The blind search for 'Kid Future'...
If you like your John Fahey's, your Dave Van Ronk's and your Leo Koettke's and even further down the line you like your Derek Bailey's, Jim O'Rourkes' and David Grubbs', then you should listen to this guy - Stefan Grossman.
Grossman plays superb 'fingerstyle' guitar and spent the weekends of his youth with gospel singer/guitarist Rev. Gary Davis learning guitar. The man is a historian of great guitar music and an indexing point for all of the acoustic guitar greats, as well as a truly great talent in his own right.
In the video below he also wears a fantastic beard:
Grossman got to play and study under other seminal figures, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Mississippi Fred McDowell and in the sixties formed the Even Dozen Jug Band, of which several members went on to forge successful careers of their own, where Grossman remained relatively outside of the limelight. Although, he has the privilege of his own Martin Custom Edition guitar, the HJ-38 Stefan Grossman Custom Signature Edition and according to his Wikipedia entry is a market leader in instrument instruction. He resumed touring in 2006 and frequently visits the UK which is good news for me, as I will without a doubt attend one of his guitar workshops.
Here he is performing the 'Assassination of John Fahey':
Thanks to the online radio Pandora, (which I use daily) my listening tastes can be channelled through a particular style or artist, in this case Jim O' Rourke, leading me off into a world of good music that I may be hearing for the first time. Because of Pandora, I got to hear this guy for the first time and found myself in a familiar and comfortable world of guitar rags and guitar drones both traditional and experimental.
Although some may mourn the death in some cases - depending on geography - of hearing this music live, or swapping vinyls and tapes with avid collectors. This process is still occurring, if even on another level. Sites like Pandora or Spotify, although they don't allow us the opportunity to hold the album in our hands and run our fingers over the artwork or the vinyl, they do give us a window into a world, which was once governed by who you knew and where you lived at a certain point in history.
Playing Mississippi Blues in 1981 (great little back story as well):
Playing 'God Moves on The Water' (1972):
Access to this material at one time may have taken a music listener years to achieve and depend on a friend of a friend to provide a record and after much searching result in nights of bliss in front of their record player smoking pot reading the album sleeves. In my case as clinical as it may be, drinking coffee in the house on an afternoon with my laptop humming low I stumble upon Stefan Grossman. The hunt is not as majestic for the music, and beauty and yearning of the search may have died, but the beauty of the music is immediate and most importantly available.
Some who read this may already be aware of Stefan Grossman, and have discovered him in other ways perhaps more interesting, but the important point is discoveries are still personal, whether online, or in the real world.
Recommended link - http://www.guitarvideos.com/
Recommend listening - Yazoo Basin Boogie (album)
Others will far more knowledge than I could probably expand on this in the comments section...
