Is it wrong to look a tribute album
in the mouth? It seems nasty, I know, to compare well-meaning
musicians to gasbag grandees hogging the dais at a televised
funeral (R.I.P., Coretta Scott King), but let’s face it: Are
the assembled homage-payers truly interested in honoring the
honoree, or are they just hitching a ride on a convenient passing
coffin? Would the tribute-receiver be better served if the
tribute-bestowers simply urged all of their friends and fans to buy
the poor dead dude’s albums and hear for themselves what
makes it so great? Put those cynical questions to rest for now,
because I Am the Resurrection, a new tribute to John Fahey, is not your typical
tribute album. First, the contributors all have some kind of
legitimate connection to the man, his music, or both. Second, the
contributors understand that Fahey’s genius cannot be
replicated, only reimagined. They use his music as a springboard,
not as an end in itself, which is precisely what Fahey did with his
own influences, taking the blues-based fingerpicked stylings of
early mentors such as Blind Willie Johnson and Mississippi John
Hurt into new realms of virtuosity, infusing their backwoods
incantations with compositional elements inspired by Charles Ives,
Béla Bartók, Albert Ayler, Indian raga, and musique concrète.
Fahey’s music was a passel of paradoxes, at once intricate
and minimalist, sophisticated and primitive. The body of work that
he left behind — almost 40 albums recorded over about 40
years — remains hugely influential, if unjustly neglected.
From the classic Takoma recordings of the ’60s to the
abstract sound-collages of his later years, Fahey’s
contributions to American culture have been so widely disseminated
that many of his heirs, one suspects, have never heard Fahey
firsthand. In its eclecticism and scope, the lineup of
talent on Resurrection shows the great man’s range. Sonic Youth’s
Lee Ranaldo, who toured with Fahey in the late ’90s, combines
birdsong, fragments of a Nation of Islam sermon, and ambient noises
recorded from the Brooklyn Bridge to re-create a track from
Fahey’s soon-to-be-reissued 1968 album, The Yellow Princess; by
borrowing Fahey’s approach rather than meticulously reproducing
his every note, he shows that Fahey’s music is relevant today,
not just a before-its-time relic from some alternative-tuning canon.
Giant Sand frontman Howe Gelb tackles “My Grandfather’s
Clock,” transposing its rickety, antiquarian whimsy into a medium
both old (he plays it on an 1888 upright piano) and new (the original
was written for solo acoustic guitar). As Gelb observes in the liner notes, Fahey
could “play guitar like a piano player, which I relate to
from playing the piano like a guitar player.” M. Ward, who
also produced the disc, offers a too-brief take on “Bean Vine
Blues #2,” an unlikely mash-up of sludgy electrified rock and
giddy ragtime. College-rock poster boy Sufjan Stevens transforms
“Commemorative Transfiguration & Communion at Magruder
Park” into a minisymphony replete with oboe, flute,
recorders, triangles, and choirboy vocals. A compulsive researcher
(cf. Illinois), Stevens traced Fahey’s melodic motifs to their
original liturgical roots, slyly incorporating traces of the source
material into the finished product in much the same way that Fahey
parlayed his folklorist training (cf. his seminal dissertation on
Charlie Patton) into innovative uses of his own. Other highlights
include cuts by Boston-based post-rockers Cul de Sac, who had the
honor of playing with Fahey on The
Epiphany of Glenn Jones; Calexico,
whose version of “Dance of Death” is predictably spooky
and sublime; and Currituck Co., whose medley of “Requiem for
John Hurt” and “Jaya Shiva Shankarah” is
avant-Delta drone of the highest order. Somewhere, let’s hope, Blind Joe Death
is smiling.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2006.
