the niki download

9/03/2021

Soul First, Technique Later

While reading, put on headphones and listen to this:
Robbie Basho - Blue Crystal Fire - YouTube

This week I became obsessed with the music and life of Robbie Basho.

My friend Steve shared the above song (are you listening?) with me after I sent him a demo of a song I am writing.

Experiencing Basho’s music has awoken within me the sublime and frantic feeling that comes from discovering a new “art god” and having to absorb their entire artistic output as quick as the illusion of time will allow.

His songs are tapestries of emotion.

They provide a glimpse into a soul’s vulnerable longing to connect with the most high, transcend space and time, and merge with pure creation and harmony.

I was drawn to the way he spoke of writing his music and how he thought of crafting songs as paintings, conjuring the hue of nature's colors with his guitar and voice.

Robbie Basho's Esoteric Doctrine of
Color & Mood for 12&6 string guitar

(published in the album notes of the first "The Seal of the Blue Lotus" issue)

E, purple grey, 'blues',classic, normal
Em, black, dark-blue, blues pathetic, soul black, sombre-evil
C, yellow, pristine, white sunshine
D, green, quiet pastoral, Runnymede, Irish meadow
Dm, dark green, violet-grey-black, darkness, agony-death, thin smoky
A, red, sunset, brave, ochre-wine & roses some blues, grey-blue form
Am, oakbrown, carminadolorous, solid sorrow mature
F, orange-whiteorange, creamsicle, deep orange
B, burnished carmine brown-red
Bm, blood red, bravado-danger, batfang-romilar, red, fantasies

Basho’s oeuvre ranged from rough-hewn Zen-Buddhist-Cowboysongs, to long-winding gems full of expression and romantic visions. He developed his idiosyncratic guitar style by combing his roots in 1950’s American folk music with his studies of flamenco techniques, blues, classical music, bluegrass, Oriental, American Indian and Hindu textures.

In his later years he claimed to use about 30 separate tunings and various picking-styles to broaden the dimensions of what we know as our own.

Basho’s spiritual bend to his art practice resonates with me. He believed himself to have had a number of past lives – including being a soldier for Genghis Khan – and the costumes he dressed up in for album sleeves like The Falconer’s Arm – embroidered tabards and fringed boots – speak to his desire to make his notions of self materially real.

There’s also something in these outfits that is about escape, as if absorbing past lives, contemporary heroes, ancient legends and mythological figures, might lift him from his immediate pain, banality and earthbound existence.

There is not a ton of biographical information to be found. Stories, often conflicting, circulate on pre-template era websites and in forums about his loner tendencies and eccentric approach to life. He did not have many close friends or romantic partners, one person said he might be a virgin, another that he lived with two beautiful Japanese girlfriends.

He had taken LSD and experimented with psychedelics, but it was apparently a disaster, and he described it to a friend as being like “throwing a grenade into a flower”, and continued to have flashbacks. William Ackerman (of Windham Hill Records) said the first time he met Basho, in his Berkeley flat that was ‘floor to ceiling’ with books, Basho paused the conversation to continue speaking to a spirit in the room.

Basho’s music looked upwards, to the spiritual realm. Despite his mastery of guitar, his central tenet to his art was to lead with the soul and let technique follow.

He reached towards a spiritual beauty that is audible in so much of his music, in a raw lack of self-consciousness, in its soaring feeling, and in the hope that transcendence might be achieved through the earthly means of him and his guitar. Basho’s music, first and foremost, is a music of praise.

Basho died in 1986 at the age of 45 due to an accident during a visit to a chiropractor, where an "intentional whiplash" experiment caused blood vessels in his neck to rupture, leading to a fatal stroke.

I am super thankful that he existed.

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