Sandy Bull

The face of folk music changes forever when Alexander "Sandy" Bull records his first album in the early 1960s: blending Eastern and Western stylistic elements, Bull's guitar playing would influence every artist then emerging from the American counterculture. Born in New York in 1941, young Sandy is introduced to music from childhood by his divorced parents. As a boy he lives in Florida with his father, editor-in-chief of the magazine "Town & Country", who instills in him a love for Hank Williams and African music. As a teenager, he returns to New York with his mother Daphne Hellman, an eccentric jazz harpist of some national renown.

If by the age of 8 the enfant prodige Sandy Bull has already picked up the guitar, it doesn't take long before he moves on to drums and banjo, thanks to lessons given to him by Erik Darling of the Weavers. Once he comes of age, his talent is plain for all to see: it's his own parents, in fact, who are the first to believe in him, so much so that they push him to enroll at Boston University, where he can deepen his studies in composition. Sandy, however, doesn't feel at ease among the books; within a few months the urge to play in the streets takes over, and he decides to head to Paris, where he comes into contact with North African music. That blend of distant sounds, at once so simple and so intricate, captivates his soul and leads him on to Beirut to buy some indigenous instruments. As fate would have it, along the way Sandy decides to stop off in Rome, where he has the good fortune to meet Hamza El Din, the Nubian musician with whom he will go on to share an apartment in New York in the years to come; it's an illuminating encounter for young Sandy, since it's his new guru who will advise him to buy an oud, one of the most distinctive and difficult instruments in the Arab musical universe, of which he would go on to become a virtuoso.

At the start of the Sixties, Sandy Bull returns to his hometown and starts frequenting Greenwich Village, performing at legendary clubs like the Gaslight Cafe and Gerde's Folk City. During this period, he also makes a name for himself by playing Bach on his Fender Stratocaster, leaving his contemporaries stunned a good couple of years before Bob Dylan's electric turn. Sandy Bull thus becomes one of the first key figures of the vibrant folk scene that had sprung up in Greenwich Village, though he enters it already addicted to heroin. While plenty of musicians have achieved fame despite drug abuse, in Bull's case drugs would inexorably ruin his career, sidelining him for several years and condemning him to obscurity. When he completes his rehab program in 1974, it's already too late: his legacy has by then already been divided up, fragmented into the zeitgeist of contemporary music. Back in 1963, by contrast, Bull is an artist working way ahead of his time: in an era of 3-minute pop songs, he's recording long instrumental jams full of exotic reverb. On top of all this, Bull is one of the first to experiment with studio overdubbing, and when he performs live, he typically deploys a primitive drum machine in support, accompanying himself this way (as documented on the album "Still Valentine's Day, 1969: Live At The Matrix").

Histrionic and visionary, like a skilled craftsman, Sandy Bull managed to blend together Eastern styles, gospel, minimalism, jazz, folk and blues, offering an early preview of what would become common forms of world music many years later. In a sense, his world music ante-litteram is the American equivalent of what English guitarist Davy Graham was proposing at the time. Both, in their pioneering endeavours, managed to connect their instruments to the most ancient traditions, thanks to their studies of North African and Indian music: it's no coincidence that their style would go on to influence artists from very different backgrounds, such as John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Steve Winwood, Roy Montgomery and Lee Ranaldo.

Released by Vanguard in August 1963, "Fantasias For Guitar And Banjo" stands out for the sole accompaniment allowed alongside Bull's guitar and banjo, namely the jazz backing of drummer Billy Higgins (from Ornette Coleman's entourage), whose perfect symbiosis with Bull is already evident in the opening suite. "Blend", the 22-minute composition that takes up the entire first side of the vinyl, is in fact made up of an unusual mélange of rural folk, modal jazz, medieval drones and Indian ragas. With "Blend", American primitivism is in a sense born (later enshrined by John Fahey and the artists on his Takoma Records label), but Bull's use of the guitar tuned like a banjo and of Eastern scales means he even foreshadows the psychedelic movements to come. The instrument absorbs all of the composer's inner turmoil, at the start of his long struggle with drugs: after a slow incipit, the composition picks up speed from the five-minute mark onward, eventually taking on the shape of a hallucinated crescendo. To reach such a level of solemnity, Bull takes cues from musicians like Ali Akbar Khan, Munir Bashir and Ravi Shankar, but also from artists of the rural communities of the Appalachian mountains and from the catalogue of the Folkways record label, of which he is a fervent admirer. The quest for the avant-garde thus passes precisely through the primitive element: just as Jackson Pollock, in developing his idea of gestural painting, had started out from Native American art, Sandy Bull realizes that the oldest and most distant folkloric element is the necessary foundation for inaugurating a new musical season.

The remaining "fantasias" are psychedelic improvisations kept under control, clearly innovative for their time, and undoubtedly substantial in opening up unprecedented possibilities within American counterculture. One example of this is his ominous interpretation of "Carmina Burana Fantasy", a reworking of Carl Orff's famous cantata that turns into a requiem for banjo, bringing out a whole new dimension of the piece. As a true Dharma bum, Bull then goes on to make the realms of Western classical music collide, within his fingerpicking, with those of Eastern tradition on "Non Nobis Domine" (by the Renaissance-era British composer William Byrd), before underlining his virtuosity with the narcotic bluegrass of the traditional "Little Maggie". Bull finally seals his debut with "Gospel Tune", where — despite the title — he offers up an oppressive folk piece with tremolo-laden electric guitar, its groove interacting perfectly with Higgins' drums, never once leaving you missing the bass.

If the second side doesn't seem quite as inspired as "Blend", it's worth remembering that when the record was made, at the start of 1963, the Beatles were singing "Please Please Me" and Bob Dylan was only just beginning to make a name for himself. Before 1965, Arabic or Indian music still hadn't entered the vocabulary of folk and rock: in those years, only Henry Flynt, with his electric ragas, had ventured so far geographically, not to mention the space travels of Joe Meek on "I Hear A New World" (1960). All these experimental combinations — as history teaches us — would prove seminal in the development of nascent psychedelic rock, but also of a multitude of other genres that in the Sixties were still unimaginable, such as new age or drone music.

Thanks to this extraordinary ability to be both a pioneering record and an immediately accessible listen, "Fantasias For Guitar And Banjo" became an underground classic as soon as it came out. Two years later, Sandy Bull's second album ("Inventions") managed to combine Bach, bossa nova and a superb overdubbed-guitars version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis", anticipating every direction rock would take after 1967: not bad for a kid who, at the time of his debut, had only just turned twenty-two.

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17/12/2017