Label: Confront

未発表のままとなっていた録音が、なんと英Confrontより初音盤化!!アイリッシュからゴスペルまでを演奏し多くの名作を残す米フィンガースタイル・ギタリストDuck Baker。1976年から1980年の間にKicking Mule Recordsから5枚のLPをリリース、その後レーベルの方向性が変わり次の出版元を探している最中に録音されていた82年デモ音源が初出版。タイトル[Contra Costa Dance]は、あまりにも美しすぎて自身の価値を見失ったというアイルランドの伝説の少女にちなんで付けられたものであり、バート・ヤンシュへのオマージュやらラグタイム風、またミニマルな楽曲までと多彩な技巧を披露する名演集。









My first record deal was with Kicking Mule, a specialised acoustic guitar label that released five Duck Baker LPs between 1976 and 1980. But eventually the label changed direction and I did no recording for them after I finished The Kid On The Mountain in 1980. By that time, my primary focus had shifted from arranging traditional tunes to writing original pieces like those included on The Art Of Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar (1979). By mid-1982 I was not only thinking in terms of finding another label but dealing with a painful relationship breakup and relocating from London, where I had been based for several years. I spent that summer in Berkeley trying unsuccessfully to make sense of things before returning to Europe in the fall, and since my friend Dix Bruce knew that I was looking for a label, he helped me make make demo recordings of the original tunes I wanted to record. I sent a selection around to a a few labels, but to no avail; most of the new acoustic guitar records being made at that point featured New Age music, and I just didn’t fit the program. I recall thinking that the repeated phrases in pieces like “Putney Bridge” and the title track might appeal to these people, but maybe time signatures like 5/4 and 5/8 put them off. Or maybe it was the jazz influence, though “Putney Bridge” was also a clear nod to folk guitarist Bert Jansch, who lived just down the road form me in Fulham but often crossed the bridge to get to his preferred pubs in those days.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the German label Acoustic Music released four CDs mainly devoted to my own compositions, and most of the pieces on the present collection were included. Meanwhile the 1982 demo recordings had been forgotten, and were sitting in a box in Dix Bruce’s garage until he started going through things in early 2021. When I heard the recordings again, I liked the edgy quality in the playing and thought that many of these demo recordings were stronger than the later studio versions. There are also three tunes that I never did rerecord: the ragtime knuckle-buster “Highland Springs”, the quasi-modal “Dance Me Outside”, and the impressionistic “Deirdre”, named for the girl of Irish legend who was just too pretty for her own good. What later studio recordings would have, of course, was better sound quality, and the fidelity of these demos was further compromised by sitting in storage for so long.

Despite the imperfect audio, I felt that the music I was trying so hard to get out there in 1982 was still worth sharing, and when Mark Wastell at Confront heard the recordings, he agreed. So in the end, I did manage to find a label for the record I wanted to make after The Kid On The Mountain. It took 40 years, but here it is.