Tibbetts, Steve - Natural Causes
SKU
28-ECM 1951
Steve Tibbetts guitars, piano, kalimba, bouzouki
Marc Anderson percussion, steel drum, gongs
There are few things as anxiously awaited around here as a new Steve Tibbetts release. I hope/assume all Waysiders know Steve's work. Whether on electric or acoustic guitar, he has a distinctive sound/style that somehow combines elements of John Fahey with Jimi Hendrix but without sounding like either and only sounding like himself. While it's quite different from his previous ECM works, in that it's all acoustic, there were always lots of acoustic sections on all his albums, so it's just like the acoustic half of his other great albums, except it's twice as long! Highly recommended!
"It has been eight years since Steve Tibbetts gave us the fiery electric guitar album “A Man About A Horse”. Now he returns with a different kind of recording: an album of, primarily, acoustic sounds. The making of “Natural Causes” took place in a period when Tibbetts was reconsidering some fundamental aspects of his art and craft - in parallel with daily studies of Bach, Bartók, and music theory. Examining those giants up close made it doubly difficult to go about business-as-usual in his own work. “After some hours, my ears would be wide open...and disinclined to the prospect of blasting electric guitar. So I stuck with my dad’s Martin D-12-20 12-string. I wanted to keep things simple. I thought maybe I could find a voice in well-played single-string lines and say more with less - like Sultan Kahn perhaps. That was the intent, even though the music usually mutated into complex little cathedrals.” The music of Sultan Kahn has been a reference for Tibbetts since the mid-90s and the experience of witnessing a revelatory concert that brought the Indian sarangi master to Saint Paul. “Since then I have taken the singing, voice-like quality of his sarangi as my example. Over months and years of playing the frets were ground down on my 12-string and it began to sound more and more like the sarangi. The frets are nearly flat now. The guitar is about 45 years old and has a mellow, aged sound to it. I set up that guitar so that the strings are in double courses. I set them in unisons. This makes it possible to find (for me) a more “singing” tonality in single string lines."