Pitchfork

Guitar Soli, the Numero Group's collection of obscure solo acoustic guitar instrumentals, professes to explore the "private side of the solo guitar movement from 1966-1981". The public side needs no introduction here, having been documented by Martin Scorsese in his revealing 1983 documentary The Last Raga about the decadent concert blowout for solo guitar's leading lights. Davey Graham did a load of blow off of a Martin D-28 and Bert Jansch nearly choked Sandy Bull with a nickel-wound 46-gauge string. Wait, no, that never happened. The scene's leading lights used 1966-1981 to move into some combination of obscurity, poverty, and cult worship. Solo acoustic guitar is not by definition a private affair but its conventions-- and the personalities that are drawn to those conventions-- are not typically the public type.

But I'm being a shit: surely Numero means only to show a side of acoustic composition and performance outside the genre-defining names like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke, none of whom were really public figures but all of whom enjoyed (or enjoy) critical acclaim and understanding audiences. Guitar Soli collects fourteen such pieces, focusing neither on technical achievement nor on any coherent historical narrative. Freed of even minor stylistic excesses-- like Fahey's collage or Basho's chant-- Guitar Soli defies categorization as anything but six-string plainsong.

So silly miniatures help focus Guitar Soli. Ted Lucas, who turns in the comp's most furiously picked track, "Raga in 'D'", was Motown's Indian-music session man, playing sitar for the Temptations and the Supremes. Richard Crandell has found work after learning the mbira while driving Thomas Mapfumo's bus. Daniel Hecht knew Moondog and now writes mystery novels. Best of all, Mark Lang's "Strawberry Man" is sunny and weightless in its contemplation of a beachside fruit vendor but it never would've hit the tape if Lang hadn't grown jealous of his brother Peter, who cut an album with Fahey and Kottke. Other tracks require no backstory at all: Stephen Cohen's "No More School" is exactly as red-faced and dimpled as its title suggests, while Jim Ohlschmidt's "The Delta Freeze" is Guitar Soli's most singular sonic statement, a mess of strangulated slides that grow denser and angrier until the tape saturates.

The music only gets so peculiar, though: these are acoustic guitar tracks mostly in the folk mold with occasional Eastern influences. Guitar Soli doesn't even contain a proper blues; its most far-off cut is its last, Dwayne Cannan's "One Forty Eight", which features an electric guitar part best described as...Carlos Santana-y? Strange, but it fits: these artists, along with Fahey, Basho etc., were important bridges between the American Primitive style birthed by the 1960s folk movement and the New Age 80s. Guitar Soli is no missing link but its placidity, a product of carefully minded source music and the subtlest of desires to innovate, suggests that the artists of Guitar Soli belong in the discussion, however private and odd their endeavors.