“I have now heard – but am powerless to describe – reggae elevator music”. So wrote David Foster Wallace about his experiences aboard a Caribbean cruise liner in his marvellous essay ‘ A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again’ .
Another first for DFW was noted : “I have heard people in deck chairs say in all earnestness that it’s the humidity rather than the heat”.
Israeli acoustic guitarist Yair Yona chose the title for the track It’s Not The Heat (It’s The Humidity) based on his experience of living in Tel Aviv.
I discovered Yona’s music by chance after reading his open letter to Jack Rose written on his Small Town Romance blog which for me remains the best tribute about the late great man.
He captured the sense of loss but also emphasised what an inspirational figure Rose was. In this short extract he recounts the impact of witnessing Jack Rose in concert: “you took your six strings guitar and played a Fahey number, […] I had no idea back then what is a ‘Fahey’. But I realized that if that’s a Fahey, I need some of that in my life.[…] Then you took the slide guitar again and played a twenty minutes raga, or at least it felt that long. In the first 1/3 of the piece, the forty people in the audience were still standing there. 2/3 of the piece, half of them left. In the last 1/3, only few crazy hypnotized fans kept standing there. There was a total blindness in the room, real clashes of truths and colors, and that repetitive sound of a groove supported by two D tuned strings. By now I knew Bert Jansch and considered myself a guitarist. In the end of that raga, I knew shit. All my consciousness was thrown to the trash can, and all my perception of music was down the drain”.
I don’t relate to this as a guitarist (I have never played) but like it because it captures so well how an artist can open your ears to new possibilities in music.
Rose was part of a generation who knew you didn’t need vocals to give a sense of energy and dynamics. In this, he was taking cues from his own influences – John Fahey and others of the Tahoma school of ‘American primitives’.
A recently released album on Important Records ,called ‘We Are One, In The Sun’ is a tribute to another of his heroes ,Robbie Basho and, fittingly, this is dedicated to the memory of Rose.
To the uninitiated, instrumental acoustic guitar may be thought of as the preserve of elevator music, the type of musak that infests shopping malls or waiting areas. Either this, or could be lumped in a new age music suitable for polite dinner parties or dreaming of dolphins. Neither is true. On the contrary, a generation of artists loosely linked to the New Weird America label have proven just how dynamic the instrument can be.
It is great to see that Jack Rose’s legacy is alive and well in the work of exciting new artists like Yair Yona. It’s particularly cool that Yona draws inspiration from folk innovators of the past while also embracing other genres and contemporary influences. This open-minded approach is evident by the fact that a track of his called Skinniest Fists was inspired by apocalyptic post-rockers Godspeed You Black Emperor. Another version of this track (Skinny Fists) can be found on the digital version of the Basho tribute and also appears on his debut ‘Remember’, an album which was released on his own Anova Records in 2009 but will, on 24th August 2010, deservedly get a wider release through Strange Attractors Audio House . The Heat-Humidity track is from the as yet unnamed follow up which Yair says is going to be less Fahey/Rose and more eclectic. Can’t wait!
