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Steve Tibbetts

It has been eight years since Steve Tibbetts gave us the fiery electric guitar album “A Man About A Horse” (ECM 1814). Now he returns with a different kind of recording: an album of, primarily, acoustic sounds. The making of “Natural Causes” took place in a period when Tibbetts was reconsidering some fundamental aspects of his art and craft – in parallel with daily studies of Bach, Bartók, and music theory. Examining those giants up close made it doubly difficult to go about business-as-usual in his own work. “After some hours, my ears would be wide open…and disinclined to the prospect of blasting electric guitar. So I stuck with my dad’s Martin D-12-20 12-string. I wanted to keep things simple. I thought maybe I could find a voice in well-played single-string lines and say more with less – like Sultan Kahn perhaps. That was the intent, even though the music usually mutated into complex little cathedrals.”

The music of Sultan Kahn (see mp3 selection below) has been a reference for Tibbetts since the mid-90s and the experience of witnessing a revelatory concert that brought the Indian sarangi master to Minneapolis. “Since then I have taken the singing, voice-like quality of his sarangi as my example. Over months and years of playing the frets were ground down on my 12-string and it began to sound more and more like the sarangi. The frets are nearly flat now. The guitar is about 45 years old and has a mellow, aged sound to it. I set up that guitar so that the strings are in double courses. I set them in unisons. This makes it possible to find (for me) a more “singing” tonality in single string lines. “

Gongs are another primary instrument on “Natural Causes”: “Gong cycles are everywhere in this album. I lived around gong cycles when I worked for study-abroad programs in Indonesia. The students studied gamelan music as part of our programs. Music is everywhere in Indonesia: feasts, temple ceremonies, funerals, births, sacred calendar days. Gong cycles anchor the music. The gong cycles on songs like “Lakshmivana” are triggered from a 12-string I set up with a midi interface. A friend let me record in his gong shop in Peliatan (south of Ubud, Bali) for a few hours, sampling gongs and other metal-key instruments on a portable DAT recorder I brought to Asia. I sampled gongs, gamelans, jublangs, and other metallaphones. I mapped them to diatonic scales, not necessarily tracking the guitar pitches. In other words, a harmonic minor scale played on the guitar might trigger a melodic minor scale from the sampler a 5th higher. I would sometimes make four or five different scales like this, trigger all of them from the guitar, then craft tiny compositions or motifs.”

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Extended Analysis

Hellbound Train—An Anthology

Read "Hellbound Train—An Anthology" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


A career anthology of trumpeter Miles Davis' music would struggle for cohesion, trying to combine sounds from his Birth Of The Cool (Capitol, 1957) to the first and second great quintets, to Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970) and On the Corner (Columbia, 1972). It is a stew that is hard to digest in one sitting. It makes more sense to listen to the albums separately rather than putting snippets into one package. The same could be said for pianist Herbie Hancock, ...

Album Review

Steve Tibbetts: Life Of

Read "Life Of" reviewed by Mario Calvitti


Pochi musicisti sono così sfuggenti a ogni tentativo di categorizzazione come il chitarrista americano Steve Tibbetts. La sua musica, da lui descritta come 'neo-primitivismo postmoderno' trae le sue origini inizialmente dal folk-rock sperimentale, spostandosi poi sempre più verso una dimensione world-ambient (nutrita dal profondo interesse dell'artista verso la musica nepalese e tibetana) realizzata attraverso una costante ricerca su sonorità e timbriche elettro-acustiche. Negli oltre 40 anni di attività ha realizzato 13 album, a suo nome o in collaborazione con altri ...

2
Album Review

Steve Tibbetts: Life Of

Read "Life Of" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Minnesota-based guitarist Steve Tibbetts has always gone his own way, crafting his albums in the recording studio with deliberate care. Many of those albums have featured his scorching electric-guitar playing, for example Exploded View (ECM, 1986) and the later A Man About a Horse (ECM, 2002). But beginning with his previous album, Natural Causes (ECM, 2010), he has concentrated on acoustic sounds. His main instrument here is a Martin 12-string guitar, but strung with double-course unison strings (in place of ...

9
Interview

Steve Tibbetts: “Northern Song” and the Sounds of Silence

Read "Steve Tibbetts: “Northern Song” and the Sounds of Silence" reviewed by Rob Caldwell


It's a chilly, overcast afternoon in jny: Oslo, Norway in late October 1981. This close to the Arctic Circle, the days are already rapidly shortening with winter's approach, the sun beginning to disappear over the horizon by mid-afternoon. In a darkened studio, guitarist Steve Tibbetts, percussionist Marc Anderson, producer and ECM Records head Manfred Eicher, along with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug have been sequestered for two days of a three day recording session. The team is intently laying down tracks ...

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Album Review

Steve Tibbetts: Natural Causes

Read "Natural Causes" reviewed by Ian Patterson


Although guitarist/composer Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson have collaborated since the late 1970s--the percussionist has played on every one of Tibbetts ECM releases--this is their first duo recording since Northern Song (ECM, 1982). That album employed silence as a sideman, and although there is less outright pause on Natural Causes, the same soothing, meditative ambiance forms a natural bridge between the two works, separated by almost thirty years. Tibbetts layers and interweaves 12-string guitar, bouzouki and kalimba, with a bewitching ...

197
Album Review

Steve Tibbetts: Natural Causes

Read "Natural Causes" reviewed by Jeff Dayton-Johnson


First things first: this is a mellow record. A very mellow record. Not Ben Webster mellow, or Antonio Carlos Jobim mellow, or Morton Feldman mellow, but rather, a record of music depicting a kind of quietism: profoundly passive contemplation. And it's not clear that quietism is a direction all jazz fans will want to go.

Now the project is an interesting one, and there is no lack of skill or care in its execution. Guitarist Tibbetts plays his ...

282
Album Review

Steve Tibbetts: Natural Causes

Read "Natural Causes" reviewed by John Kelman


Alongside Stephan Micus, Steve Tibbetts occupies a somewhat rare position in ECM's roster of longstanding musical collaborators. Like the German composer/multi-instrumentalist, this “Zen Guitarist" defies ECM's general rule of two days to record, one day to mix (with minimal editing and overdubbing); instead, Tibbetts has, with rare exception, recorded his music from a home base in St. Paul, Minneapolis--again like Micus, sometimes taking years between recordings and with minimal label intervention. Unlike Micus, however, who produces his albums in isolation, ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Hellbound...

ECM Records
2022

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Life Of

ECM Records
2018

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Natural Causes

ECM Records
2010

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A Man About A Horse

ECM Records
2002

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