Starting with the title track, a five minute stabilized improvisation on a passage from Saint-Saens’ The Yellow Princess Overture, a neat balance between complex classical and more primitive Americana expressed through superb guitar technique, apparently inspired by a magnificent Clipper ship with golden sails, ivory prow, jade hull and jeweled mast-head.
The Americana side of things continues with View (East from the Top of the Riggs Road/B&O Trestle) before Fahey mixes it up on a requiem for my orange tom-cat. Died early 1966 on Lion, a more complicated number with ringing flourishes in a finger-picked jam that quotes Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
Given Fahey’s instrumental prowess in a solo setting you might question the need for anyone else, but Kevin Kelley’s shuffling drums add just the right touch to March! For Martin Luther King (Why didn't we all? asks Fahey in the liner notes, adding, Maybe some of us will now; maybe it's too late). The other added instrumentation is subtle and works quite well.
The sound collage on The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee (subtitled Concerto for guitar, singing bridge, electric bassoon and old phonograph record) however brings a couple of new elements to Fahey’s work. The old phonograph record is Quill Blues by Big Boy Cleveland, a pan pipe solo recorded in 1927. Pan, Fahey notes, chases away the assassin, but the city remains unredeemed, which I’m inclined to read as a reference to the previous track (King was assassinated on the verandah of a Memphis motel) and as a collage the track works better than similar experiments on Requia.
That additional instrumentation is back for Dances of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg (Fahey: East of Hyattsville, even farther than the bridge that does not sing. But then you can't see anybody there because the people are all invisible) with the drums and some understated electric guitar kick in around half way through and Charles A. Lee: In Memoriam apparently remembers a noted icthyologist who accidentally saved the lives of thousands of people through his research (I went looking for details, but Google decided not to co-operate). His son, nicknamed Flea, a childhood friend of Fahey’s, may have played organ on The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party & Other Excursions.
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