose not to perform often or in large venues, and though she was signed to major labels, she avoided exposure and increased commercialization wherever possible. She wore a wig and sunglasses in most photos and live appearances, and eventually stepped away from music completely to focus on her domestic life. Sadly, she passed away a few months ago at the age of 65.

The records of hers that I’ve spent time with, such as the also excellent スカイ = きみは悲しみの青い空をひとりで飛べるか (Mother Sky), are all colored by her intense melancholy and nostalgia, and A Boy ボーイ is no exception. Spanish guitar, swelling and cinematic string arrangements, and hushed, forlorn vocals. I imagine that in addition to her folk contemporaries, Morita-san was heavily inspired by Brazilian, Portuguese, and even Cape Verdean musical traditions, with a lot of her instrumentation, vocal lines, and vocal inflections strongly suggesting morno (though she also nods to American folk and country in “君と淋しい風になる,” before submerging us in another particularly dramatic bath of strings). I suspect she was an Ennio Morricone fan as well.

Interestingly, at several points throughout the record songs cut off abruptly and are followed by snippets of what I assume are field recordings–the flapping of a bird’s wings, or rushing water. It’s a motif that appears on her other records, too, and I’d imagine it’s a textural nod to her interest in baroque folk and pastorality. This is a high drama and high reward record, and feels peak autumnal to me, so I hope you enjoy it.

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Penguin Café Orchestra – Broadcasting From Home, 1984

Another dear favorite from Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a project spearheaded by UK-born composer and musician Simon Jeffes. Jeffes saw PCO as the ongoing soundtrack to a dream he had had while suffering from food poisoning in the south of France, as well as a vessel through which to explore his interest in “world” folk music, particularly African percussion. The project that didn’t exactly suffer from under-exposure, if their dozens of commercial song placements are any indication. Still, I think the music very much belongs here. Plenty of ink has already been spilled by much more knowledgeable people about the group, so without attempting to poorly explain what makes this music great, I’ll say that what I love about this record, as with much of PCO’s catalogue, is the way it challenges and subverts what background music is and what it can do.

Though the exuberant “Music From A Found Harmonium,” named after the discarded pump organ upon which it was composed that Jeffes found in an alleyway in Japan, is easily the record’s most famous track, I’m a huge sucker for more pared back moments like “Prelude & Yodel,” which milks little more than three string instruments for far more than the sum of their parts; and the heartbreaking “Isle Of View (Music For Helicopter Pilots).” Elsewhere are hints of reggae (“Music by Numbers”); baroque, as per usual (“Sheep Dip”); and the perfect Latin jazz riff “Heartwind,” co-written by none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto. Lofty, nostalgic, and unabashedly sentimental, but with enough warmth and playfulness to keep it precise and never saccharine. Razor sharp and meticulous musicianship from a group of musicians who, by this time, had fully locked into the ethos of what they were doing and how best to play with each other. I hope you have a great time with this.

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Linda Cohen – Leda, 1972

Gorgeous minimal classical guitar on the first of three full-lengths from the largely self-taught Linda Cohen. Her fingerpicking pulls from folk, baroque, and blues, and given that she opened for Joni Mitchell, John Fahey, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at Philadelphia’s Second Fret in the late 60s, I would imagine these were influential artists for her. Though she was an active musician through much of her life, Cohen was most passionately a teacher, teaching classical guitar for 35 years at the Classical Guitar Store in Philly, where she was a fixture in the music scene. Her life was sadly cut short by cancer in 2009.

Leda is an exercise in restraint. Meticulously fingerpicked, just barely fleshed out with synth, theremin, celesta, tapes, and percussion. Much of the additional instrumentation is so subtle that it might not register without headphones–this is very much acoustic guitar music. Warm with room tone and (at least on this rip) crackling vinyl pops, it’s also prime cold weather, indoor listening. It includes instrumentation and effects from Charles Cohen (no relation), among others; with cover art by Milton Glaser. Sparse and masterful. Thank you Chad for the tip!

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Priscilla Ermel – Campo De Sonhos, 1982

A stunner. Priscilla Ermel is a Brazilian anthropoligist, video artist, and musician based at the Laboratório de Imagem e Som em Entropologia in University of Sao Paulo. If you’ve heard Music From Memory’s extraordinary Outro Tempo compilation, you’ve heard two of her songs, one of which is included on this record. You can watch some of her video work on Vimeo. Also–a cool fact that I was unaware of until just now courtesy of 20 Jazz Funk Greats:

In her ethno-musicological researches, she has studied the indigenous Tupi Mondé people of Brazil, as well as the Dogon in Mali- yes, the same Dogon who, as myth has hit, descended from the Sirians, and were soundtracked by Craig Leon in his Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music.

Campo de Sonhos (“field of dreams”) is a collection of cinematic instrumental textures that lean alternately towards jazz and classical. There are a few gorgeous, guitar-centric tracks that employ both acoustic (viola caipira) and electric, but the electric moments are more sparse, moody, and textural; almost Durutti Column-esque. Elsewhere, a laundry list of instruments: kalimba, berimbau, viola-de-cocho, chirimia, ocarina, nepalese flute, Jew’s harp, piano, saxophone, cello, violin, synth, and a slew of drums including congas, surdo, bombo, gongs, cultrun, and cajón. And while there are moments of uninhibited percussive joy and spiritual jazz, these songs feel focused, elegant, even stripped back at times. Thank you Kosta for the reminder to share an old favorite!

Also, if things look a bit rough around here, it’s because I’ve just switched to WordPress and am still finding my way around–am hoping to have more user-friendly navigation and archive up soon. Please bear with me in the meantime! (I’d also like to thank a very nice reader named Kenji who spent a solid hour and a half writing and tweaking code and holding my hand through learning about plug-ins to fix a few hundred broken links. Thanks Kenji!)

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Bola Sete – Ocean, 1975

Swooning solo guitar. Sete’s fingerpicking is some of the best ever, and this release catches him at a particularly special moment: his samba, bossa nova, and jazz roots are out in full effect, but this was his first release on John Fahey’s label Takoma, and Fahey’s influence shows. Ocean dabbles in folk (seemingly from multiple traditions) and has that same expansiveness that marks much of Fahey’s work—music that, at the risk of sounding trite, seems to slip outside of time.

Side note: for those in New York, I’ll be doing a guest set of Japanese pop heavy hitters with Evan Neuhausen on WNYU (89.1 FM) tonight at 7:30. Spoiler alert: there will be bird sounds.

Penguin Cafe Orchestra – Penguin Cafe Orchestra, 1981

Arguably the definitive work from Penguin Cafe Orchestra, the project of UK-born composer and musician Simon Jeffes. Jeffes saw PCO as the ongoing soundtrack to a dream he had had while suffering from food poisoning in the south of France, as well as a vessel through which to explore his interest in “world” music, particularly African percussion. The ensemble’s music resists genre, though–you can hear Jeffes’s British proclivity towards the pastoral and an interest in folk music that splits itself between Western and non-Western traditions, but you can also hear a love for Reichian minimalism, a vaguely avant-garde quality that presumably compelled Brian Eno to release their first record on his Obscure label, Satie-esque piano ambling, flamenco, and even–going out on a limb here–the chug-a-chug forward momentum of Kraftwerk, for whom PCO opened in 1976 in their first major concert.

Penguin Café Orchestra moves comfortably between unabashedly beautiful (“Numbers 1-4,” “Flux,” “Harmonic Necklace”), cheeky (the famous “Telephone and Rubber Band,” based on tape loops of a telephone ringing tone, an engaged tone, and a rubber band), and the clever, all-purpose optimism that the best movie soundtracks happily exploit (“Air A Danser,” “Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter,” “The Ecstasy of Dancing Fleas”). There’s a sense of déjà-vu to much of PCO’s discography, but it’s especially present here, and combined with meticulous musicianship (this album took almost four years to record), it makes for a deeply transportive listen–with the caveat that the destination isn’t always clear.

Robbie Băsho – Bonn Ist Supreme, 1980

Hard to know where to begin with Robbie Băsho, as he did so much in his twenty years of making music before his life was cut short by a freak chiropractic accident. 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.

Although several of his studio recordings are among my favorite albums, I wanted to share this live recording because (unsurprisingly) there’s a specific rawness to it that I love. The master files have been lost, so this is a cleaned up version of a second generation tape, and it shows. Băsho lets himself pick up speed at the expense of precision, often bordering on sloppy, and he sings unabashedly in a voice that many have snickered about but that gives me chills. It’s terribly intimate, and the audience is all but inaudible excepting polite bits of applause. You hear Băsho talk a bit about his guitar tunings, about his 115 year old instrument, and banter a little in bad German. More importantly, Bonn Ist Supreme gives an overview of his dizzying range, incorporating his signature guitar raga style, American spirituals, a reworking of Debussy, blues, themes from Wagner’s Parsifal, and Celtic folk melodies. Sprawling and trancelike.

Joan Bibiloni – Born, 1989

Really difficult to pick one record from Mallorcan guitarist Joan Bibiloni, as his body of work is unusually diverse, ranging from boogie-funk to jazz to ambient. For a more inclusive collection, pick up the excellent Music From Memory’s excellent compilation, El Sur. Born is an experiment in combining classical guitar with subtler synth textures. Though Bibiloni is first and foremost a guitarist, Born hits its peak when synth shares center stage on stunner “Sa Fosca,” which sounds like an outtake from Wally Badarou’s Echoes. Elsewhere, find Indian drum textures and saxophone (“Born”), sunny jazz-flecked meandering (“Una Vida Llarga I Tranquil·la”) and moody, nimble-fingered bravado (“El Sur,” “Water Drops”). Heavy rotation on this one. Enjoy!