Culture Club

 

Alexander "Sandy" Bull (February 25, 1941 – April 11, 2001) was an American folk musician and composer. Bull was an accomplished player of many stringed instruments, including guitar, pedal steel guitar, banjo, and oud. His early work blends non-western instruments with 1960s folk revival, and has been cited as important in the development of psychedelic music.

His albums often presented an eclectic repertoire including extended modal improvisations on oud. An arrangement of Carl Orff's composition Carmina Burana for 5-string banjo appears on his first album and other musical fusions include his adaptation of Luiz Bonfá's "Manhã de Carnaval", a lengthy variation on "Memphis Tennessee" by Chuck Berry, and compositions derived from works of J. S. Bach and Roebuck Staples.

Bull used overdubbing as a way to accompany himself. As documented in the Still Valentine's Day, 1969: Live At the Matrix, San Francisco recording, Sandy Bull's use of tape accompaniment was part of his solo performances in concert as well.

Bull primarily played a finger-picking style of guitar and banjo and his style has been compared to that of John Fahey and Robbie Basho of the early Takoma label in the 1960s. Guitarist Guthrie Thomas credits Bull as being a major influence in his early playing career.

By the 1970s he had relocated to San Francisco, where he shared living and rehearsal space with folk singer Billy Roberts, the composer of the Jimi Hendrix song, "Hey Joe". On May 2, 1976 he opened a concert by Leo Kottke at the Berkeley Community Theater, where he performed using his 4-track recorder and a 'Rhythm Ace' as backup instruments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bull  

 

People involved in a genre of music just generally don’t like the name journalists give that genre, however cool it might sound. While I’m not sure of the exact popularity of the term American Primitive it is a neat container. It manages to be precise in a way that signifies at the essence of the music it describes, but vague enough to include all the orbital developments.

American Primitive is based around American folk idioms, usually played on that most everyman of instruments, the steel-string guitar. By its very nature, American folk music is a broth of cultures, both black and white in origin. While the assimilation of blues and gospel spiritual tunes and folk-songs from Celtic (Irish and Scottish) traditions is hardly revolutionary on it’s own, American Primitive synthesises this palette with modern elements: neo-classical compositional structure, intense, meditative repetition, a greater chromaticism (inspired by Charles Ives and Béla Bartók) and an embrace of dissonance, often achieved through use of alternate tunings on the guitar.

https://www.totallydublin.ie/more/entry-level-american-primitivism/
To call it “primitive” is in fact a little disingenuous, but still effective. The musicians who pioneered and embraced this type of music were learned and obsessive but they were also intuitive and improvisatory. There were traits they shared with composers dubbed minimalist (another useful if inaccurate term unpopular amongst those it describes) around this same time: the repetition, the meditativeness in particular. But it differed in terms of reference points, timbre and modes of thought. This is non-academic music, learnt by ear and instinct rather than theory and teacher.

There is one towering figure who leers both crazy and indifferent over this music, that of the late John Fahey. Fahey is a bit of a mystery cat, one whose obliviousness to the fame game seems built equal parts out of cantankerousness and naïveté. Fahey was innovator and eccentric, salesman and scholar. Musically, the Maryland native came from bluegrass and country traditions and in his youth, while he hustled for 78rpm records to collectors, he had an epiphany listening to Blind Willie Johnson, who’s heavy voice opened up the world of blues to Fahey.

As Fahey developed his own guitar style to incorporate the various elements referenced above, he also decided to make and release his own recordings, founding Takoma Records (named for his Maryland homestead, Takoma Park.) He did so on the assumption that no one else would take interest in releasing the kind of music he was making and was unsure even of how to go about that task. Takoma Records eventually became the home of American Primitive music, where Fahey discovered Leo Kottke (whose style was more virtuosic and clean cut), Robbie Basho (who incorporated Indian raga into his 12 string jams) and Peter Lang and would surprisingly do quite well for itself in a business sense, until Fahey’s personal problems got the better of the company.

With its low barriers to entry (an acoustic guitar, an imagination, some patience) and the way in which the music can float between stools – sometimes folky, sometimes avant garde wig-out dependent on context and creator – the tradition of American Primitive is surprisingly health today, particularly following a resurgence in interest in the early 2000s through re-issues and comebacks. Practitioners of this music, like within any genre, have blurred and smudged the boundaries over time, but the principals of getting lost in endless finger picking cycles, the infinite variations of blues tropes, the buzzing of the fretboard still endear many musicians, from Jim O’Rourke, through Glenn Jones’ Cul de Sac or Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance project to Daniel Bachman and to Dublin’s own Cian Nugent.

 

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