James Blackshaw, Litany of Echoes
Featured Album
A prolific steel-string guitar prodigy once again mines Fahey and Basho territory.
Twentysomething twelve-stringer James Blackshaw has ascended to the forefront of the steel-string tradition in just a few short years. At an age when most young musicians are instead enamored with the high-metabolism and angst of overdriven rock (or hip-hop) outbursts, it's startling how patient and focused on craft Blackshaw is — not to mention how prolific. Where Blackshaw outshines other modern-day practitioners (many of which can be found on Imaginational Anthem 1, 2 and 3) is how he weds such skill to the timbre of other instruments, so that his finger-picked flurries might sparkle all the more.
Already on his sixth album, with Litany of Echoes Blackshaw addresses his curious position — young yet enamored with elders like John Fahey and Robbie Basho, living in the 21st century yet plying a sound centuries old — with “Past Has Not Passed” (a William Faulkner quote). A sterling, moving piece, Blackshaw takes the acoustic guitar and plunks it firmly in the present, his cycling figures hewing to the slow-rising sympathetic figures of a viola. Elsewhere, he even foregoes the guitar altogether, as on the bookends “Gate of Ivory” and “Gate of Horn,” where Blackshaw shows that he's been taking on the restless, repetitive piano meditations as practiced by folks like Charlemagne Palestine and Terry Riley. Who knows what other instruments he might master before he hits thirty?
