Roy Harper

When it comes to intellectual singer-songwriting, Roy Harper is one of the shadowy figures of the transition between the 60s and 70s, and his artistic habitat is a "limbo" of stylistic contradictions. Not quite as free as Tim Buckley's, and too unorthodox to be placed alongside Leonard Cohen's, his "progressive" folk nonetheless fully belongs among the music that helped shake off its dust and project it toward a higher harmonic form.

Born in a poor neighbourhood of Manchester in 1941, and introduced to music alongside his brother David (mostly as an outlet for his restless temperament), Harper drew above all on the emphasis of singing from his mentors. What first drew him in was the torrential Dylan of the mid-60s, the syllabic modulation and the intricate arrangements underpinning his invectives (he would be one of the many devotees of "Blonde On Blonde"). But his personality resides increasingly in a galaxy of hymn-like melodies and stretched-out melismas, atmospheric touches and impressionistic reflections, preciosity and acoustic shimmer. Compared to the masterworks of one of his closest points of reference, Cat Stevens, Harper takes an almost opposite approach: where Stevens schematises and pares things down to the intangible, Harper expands and layers, almost separating voice and accompaniment into two connected yet autonomous planes.

It's no surprise, then, that his first records are amateurish, strongly poetic compositions, early attempts to give folk song – his first stomping ground – a lyrical and metaphysical dimension. But the roots of his crowning achievement, "Stormcock", lie rather in its highly inspired predecessor, "Flat Baroque And Berserk", a record that lays bare his soul as a grieving Dylan, an oracle-like troubadour, a rural Homer, with epic litanies such as "I Hate The White Man" and "How Does It Feel?", visionary watercolours like "Song Of The Ages", and an extended version of "Tom Tidler's Ground".

But "Stormcock", released just a year later, is the most direct testament to his genius, and perhaps the truest document – of that era, but also for decades to come – of progressive folk understood as a free union of harmonic sequences in place of suites in the baroque manner, secular parables, ever more intricate weavings of words and acoustic guitar strings. Where "Flat Baroque" was a diary of life, "Stormcock" is a stream of consciousness free of constraints. There's no sprawl here: just four tracks, standing in for four narrative and pictorial panels, with a perfect blend of craftsmanship, melodic accessibility and orchestration.

Dazzling acoustic chords carve out the superhuman opening ballad, "Hors d'oeuvres." Its long, gruelling verse pairs with a refrain of near-shamanic quality. Throughout the track, the essence of his music comes clearly into view, an emblem that here deepens into illusion, threading references to the classics with a personality devoted to evanescence. It's as if Bob Dylan's emphatic outpourings turned into celestial homily, as if Tim Buckley's vocal flights became symbols to decode, as if Leonard Cohen's measured touches caught a magic carpet toward sublime valleys. And all three converged into a single, deeply personal, confessional act.

In "The Same Old Rock" the harmonic rhythm, the references, the worlds, simply multiply. It's the fresco-song that paints the broadest, most elegant (and most free-form) spectrum, and the one in which the contrast between the vocal expansions and the acoustic weave grows sharpest. The gorgeous Leo Kottke-style riff that opens the track melts into cheerful cantata-like shapes, then gives way to silence. The Gregorian-monastic moment that follows preludes a Hare Krishna transfiguration, with reverbed voices cast toward the Empyrean; the reverb then spreads to the chords, in the closing minutes of solo guitar torn between shimmering effects and macabre tarantella.

"One Man Rock And Roll Band" is a raga-folk recitative for muezzin-like voice; it's the shortest track, yet it too doesn't fail to reveal an abyss of echoes and transcendental splits, the "dead-end" of an agony that drags on for its entire length.

Either way, it serves as the humble introduction to the epic "Me And My Woman," his capital composition, a monumental romance in which the arrangement's twists and turns grow even more intricate. A wandering arpeggio and a suspended vocal line set things in motion. Both collapse into a brief symphonic choral mirage; the singing re-emerges with more grace, but also with flashes of j'accuse. The resulting motif, set against the symphonic chorale, turns it into a majestic inscription.

The second part shifts harmony and cadence, becoming a Gaelic lament that leans on a solo oboe to morph into an acid trip (a cultured, neo-classical rendering of "Forever Changes"). The third part opens with an increasingly stern dialogue between guitar and orchestra; the vocals rise and everything accelerates, becoming pure rhythmic-verbal matter, the chant regressing into something both primitive and universal. Then the piece finally returns to its initial key, for a passionate reprise of the opening tempo leading to the gentle close.

An era-defining yet timeless classic of remarkable poise, rhythm and tension in perfect balance, poetry and wonder, knowledge and memory. It will win over guitarists and singers in love with the infinite, and with otherness. Among them will be a shy Jimmy Page, who will fold the author into the grooves of his Led Zeppelin, will join him on stage, and will finally take part in the making of the album (under the pseudonym Flavius Mercurius) for "The Same Old Rock," which in some way pays tribute to his "Stairway To Heaven." It is the "transforming ember" for folk devotees. Its gaze toward the future reaches all the way to the present day, with the recovery of a certain classical-operatic-choral modus operandi in folk-making (foremost among them the great flow of instruments and voice on Joanna Newsom's "Ys"), pairing up with "Astral Weeks". Its greatness, however, lies not so much in its historiographic seminal status, but in the constant, secret beauty of its vital turns, in the shining urgency of the soul, like a testament of trusting splendour, a vessel of grace.

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07/02/2011