![]() ![]() There’s the “Monk’s” (Thelonious and Meredith) and then there’s the “John’s”: Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Johnny Cash, John Williams, John Cage, Johannes Brahms, Johannes Ockeghem, Johannes Ciconia…in other words, on dozens of steadily accumulating recordings, he is playing through-via his own transcriptions-the history of Western art music from the Medieval era through the post-WWII American and European avant-garde. King and Robert Johnson, yes, and also compositions by Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley’s In C, La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. He plays Django Rheinhardt and Charlie Christian, B.B. Akchoté seems to be on a path to play every kind of music that exists, at least in the Western canon. (Subtract the books of technical studies, sheet music, and tablatures-and their accompanying tuning pitches-and even the singles, and there’s still more than 500 full albums or EPs.) The parts of this whole include the kind of music one would expect from a guitar player, with some jazz, some rock, some blues, some folk, all both electric and acoustic-and even substantial free playing-all of which dovetails with his bio: Akchoté taught himself to play and started performing publicly at an early age, learned from jazz greats like Tal Farlow and Philip Catherine, and developed in a scene that included leading European improvisers like Derek Bailey and Lol Coxhill.īut there’s much more to this than simply being prolific. The elephant in this case is French guitarist Noël Akchoté, and his discography on Bandcamp is not just huge in terms of numbers but also scope. In the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, a group of blind men each touch and describe a different part of the enormous creature, and while none of them has an inkling of the whole, each one’s impression fills in a key part of the picture. ![]() The best way to comprehend a discography that exceeds 500 recordings is to perhaps start with some ancient wisdom. ![]()
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