ROBBIE BASHO
Bonn Ist Supreme
(Bo Weavil)
By Max Goldberg
Steel-string master Jack Rose emphasizes the gravity of Robbie Basho’s playing in a brief note introducing this second-generation recording of a late Basho performance: “For me, 12-string guitar begins and ends with Blind Willie McTell and Robbie Basho.”
Basho was loosely affiliated with the “American Primitive” movement centering around John Fahey’s Takoma label, but from early on he displayed a unique voraciousness for cross-cultural transfusions. Besides adapting his last name from the Japanese haiku poet, his extended “ragas” were as likely to veer into Moorish and Persian terrain as the typical Indian-blues hybrid.
Bonn Ist Supreme is a generous helping of Basho’s searching guitar spirals, and while 66 minutes worth of his immersed playing may be too much for one sitting, dipping in piece by piece makes for lovely swimming.
In spite of coming in the midst of Basho’s much-derided Windham Hill period, the 1980 concert shows the guitarist still hard at work at compositions he wrote 15 years earlier. Dewy epics like “Rocky Mountain Raga,” “The Girl and the Lotus,” and “California Raga” are all given energetic run-throughs, and though Basho’s occasional baritone wails make for an easy mark, they’re also a powerful indicator of the guitarist’s unembarrassed zeal.