This week I am visiting the well of American Primitive Guitar, and, well, I pretty much just fell straight in.
It’s almost as if he is John Fahey “round 2,” but not exactly. You can hear the influence, you can hear the style, but his playing on both the six and twelve string guitar is unique and hypnotic.
A quick thank you to my friend Simone M for introducing me to Daniel Bachman because this last week I was immersed in Daniel Bachman’s catalog. He is certainly the next wave of American Primitive guitar and he brings his own style to the genre.
His picking is precise and intentional, and he does this thing… I can’t really describe it, but his right hand is a machine and his compositions are memorable as well as thought provoking.
The album that has me hooked this week is called River, it’s not his newest release, it just happens to be the one that I am really digging into.
Daniel Bachman Links
Definitely not. He is a great guitarist no doubt but that’s a pretty ridiculous claim to try and make. Also, part of what made John such and iconoclast is that he INVENTED this style of playing, it is literally the style of John Fahey. Many, many people have come along and used this style heavily, Bachman being one of the better ones so far, but nobody will ever match that original burst of creativity Fahey shared with us all those years ago. If anything, I would say the better question would be “Is Bachman the new Jack Rose” but that sits distastefully in my mind too. I imagine I just took this too literally, my apologizes. Bachman also has a tendency to “play like he’s double parked” so to speak, something that gets old fast.