Over Half A Century Later - Robbie Băsho :: “The Falconer’s Arm I and II” - Vanguard
It’s been well over three decades since the untimely passing of the late, multi-instrumentalist and guitar guru, Robbie Basho, born Daniel R. Robinson, Jr., in the winter of 1986. His devilishly divine approach to, not only his instrument, but the prolifically poetic life he led, is simply unparalleled and often times unbelievable. Sharing a similar spiritual realm with his colleagues such as John Fahey, Max Ochs and Ed Denson, Basho summoned the sonically sophisticated and almost ghostly apparatuses of both the paranormal and the atmospheric alchemy of the primitive guitar, while simultaneously gambling with the cosmic currency of space and time. Performing in the shadowy silhouettes of ancient puzzlement, esoteric enlightenment and the seasonal seance, Basho manifested a number of extraterrestrial elements across his career that spanned two decades since the release of his soothing debut, “The Seal of the Blue Lotus”, on Fahey’s Takoma imprint back in 1965.
“The superego isn’t satisfied with meat and potatoes music anymore, it really wants the best it can get… Music is supposed to say something, music is supposed to do something. People that know what I’m doing rave about me and people that don’t put me down like the dickens”
While effortlessly casting stringed spells into the canals of his listeners' eager ears, the master of melody and medieval magic awakened something in the community of both songwriting and instrumentation during the folk music boom of the 1960s that is still being unraveled by scholars and students of his inner sanctum. As we sit down to properly focus on the raging productivity and melodic motivation that Basho had in the year of 1967, let us shed light on some of those students, listeners of the sonic literature and fundamental fans who have kept the radical Renaissance of the guitar movement alive, such as Joseph Allred, Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), Daniel Bachman, Micah Blue Smaldone, Richard Bishop, Liam Grant, William Tyler and countless others still discovering and yet to be discovered. It’s almost alarming just how much he’s influenced the multiple generations that have come since his passing and yet his work is still being excavated from the depths of the atmospheric archive he left behind all these years later. Was he a guitarist, ghost, gnome, guru? You decide…
Releasing the sister albums “The Falconer’s Arm I and II” back to back during the year of the “Long Hot Summer”, “Six-Day War” and other countless historical events, Basho had officially entered yet another stage of enlightenment and poetic performance in his career by this time, while simultaneously occupying an already influential layer in the cosmic geology of his genre. Acknowledging in the past that the nylon-string guitar was justified for "love songs", while his choice of its steel counterpart could communicate "fire", Basho blended the natural elements of humanity like the anatomical avatar of sound he was. With numbers like "Lost Lagoon Suite (Walking into the Forest/Prelude/Blue Wolf/Sky Medicine/Finale/Walking Out the Forest)”, “Variations on "Shakespeare Wallah", "Song of the Snowy Ranges" and “Pasha” all containing multiple depths of spiritualist sobriety, the late musician effortlessly blends the existential elements of life and death as well as the thematic tonality of theater and performance across both album’s melodic membrane of furious sound. Like a thousand-year-old meditation uninterrupted someplace deep in the fundamental forests of man, Basho pieces together the story of the Zodiac and its colossal counterparts, while weaving our weird world into this dark, sacredly sweet knot of biblical proportion, only to be untied in the unforeseeable future under the shade of an olive tree once celebrated.
