Van Morrison: When The Leaves Come Falling Down.

The Legend Of Blind Joe Death.

In the very early 1970s I saw a film called Zabriskie Point which was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. It was a forgettable film, but it had one saving grace which was an eclectic soundtrack containing music by the likes of Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Patti Page, and a guitar instrumental called Dance Of Death by someone I hadn’t heard of before called John Fahey. About five decades went by before I was reminded of his name again when recently I was talking to a muso friend about great guitar players, and he recommended I check out Robbie Basho and John Fahey. Well, I still haven’t listened to Robbie Basho yet, but I looked on Youtube for John Fahey and watched a video of him performing in Hamburg Germany in 1972. (See video below) I was so impressed that I decided to order a CD. I chose The Legend Of Blind Joe Death because I was amused and intrigued by the title. It arrived here a few days ago.

The copy I received is a remastered version from 1996, 75 minutes long containing 21 tracks. The album was actually recorded three times, in 1959, 64, and 67. My copy includes tracks from all three recordings. It also contains a very informative booklet which told the whole saga of the history of the album. The first thing to say is that there was never a person called Blind Joe Death. He was a fictitious character invented by John Fahey in 1959 when he was 20 years old. John was a self-taught finger style steel string guitar player who invented a genre known as American Primitive Guitar. He was an avid collector of old-time music, blues, hillbilly, gospel and jazz, and also had a contempt for the popular sanitised folk music of the day. He decided to release an album of his own compositions and his arrangements of other blues songs, and paid for the recording himself from his earnings working in a gas station. There were only 100 copies pressed, one side was credited to Blind Joe Death and the other to John Fahey although they were both the same person. The label was called Takoma Records after his hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland. Some copies got broken in transit, others were given away to friends and folklorists and it took three years to sell the remaining copies. By 1964 John was finally getting some recognition with live performances, and his second album Death Chants, Breakdowns & Military Waltzes which was distributed nationally. Feeling that his guitar playing had improved dramatically since 1959, he decided to re-record Blind Joe Death again. He also wrote spoof sleeve notes parodying the writing style of the time under the name Chester C. Petranick which was the name of one of his old schoolteachers. The third and final recording was in 1967 for the burgeoning stereo market.

I love the music on this album. I have never played the guitar, so I am always wary of commenting on a guitarists technique in case I’m just displaying my ignorance. However, my ears tell me that John Fahey is one of the greats. I am in awe of his dexterity of syncopating the rhythm with his thumb while he fingerpicks music of dazzling complexity. When I saw Richard Thompson playing live I couldn’t believe how he could make one acoustic guitar sound like three, and John Fahey is just the same. Although he worshipped the blues masters, and his college thesis about Charley Patton was published as a book, that was only his starting point. You can hear influences of country, and jazz, even Indian style raga. Also, classical music. It says in the booklet that he was influenced by composers such as Charles Ives and Bartok.  I couldn’t comment on that, although at times I thought he sounded as good as Julian Bream playing Bach. There is one track of over 10 minutes length called The Transcendental Waterfall which is an epic composition of many styles of music. Most of the tracks were composed by John Fahey, but there are some other tunes such as St Louis Blues written by W.C. Handy and the traditional John Henry, but they all receive the John Fahey unique arrangements.

John had a lot of mixed fortunes in his life, with broken marriages, health issues, homelessness, and drug and alcohol addictions. After spending many years in obscurity, he did have a resurgence in popularity in the 1990s when he was championed by people like Sonic Youth, Cul De Sac and John O’Rourke. He also began to be noticed as an abstract painter. Sadly, he died aged 61 in 2001 after undergoing major heart surgery. His reputation continues to grow as a giant of American music. There have been documentary films and tribute albums to him. I am very pleased I checked out the music of John Fahey, and I might have a listen to Robbie Basho before too long as well.

 

John Fahey - Poor Boys Long Way From Home

Listening To Careful Of Your Keepers, by This Is The Kit.

It is Thursday afternoon in my little corner of the universe. The weather has changed in the last few days. It feels quite autumnal as I gaze out of my kitchen window. There is still a lot of colour in my little garden. I am looking out at flowers called cosmos swaying in the breeze, and sweet peas which my niece Katherine gave me the seeds for. Katherine also kindly gifted me the music I am listening to at this very moment which is the most recent album by This Is The Kit called Careful Of Your Keepers. Kate Stables and Rozi Plain from the band also signed it for me which was nice of them. So, this is what I thought I’d tell you about today. The album was recorded in Bristol in December 2022 and produced by the Welsh musician Gruff Rhys who you may know from the band Super Furry Animals. I know him from his influence in awakening attention to the music of Wendy & Bonnie who I wrote about several years ago. As well as the band I saw in Frome last week consisting of Kate, Neil, Rozi and Jamie, there are also major contributions from Kate’s husband Jesse Vernon on various instruments and also horn arrangements. There is bassoon, flugelhorn, trombone, tenor sax, piano, and kora players on the album, and the Be OK choir on one track. If asked how I would describe the music of this album I think I would say something like folk-rock, with elements of jazz and psychedelia, but Kate Stables is a unique singer-songwriter poet who is hard to define.

Two people who know more about the band than me have said that this is their favourite Kit album, and I must say on first listen I found it immediately more accessible than Bashed Out which took several playing’s until it weaved its magic on me. Or that might be because I have got more attuned to their sound after seeing them live for the first time. That is especially true of the opening track Goodbye Bite which is the song I filmed in Frome and put on this blog page. I find Kate’s lyrics very poetic, but also enigmatic. This song mentions biting someone and the following song Inside Out mentions chewing, “I chew, chew, choose you”. It might be a metaphor for seeing how a relationship feels or tastes. The songs will mean different things to different people, as all art should. It has occurred to me that maybe Kate wrote these songs during lockdown which might have influenced, even subconsciously her mood and writing. I thought that because of some of the song titles such as, Stuck In A Room, Doomed Or More Doomed, Inside Out, I might be barking up the wrong tree there though. There is a lot of clever humour in her words, even if they are quite dark sometimes. In one song she says getting involved with someone is like playing ‘emotional Buckaroo’. You get the feeling that Kate thinks deeply about the meaning of life, and mulls it over in her songs, but she doesn’t necessarily have any answers, just questions. 

Sometimes the lyrics are sparse, as in Take You To Sleep which to me is about empathy for someone who is suffering, and all you can do is be there for them. It says, ‘give me your hand’, as does More Change which says, ‘If we’re holding hands, We’ll walk at the same speed’. (I urge you to watch the video of this song below because I think it is brilliant and funny. a work of art) The relentless rhythm of Jamie's drums and Neil's guitar are particularly excellent on This Is Where The Sky Gets Big. The title track Careful Of Your Keepers seems to me to be about the passing of time and the inevitability of old age, and how nature eventually reclaims everything. I think they performed Scabby Head And Legs in Frome, but I don’t know what it is about. Stuck In A Room might be one of my favourite tracks, short and sweet, with Kate’s spoken words and the excellent horn section accompaniment. Dibs brings the album to a glorious close. In Frome Kate used the audience to sing the refrain ‘Be OK’ which the choir sing on the album. The music descends into fuzzy psychedelia behind Kate’s voice before an abrupt ending that leaves you wanting more. I highly recommend this album, so thank you very much to Katherine for such a nice gift.

My Cosmos, Sweet Peas, & Other Plants.

 

This Is The Kit - More Change (Official Video)

Reet, Estonian Folksongs by Reet Hendrikson.

Estonia is a small country nestling on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea. It only has a population of about 1.3 million people, but those people seem to have music in their soul. You may recall I wrote a piece called Little Bells a couple of years ago which was about the Estonian composer Arvo Part who is arguably the greatest living composer in the world today. Well, today I thought I would tell you about another musician from Estonia who I recently discovered called Reet Hendrikson. However, unlike Arvo who is famous throughout the world, little is known about Reet, even in her native land. These days Estonia is a very prosperous country, but that hasn’t always been the case.

The country suffered terribly during long periods of the 20^th century, especially during WW2 when it was invaded firstly by the Soviets in 1940 and then by the Nazis. Estonia in that dark time lost 25% of its population. In 1944 faced with the twin evils of living under Stalin or Hitler tens of thousands of people fled westwards. This became known as ‘The Great Escape’. Many of the refugees perished in the icy waters of the Baltic, but many others reached Sweden and safety. From there a lot of people went to countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK and established an Estonian diaspora worldwide. One of the families that stayed in Sweden was that of Reet Hendrikson who was only a few months old when her parents made the decision to risk that perilous journey. So, Reet was brought up and educated in Sweden where there were many good schools for the ex-patriate community of her homeland. She must have been a bright kid because in the mid-1960s she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship which allowed her to study in the USA.

When her college course ended in 1968 Reet arrived in Canada where she found a thriving Estonian community. At a summer seminar for ex-pats she was spotted singing by Andres Raudsepp of a tiny label called Reindeer Records who took her into the studio to record Reet, Estonian Folksongs. It was to be the only album she ever recorded. I doubt if more than a couple of hundred copies were ever sold. After Canada Reet lived in Boston for a while and mixed with other musicians on the local folk scene. In the 1980s she returned to live in Sweden and worked for the Swedish Radio archive. On visits to Estonia she helped other musicians as much as she could, providing them with sheet music and much needed repertoire. Finally in 1988/89 came what was known as the peaceful ‘Singing Revolution’ where Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania finally won back their independence from Russian domination. Reet sadly died in Stockholm in 2000 at the early age of 56 virtually unknown. In recent years however, thanks to the internet and places like youtube word began to spread, and people began to listen to her one and only album. In November 2023 an English label called Moved By Sound gave the album a limited re-release of 500 copies on vinyl and 1,000 copies on CD. Reet's mentor Andres Raudsepp also passed away in November 2023 at the age of 86 after writing the sleeve notes for the re-release, so I'm sure he was happy to know that his prodigy Reet was finally getting the attention she deserved.

Andres Raudsepp.

The CD popped through my letterbox last Saturday. The first track is called Meil Aiaaarne Tanavas which I think means We Have A Garden. When I heard the first few notes on her acoustic guitar, I was reminded of the melancholy sound of I Want To Be Alone by Jackson C. Frank, and when her crystal-clear voice began to sing, the haunting sound of The Garden Of Jane Delawney by The Trees came to mind. I have shared this song below which you might like to listen to, so you can decide for yourself what you think. I don’t think Reet wrote any of the songs, they are all traditional folk songs as far as I know. I don’t know what the songs are about either, although I did translate a couple of the song titles on a translation website. That doesn’t matter, because as the great Tony Benn once famously said on the Leftfield stage at Glastonbury, “Music is the international language, you don’t have to understand the words to appreciate the music”. 

I love her voice. Listening in my kitchen to my little CD player, her voice and simple but effective guitar playing sounds so intimate that you could almost think she was in the same room. I think the last time I thought that on first hearing a female singer was when I first played Colour Green by Sibylle Baier. I’m not saying Reet is the greatest singer ever, by any means, but I’m very glad somebody mentioned this album on a Facebook folk music page which led me to searching her out. I don’t think she is very well known, even in her own country, but I’m pleased she is finally getting some recognition for her small but significant contribution to the rich cultural heritage of Estonia.

Reet Hendrikson - Meil Aiaaarne Tanavas