"Some of the guitar solos just knock me out," Jones says. Glenn Jones says the rediscovery of these recordings is a major addition to his legacy. He left most of his possessions to Sufism Reoriented, and they wound up scattered across the country, with his collection of recordings landing in that house in South Carolina. All of his records were out of print at the time. He was 45 years old when he died from a ruptured artery in his neck. Robbie Basho playing for fans in Cragmont Park in Berkeley, California, in 1977. Jones says the older guitarist invented his own style, drawing on musical influences from all over the world. "He was genuine and unselfconscious about what he was doing," says Glenn Jones, a guitarist and collector who became friends with Basho in the late 1970s. And then I heard Hindu music."īasho moved to Berkeley, where he immersed himself in Eastern religion and music, and renamed himself after a 17th-century Japanese poet. I was doing that, and thought I was doing something. The music of those days was so artificial, you know, that we couldn't believe it. "It was kind of the only vitality around. "When I started out, there was a big cult in D.C., in the University of Maryland, of country blues," Basho told KFPA. He started playing the guitar as a student at the University of Maryland in the late '50s and early '60s, when he befriended fellow guitarists John Fahey and Max Ochs. Then I started trying to see how high and beautiful I could go."Īn adopted child, Basho grew up in Baltimore as Daniel Robinson. And it got dawned on me, music is supposed to say something. "I spent years on the road singing folk songs that had no meaning, you know, just emoting these things. "I don't call a lot of my stuff 'far out' - I just call it a different level of feeling," he said in a 1974 interview with Pacifica radio station KPFA. "It's beautiful and eloquent and profound, and full of love and devotion and melancholy."īasho had his own way of describing his work. "I think anybody, any young guitar player that hears his music today, would be influenced by him," Townsend said in an interview in Voice of the Eagle. Now, the personal recordings stashed in those boxes are being released for the first time in a five-disc set called Song of the Avatars: The Lost Master Tapes.īasho's music never found a wide audience in his lifetime, but it's had a deep impact on generations of fellow guitar players and listeners - including Pete Townshend, guitarist and co-founder of The Who. "Miraculously, some of these recordings sound like they were recorded yesterday," he says. "It was like, you know, unbelievable filth all around."īut to his amazement, Barker found exactly what he was looking for: box after box of magnetic reel-to-reel tapes, still sealed. "When I went there, it was kind of like something out of a horror film," Barker says. That's how the director found himself in a ramshackle house in South Carolina, surrounded by stacks of old newspaper and animal excrement. Barker's subject was the late guitarist who (along with figures like John Fahey and Leo Kottke) helped invent the acoustic style known as American primitive, and he kept hearing about a collection of the artist's personal recordings that had seemingly been lost after his death in 1986. Now his personal recordings - long thought lost - are being released for the first time.Ī few years ago, filmmaker Liam Barker was at work on the film that would become his 2015 documentary Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho. Robbie Basho helped pioneer the American Primitive style of guitar playing.
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