Craft Recordings To Release Anthology Of Influential American Guitar And Banjo Music From the Takoma And Vanguard Vaults

On March 23, Craft Recordings will release The Thousand Incarnations Of The Rose: American Primitive Guitar and Banjo (1963-1974) on 2LP, CD, and digital. This new compilation celebrates the groundbreaking, inventive approach to traditional instrumentation brought forward by an impressive group of maverick artists whose interpretations of folk, blues, and traditional song gave rise to one of American music's most unique and influential stylistic schools, known today as American Primitive. Featured artists on the compilation, which serves as a "Who's Who" of the genre, include John Fahey, Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho, Harry Taussig and more. The two-LP vinyl edition features deluxe gatefold packaging, and a tipped-in booklet containing new liner notes by compilation producer Glenn Jones and illustrations by Drew Christie. The CD configuration comes housed in a softpack and features a booklet containing both Jones' notes and Christie's artwork.

The Craft Recordings release comes in connection with a three-day festival by the same name, The Thousand Incarnations of the Rose, which promises to be a music festival unlike any other. Taking place at multiple venues in Takoma Park, MD from April 13th - 15th, the festival brings together for the first time more than 25 acoustic fingerstyle guitar and banjo players from every era of the American Primitive/Guitar Soli movement and every corner of the United States; pairing legends such as Peter Lang, Max Ochs, Harry Taussig, and Peter Walker with modern day heavy hitters like Glenn Jones, Marisa Anderson, Daniel Bachman, and Nathan Bowles. There will also be documentary screenings and rare footage of John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Jack Rose, plus panel discussions with scholars and musicians. It is only fitting that Takoma Park, Fahey's boyhood home, will host the festival this year, which commemorates the 60th anniversary of his very first recordings.

When guitarist John Fahey sat down to record The Takoma Park Pool Hall Blues for Fonotone Records in 1958 he could not have imagined that he was starting an artistic movement or that generations of players would follow in his footsteps. The number of players who have since taken up the American Primitive mantle has grown exponentially year-by-year and album-by-album. The term has come to refer to a certain approach to playing the guitar (or banjo) that favors emotion and mood over virtuosity for its own sake. With his minimalistic, self-taught approach to writing and recording, incorporating folk, blues, American roots music, and sound collage, Fahey laid the foundation for others to follow in his style. Leo Kottke, Peter Lang, and Robbie Basho, Fahey's labelmates on the Takoma label, all shared aspects of Fahey's approach to fingerstyle acoustic guitar, expanding and building upon the sounds that Fahey brought forward with his inventive approach to the instrument. Later, contemporary artists like Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Ryley Walker, and Vetiver, among many others, would cite Fahey as being highly influential on developing their own signature styles and approaches to music.