Danny Gatton, Leo Kottke, and Blastula: Real Roots

Our culture's at a point where the description American roots guitar music can apply to so much, from the blazing neo-rockabilly of the late Danny Gatton to the blues-inspired acoustic picking of Leo Kottke to the industrial modernist roar & drone of John Myers's all-guitar quartet Blastula. It's all traditional -- just coming out of different traditions.

With Gatton and Kottke, the ties to the past are obvious. Especially on The Humbler (NRG; call 1-800-4GATTON), which is actually a live recording of a Robert Gordon show from 1978, when Gatton was leading the rockabilly revivalist's band. It's in mono -- essentially a sanctioned, high-quality bootleg -- but the dynamics, and the dynamic, of Gatton's playing cut through everything: the crowd sounds, the muffled recording, and the myth that there's something inherently moribund in riffing on such a highly defined, antiquated genre. Gatton's playing is definitive rockabilly: dazzling major-scale solos, their notes chiseled in high relief, torn off his fretboard song after song. Clean and high-soaring bends on "The Way I Walk," low open-E-string bombs punctuating Gordon's stiff-necked Elvis-copped vocals, masterful three-string bends and sharp-clipped notes on the country weeper "There Stands the Glass," perfect chiming chord and sliding licks on "You Got a Heart like a Rock." One need listen to no other rockabilly guitar recording to understand the style completely. I've seen Gatton play everything from Hendrix to Elvis to Les Paul to Tal Farlow to Django Reinhardt to Merle Travis and do them all with perfection. But The Humbler (named for the effect this CD has on guitarists), along with his more eclectic NRG release Unfinished Business, is proof that this troubled artist, who, sadly, took his own life, was one of the greatest guitarists ever.

Kottke's latest release is a reissue of his 1969 debut recording for guitarist John Fahey's Takoma label, 6- and 12-String Guitar. It is what it claims to be: 14 solo performances on six- and 12-string acoustic guitars, exploring the most prominent aspects of the American steel-string guitar tradition -- blues and English folk-derived country music. For those bored with Kottke's more recent mellow recordings -- which seem to explore simple melodies for the sake of pandering to new-age-softened baby-boomers -- this is a reminder of that right-hand picking technique, with its droning low-string anchor and a high end nearly baroque in exquisite detail, that marked his craftsmanship as special. Even in Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" there's a hint of Doc Watson's hill-country twang. Between Watson and Bukka White, Kottke's influences are covered, and here he repeatedly mixes their precise vocabulary with a speed and flair for rolling melody. (Kottke, by the way, will play a concert at Harvard's Paine Hall on October 19.)

Finally, there's Blastula (Atavistic), from Glenn Branca Ensemble veteran John Myers and three fellow guitarists. From overlays of repeated figures emerge drones, melodies, interlocking rhythms, and the big hairy roar that many of the most daring New York guitarists have been dabbling in since the late '70s, when players like Branca and Elliott Sharp (and, outside the realm of guitar, John Zorn) began a regional musical movement that would eventually come to be known as the downtown scene -- the catalyst for the Knitting Factory and Sonic Youth, among other risky musical propositions.

Not all roots music runs to an ancient heritage, though the argument could be made for composers from Stravinsky to John Cage as inspiring spirits. By now, with so many guitar bands plundering atonalities, drone-yielding tunings, and sheer sonic density, this style has roots in the post-industrial school of fringe rock that defined itself as "no wave" (or, to cite its immediate predecessor, in such textural '70s Brian Eno works as Music for Airports, Music for Films, or Eno's collaboration with guitarist Robert Fripp, Evening Star). But Blastula come out ahead of the harmonically phat rat pack, putting chiming psychedelic filigrees in the midst of "Perception" to keep our attention and stimulate the ears (meticulous stereo separation and clever harmonic counterbalance pay off), using the patented Cobain loud-soft volume formula, and generally writing damn good tunes (check the menacing up-and-down climb of "Rapture," a real tension builder that seems an apt soundtrack for the prophesied event -- whew) that they play to perfection.

-- Ted Drozdowski