Review: Davy Graham - The Guitar Player (1963)
Tracks: 1) Don’t Stop The Carnival; 2) Sermonette; 3) Take Five; 4) How Long, How Long Blues; 5) Sunset Eyes; 6) Cry Me A River; 7) The Ruby And The Pearl; 8) Buffalo; 9) Exodus; 10) Yellow Bird; 11) Blues For Betty; 12) Hallelujah, I Love Her So.
REVIEW
I have no reason to think that Davy Graham’s Guitar Player was the first instrumental acoustic folk album to be released on English soil (although everything I have heard from earlier years was vocal), but it almost certainly was the first, and one of the best, experimental / artistic acoustic folk albums to come out of the UK. In fact, calling it «folk» is a bit of an understatement, given that about half of the compositions come from the jazz market, and the other half is rooted in British folk, American folk, American blues, Latin music, and whatever else I failed to notice.
First and foremost, the album is called The Guitar Player, not The Folk Musician or The People’s Artist or whatever, and if there is one particular thing that it chronicles, it is pure, sincere, and loyal love between a musician and his instrument, regardless of any specific genre or style barriers. In an era where most people’s idea of somebody playing an acoustic guitar was Big Bill Broonzy, or Pete Seeger, or at least Lonnie Donegan (over on this side of the Atlantic), seeing somebody outside the highly specialized world of classical guitar use the acoustic as a self-sufficient means in itself was a rare marvel indeed, and many times a rare marvel if it were used with such total unpredictability and freedom.
Graham was not a technical virtuoso, and his aim with these instrumentals is never to dazzle the listener with lightning-speed playing, impossible chord combinations, or any special tricks. Instead, his aim is to demonstrate the emotional power of acoustic guitar and, if possible, draw your complete attention to it. This is already evident in his first well-known composition, ‘Angi’ (= ‘Angie’, ‘Anji’), which is not on this record but was released on a three-song EP from 1962 (a re-recorded version from the 1970s is appended to the CD edition of Guitar Player as a bonus) — a short, repetitive piece which may not seem like much to the modern jaded listener, but back in the 1960s was the hottest thing around, most notably covered by Bert Jansch and then by Simon & Garfunkel (who actually thought it was written by Bert). Its bit of mystique is probably rooted in that it is even unclear which genre it is. Blues? Jazz? Folk? The rhythm seems jazzy, the main guitar hook is bluesy, yet the overall mood is closer to dark folk. Proper musicological analysis will give you a formal explanation, but the heart of the matter is that ‘Angi’ is Davy Graham in a nutshell — two minutes of lovely acoustic guitar which does not subscribe to any specific line of convention.
On the album itself, Graham is joined by notorious session drummer Bobby Graham (ironically, no relation) — one of the few players, apparently, who could keep up with him in all of his genre-defying endeavors — and nobody else. About half of the numbers, as I already said, are jazz covers, and these folkified renditions of Cannonball Adderley’s ‘Sermonette’ and Teddy Edwards’ ‘Sunset Eyes’ go a long way towards demonstrating the shared musical roots of sophisticated jazz and hillbilly dance music — though, admittedly, Davy can also hit upon trickier tempos and come up with something more exquisite and less accessible, for instance, when transcribing Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’: reduced to a barebones two-minute long musical skeleton, the composition becomes melancholic and meditative even if it still retains the speed of the original. But he is actually even more inventive when it comes to shmaltzy material — thus, ‘The Ruby & The Pearl’, a song originally recorded as a slow, sappy, heavily orchestrated ballad by Nat King Cole, is reinvented as a Mexican number (replete with Bobby clacking those castanets), probably not very impressive on its own but quite hilarious when played next to the original, just for the sake of comparison.
At the same time, Davy gives us his take on the old urban blues tradition (Leroy Carr’s ‘How Long, How Long Blues’, played with all the confidence of a Delta player, if not with the actual spirit), saves a spot for classic Ray Charles-style R&B (‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’), and dares to include one of his own compositions — ‘Blues For Betty’, which might seem like an ordinary blues shuffle at first, but dig in closer and you will notice Davey throwing in little classical flourishes and bits of dissonance, and generally going unpredictable places which probably would not be on the minds of too many traditional bluesmen. It’s all done modestly and completely without flashiness, so it might be hard to spot — and it is this very lack of flash that prevented Davy Graham from ever becoming a household name; but it also rewards patient and attentive listeners, though I confess that I personally do not have that much patience and attention to become a full-on admirer as some fans do, probably because this relatively «academic» approach to the guitar is not my favorite kind of approach. But then again, this is at least «inventive academic» as opposed to «conservative academic», graced by the addition of intrigue and unpredictability rather than religious purism.
An important detail is that, back at the time, Graham’s recordings must have sounded particularly fresh and unusual to listeners and musicians alike due to his adoption of the D-A-D-G-A-D tuning, which is now sometimes nicknamed «Celtic tuning» but which he himself apparently nicked from Moroccan music during his stay in the country. To the modern listener, this is such a standard practice, employed by most players of Celtic folk or Celtic-inspired pop/rock music (‘Kashmir’, etc.), that it would be hard to believe this kind of sound was not heard from acoustic guitar players before Graham — but apparently, it is just so. However, if I am not mistaken, only a few tracks on this particular album are in that tuning; the most notable example from Davy’s early years is his Eastern-influenced rendition of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, which is not included here.
The most common CD release of the album on the market is a little bizarre, adding half an hour’s worth of excellent bonus tracks that make an even better showcase for Davy’s amazing genre range — but all of these tracks are from much later periods (a brief live rendition of ‘Anji’ from 1976, and even more live performances that date back to the 1990s): the nearly eight-minute long ‘She Moved Thru’ The Bizarre / Blue Raga’, as you can probably guess from the title already, is a fascinating juxtaposition of British folk and Eastern raga, but I am not exactly sure what this track, recorded in 1997, has to do in this particular location — and why they could not have included the rare original recording of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ instead.
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