The solo-guitar tradition known as American Primitive has a long rich history, but nobody is doing it better in 2013 than guitarist Glenn Jones. The music he plays is so invested in specific instrumental concepts that it openly spurns the concept of originality, and yet it’s such a rich, captivating sound that none of its contemporary practitioners can be slighted as a mere copyist. For anyone with knowledge of the American Primitive ideal, Jones’ music will be instantly familiar, but he is very much his own man. My Garden State is his best record yet.
Anybody making a serious attempt to communicate the artistry of Glenn Jones will inevitably utter the name of his fellow string-master John Fahey. Not only did the two collaborate, but a significant portion of Jones’ body of work falls securely into the American Primitive guitar zone, a tradition that Fahey basically defined through his own substantial, often astonishing discography and additionally via many of the LPs from likeminded players that he released on his own Takoma Records label.
But in observing the progressions of these two men, it might seem like the long journey of Fahey ended in roughly the place where Jones began, that being the climes of deep experimentalism. And conversely, it could be said that Jones, who with the release of My Garden State is now five albums deep in a very rewarding solo stretch, has shucked off the avant-garde aspects of his earlier days and headed into the rich territory of Fahey’s late-‘60s albums for Takoma and Vanguard.
However, a deeper look makes it clear that things are far from that simple. Glenn Jones first appeared on the scene as a member of Shut Up, the group Robin Amos formed after the dissolution of Boston’s legendary avant-garage outfit The Girls. They issued one terribly neglected LP titled Hell in a Handbasket around 1985, and Jones didn’t really step into the spotlight until his next band Cul de Sac released ECIM in 1991.
It’s a classic record from an amazing band. They’ve often been pegged as post-rock, but a better way to describe their intentions is to simply quote Jones from a 2011 interview with No Depression magazine: “Cul de Sac was an attempt to do something that didn’t depend on a singer for its success, which would incorporate aspects of finger-style guitar, punk electronics, rock-and-roll rhythms, a love for experimentation and sensitivity to dynamics.”
Cul de Sac dug into all those angles so deeply that the influences of Pere Ubu, Can, and Fahey could show up not just across the span of an individual record, but in the same freaking song, and they knocked-out nine albums, all of them major, between ’91 and ’04. The last was Abhayamudra, a two-CD collab with Can’s Damo Sazuki, but seven years prior they’d released The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, a warm if at times quite harry disc co-credited to Cul de Sac and Fahey.
Previously, ECIM had featured a cover of “Portland Cement Factory at Monolith, California” from Fahey’s typically brilliant ’67 LP Volume 6/Days Have Gone By. And even at that juncture, Jones’ interest in Fahey’s work was already around two decades old, being one of a pile of early influences that included Harry Partch, John Cage, UK improvisers AMM, Stockhausen, and Jimi Hendrix.
In Jones’ liner notes to the Cul de Sac/Fahey disc, he describes meeting and befriending the older guitarist at a show many years prior to the making of the album. That record, the result of a near disastrous session, sits alongside City of Refuge, Womblife (like Epiphany, both from ’97) and the posthumously released Red Cross (from ’03) as the best documents of Fahey’s creative restlessness after a decade of dealing with Epstein-Barr syndrome.
Those albums, the ’97 releases in particular, alienated busloads of folks that had taken a major shine to Fahey’s earlier work. However, Cul de Sac’s very existence, and the collaborative disc especially (even if the man Jones thought he’d be working with didn’t really exist anymore, or maybe never did) make clear that the individual entries in Fahey’s oeuvre only really come into full light when they’re considered as one big whopping whole.
By association, not only does Jones’ solo work, which commenced in the same year as Cul de Sac’s last release, flow out of his more overtly experimental beginnings in a completely natural way, the earlier material informing the latter (and vice versa), but in diving so deeply into the seemingly bottomless spring of American Primitive inspiration the LPs stand as some of the most vibrant music in the current scheme of recorded affairs.
Between ’04 and ’09 Jones completed three releases for the Strange Attractors Audio House imprint, This is the Wind that Blows it Out, Against Which the Sea Continually Beats, and Barbeque Bob in Fishtown, each of them fantastic. Much of what makes those discs such winners comes straight out of the late-‘60s Takoma/Vanguard Fahey mode, with the first one even including an exquisite acknowledgement of the master’s glorious, immediately recognizable technique in “Fahey’s Car.”
But the influence of guitarist Robbie Basho shouldn’t be neglected, and the albums also hold moments that while solidly in keeping with the American Primitive tradition do feel quite distinct. For one example, the glistening twelve-string rumination “Nora’s Leather Jacket,” also to be found on the first record. And Barbeque Bob in Fishtown offered a few instances of Jones’ excellent banjo playing amongst the six and twelve-string statements, a development that continued on 2011’s The Wanting, his first release for Thrill Jockey.
Jones has linked his use of the banjo to his interest in the work of George Stavis, whose killer LP Labyrinths was cut for Vanguard in ’69, and Paul Metzger, a contemporary artist with a bunch of recordings to his credit, a few of them on the Nero’s Neptune label. Jones also cites his love of the old-time string-band sound, so it’s no surprise he shared a split LP Even to Win is to Fail/Eastmont Syrup with Virginia’s The Black Twig Pickers and Minnesota’s Charlie Parr in 2011.
Maybe the most interesting aspect of The Wanting was its nearly eighteen-minute long closing track “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville,” a fruitfully expansive piece which found him in dialogue with the outstanding and exceptionally free-ranging drummer Chris Corsano.
Those with a background in Fahey’s work might be thinking of “March! For Martin Luther King” from The Yellow Princess, but it actually seems closer in intent to the musique concrète experiments found on the second side of Requia. Jones however, has mentioned “Dry Bones in the Valley” from the Old Fashioned Love LP. But the actual sound of the music belongs securely to Jones and Corsano.
My Garden State holds nothing as sprawling as The Wanting’s closer, but as a document of Jones’ splendid journey on the American Primitive path, it does register his ever-growing confidence, and not just as an embodiment of the style, but also in communicating the power of the tradition in a highly personal way.
While Jones is a longtime resident of Boston, around three ago he found himself returning to his home state of New Jersey to care for his mother, who’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Returning under such circumstances and after such an extended absence obviously brought mixed emotions, but in contrast to Jersey’s rep as a grimy and foul place to live, Jones began focusing on the ample beauty of the state.
In a recent interview featured on the website American Songwriter, Jones stated that while New Jersey “has a terrible reputation for crime, squalor and places where the air is green… up and down the coast, in the waterfront towns, there’s a lot of beauty. I wrote the album as an attempt to recognize the meaning of the state, and why it still resonates with me this many years later.”
So, My Garden State is a record very specific to Jones’ individual experience that simultaneously helps to tear down a rather tyrannical stereotype of the region that names it. And due to its instrumental scheme it escapes the potential for didacticism. It’s becomes easy as homemade pie to just sit back and let the sounds unwind.
The LP opens and closes with two brief recordings of wind chimes blending with the sound of crickets and what seems to be coastline surf. In a sense these segments serve to establish Jones in a specific place, possibly sitting on the deck of a beach house in the early evening absorbing the breeze and listening to the tide, with the eight cuts in between being his thoughts, often on nearby surroundings, presented as exquisite aural essays.
“Across the Tappan Zee” is a work for banjo, the instrument at first establishing a fragile, gorgeous achiness and then subtly gaining in urgency, the music flowering at it distills the essence of the artist’s discovery. While Jones is an extremely skilled player who never lays a note wrong, refreshingly, there’s also nothing of the virtuoso in his approach, which is sort of a prerequisite for the American Primitive musician anyway.
Obviously few can do what he does, but that’s never the point. His talent is devoted to dealing out passages of great beauty, and there’s also a well-grounded sturdiness throughout his records. Never does his stuff flutter away with insubstantiality. A long engagement with open tunings makes the music quickly recognizable and yet singular. And “Across the Tappan Zee” is notably concise, meshing well with the considerably more expansive “Going Back to East Montgomery,” a grand workout on the guitar.
That cut is also distinguished by its briskness, and it contrasts finely with the following one “Blues for Tom Carter,” a nod to the guitarist of deep u-ground mainstays Charalambides, who survived a serious run-in with pneumonia last year (while in Germany he was in a drug-induced coma for over a month). The track, which examines a wonderfully atypical strand of bluesy feeling, provides an enriching thematic undercurrent to My Garden State.
That theme concerns mortality. If Fahey’s death occurred over a decade ago, guitarist Jack Rose, Jones’ close friend and American Primitive cohort, unexpectedly passed more recently. Figure in the Alzheimer’s of Jones’ mother and Carter’s near death, and My Garden State addresses much more than the too frequently celebrated beauty of New Jersey’s environs, additionally focusing upon an inevitability that touches us all. As the music progresses the record nudges the listener to take a moment to look around and consider.
The voice of Espers’ Meg Baird opens “The Vernal Pool,” stating “this is where the frogs live,” and the track also features her guitar.” It’s a small touch, but a vibrant one, magnifying Jones’ ruminations on surroundings and intensifying the human connectivity of his endeavor. Solo instrumental records often battle with a sense of isolation, but that’s not the case here. And along the way the playing achieves great communicative power.
“Alcouer Gardens” features the sound of a thunderstorm, and while contemplative, the piece is never lacking in energy. And so it is with the title track, Jones’ banjo returning for another brief passage. If his playing on the instrument is more refined than the old-time figures that impacted him, it’s still loaded with a similar spirit. “Like a Sick Eagle Looking at the Sky” is another extended bout of guitar grandeur, and penultimate track “Bergen County Farewell” is maybe the record’s most lovely guitar tapestry.
It’s already been a good year for the American Primitive impulse, with Don Bikoff’s excellent ’68 LP Celestial Explosion having been rescued from the realms of extreme collectability by the Tompkins Square label. That document uncovers some killer lost sounds from way back when, but Jones’ My Garden State is completely invested in the now.
After a load of fine listens, it’s revealed as a record without flaw that expresses its themes with an appealing lack of grandiosity. But the avoidance of showiness in no way lessens its achievement. This LP is as deep as anything that’s surfaced from the American Primitive style, and as we edge up on the year’s midway-point it’s a dead ringer for one of the best releases of 2013.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
