Customer Reviews

Man About a Horse

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Where we last left off with Steve Tibbetts, we heard his work moving in several directions, ranging from the wonderful acoustic folk of Suzi Katz's 1994 "Three Day Rain", to the heavy electric and percussive doses of his previous 1994 release "The Fall of Us All", and the more recent eclectic collaborations with Tibetan nun Choying Drolma "Cho", and...Norwegian fiddler Knut Hamre "A". Where does this new release fit in?

A Man About A Horse needs to be listened to, and isn't served justice with words or comparisons.

But I'll try, in the hope that maybe others will give it a listen....

"A Man About a Horse" is a natural progression of "The Fall of Us All", benefitted by the more natural, earthy, primal sounds of "Cho." The pieces are well-conceived yet very organic, not all all "song-like" and often atonal, shifting in mood and tone. Four basic instruments, guitar (Steve's searing electric and acoustic), percussion (batteries provided by Marc Anderson, Marcus Wise, and Tibbetts Too), and bass (Jim Anton). It's much more ethereal, but not any less Big and Heavy where it needs to be than "The Fall". At first, the music is disorienting, and oscillates between soothing and irritating ("bone-crunching" comes to mind, but to say this might be not "couth", as Steve broke a hand before making this recording...), but as with all Steve Tibbetts music, the heady combination becomes more compelling after each repeated listen. The music isn't getting any deeper, you are drawn deeper into it. On this recording, Steve is going Somewhere through the music, and it seems as if he gets There. May we enjoy similar journeys in life. Highly contemplative, and utterly gorgeous.

Steve Tibbetts, a fabulous Minnesotan guitarist and mastermind of sound, has produced beautiful and highly robust music during the course of his career dating back to 1977. His albums, ranging from his self entitled "Steve Tibbetts" to the "The Fall of Us All", have been so interesting and so well focused that the audience keeps coming back to listen again, pleasantly surprised to hear something different each time. His successful projects include "CHO", a beautiful collage of acoustic guitar and the spiritual voices of Choying Drolma and the Nagi Nunnery Foundation, followed by a US and European tour. Each album exposes the listener to elements of American music and elements of music from foreign lands ranging from Indonesia to Africa while successfully reminding the audience that successful music comes not only from the heart and soul but also through personal experiences gained from traveling to places far from your hometown. Steve's guitar and musical influences definitely include Jimi Hendrix, David Torn, John Fahey, Zakir Hussain, Sultan Kahn, and Robert Fripp.

Steve's latest release "A Man About A Horse" reiterates the points made above with even more punch and as with his earlier releases it is definitely deserving of a Grammy nomination. Like most of his ECM albums, this one features both acoustic and electric guitar. "A Man About A Horse" is impulsive, uplifting, meditative, and spiritual. It rocks, it soothes, and it radiates. Steve Tibbetts is an incredible musician and dedicated fans and newcomers to his music will definitely not be disappointed with this cd. "A Man About A Horse" will likely attract audiences of various ethnic backgrounds and attract listeners of pop, folk, rock, jazz, new age and world music. Long time collaborators, Marc Anderson(percussion), Marcus Wise(tabla), and Jim Anton(Bass), add plenty of texture and punch to this atmospheric album. There are fierce guitar licks, meditative acoustic guitar offerings, heart pounding drums, and mesmerizing sounds based on Steve's previous field recordings made in Bali and through his studies at a retreat center in Vermont where he captured a choir of approximately 250 voices and mixed it in with his colorful musical soundscapes of percussion, bass, and guitar.

Lupra - 4:43 A wonderful opening, a collage of acoustic guitar bass, and percussion with meditative passages.

Red Temple - 6:36 This is an opening of a three piece suite with pure energy radiated from the guitar surrounded by heart pounding drums and soothing sounds.

Black Temple - 10:06 A continuation of an epical journey from the prairies of Minnesota to the foreign lands of Indonesia where the wind brushes through the mountains and the guitars roar like lions.

Burning Temple - 3:58 Closing of the suite. The guitars cools off, the listener cools off. Ambient textures radiate though the speakers as we journey with Steve into the next half of the cd.

Glass Everywhere - 3:58 The journey continues with mind blowing electric guitar, bass, and acoustic guitar soundscapes.

Lochana - 3:40 The pace picks up with screaming guitar kept tame by meditative soundscapes. Great supportive bass work by Jim Anton.

Chandoha - 5:53 Look out, Hendrix's spirit is calling, Steve responds with some incredible electric guitar licks.

Koshala - 5:54 This spiritual journey comes to a pleasant end with a collage of tabla, exotic drum patterns, bass and acoustic guitar.

This is a wonderful ECM release.

I highly recommend "A Man About A Horse"

A good effort by-in-large, utterly fantastic in places. I couldn't find much thematic continuity in about half of the songs in this outing, but that doesn't seem the main objective of the creative process here -- Tibbett's heavily distorted staccato chords and gut-wrenching guitar soloing mingle with pastoral guitar washes and thoughtful 12 string fingerings and are combined with his collaborater's percussive inputs resulting in music collages of beautiful originallity.

The Red Temple, Burning Temple, Lachana and Chandoha each tell a story or trigger various sensory imaginations to my mind, while the others either lack flow (Black Temple) or never seem to get beyond a vague idea of a story or an emotion. I understand there's a certain 'calculated randomness' to the workings of the universe, but it's not necessarily interesting to listen to except, perhaps, as an uber look into the interpretations on, or construction of randomness from one man's mind...

If you're new to Steve Tibbetts, this is a very decent work to start with. Not his most accesable (his 2nd album, the overtly emotional "YR" easily takes that honor), but it has some astonishing recording dynamics and guitar and percussion muscianship that you'll find in few other places. If you like the more sedate pieces (or pieces of pieces) you hear, travel next to his "Safe Journey" album then his recent effort with Choying Drolma from 2004; if you like the more percussive and electric guitar dynamics then try Exploded View followed by the even more experimental dynamics of "The Fall of us All."

This recording represents more of a series of soundscapes rather than what we might generally recognize as songs. They will take you on a journey if you let them, but this is not casual listening music.

Describing the uniqueness of this music is unfortunately harder than simply saying it. But I guess that's part of my undertaking in providing my comments. Each song relies heavily on percussion and guitar, both in varying forms. There are side instruments in some songs, but they generally do not play prominent roles. The music flows, but really has no beginning and no end but for the brief moments of silence when between what have been described as tracks, hence the description as soundscapes. Unlike CD's such as Transit, which was a disappointment, the music is always pleasant if not melodic, Critical listening will reveal new textures and layers on each listening.

This is my second Steve Tibbetts CD, Safe Journey being the first and a third is on the way. It's safe to say that I enjoy this unique brand of music. Thank you Sterophile for making me aware of Steve Tibbetts as he was previously unknown to me. At least one reviewer there has put this CD on his list of 5 CD's if he was stuck on a desert island. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but this is good stuff that you will likely enjoy if you've somehow managed to find this CD review.

Sorry I found no other way to describe it. Tibbetts and his music travel through space and time. This album features contemplative music and plenty of distortion guitar art and polyrhythmic drumming. The performance of Anderson, Wise and Anton is commended, an impressive powerful sound. Tibbetts punk electric guitar underscores the boisterous percussives driving underneath a rumbling tide of distorsion. All of it is very intoxicating, seductive and fun.

Steve Tibbetts by now has developed a style and voice that is both deep and reverberant yet not without surface shimmer and timbral elasticity. A Man About a Horse confirms this path with heavy tabla frequently consumed by volume pedal guitar chords that sound like assemblages of tones more than a reckognizable six-string instrument heard through standard amplification. This music needs relistening in order for its audience to appreciate the gaps and agogic stretches of tonal sinew inter-relating with the percussion headed by Mr. Tibbetts long time mate Marc Andersson.
In short, if you're looking for an extremely original sonic landscape that bears multiple listens, Tibbetts music is perhaps as good as it gets. I once said to two friends in a cafeteria line that I thought Tibbets's music contained 'earth bones' and, to this day, that pronouncement stands; heavy guitar, rollicking drums, and clouds of feedback make for an experience of music had nowhere else in the aural world.

Steve Tibbetts is amazing on ANY recording he has done. I'd like to hear a live album by him. I agree (in part) with one of the reviewers that he is leaning towards directions he as already explored such as Exploded view. I found that this record has no fresh "hook" on it, though he an his fellow musicians are always superb. It is nice to hear him in the 21th century!

I've been fooling with audio equipment and auditioning recordings for so long that not much gets me excited any more. I don't really care who might have a new preamplifier on the market, nor am I apt to run out and buy any new recording of the Mahler Symphony No. 2 that happens to show up in the stores. Yes, I am getting kind of old, kind of tired, kind of jaded -- but when a new CD from Steve Tibbetts unexpectedly showed up in my mailbox, I literally shouted for joy, pumped my fists in the air, and ran up the driveway so that I could get it into my CD player just as quickly as possible. Whew! After eight years, a new Steve Tibbetts CD on ECM was something to get excited about, and I was pumped.

The best part was, once I started listening to it, I stayed pumped, because A Man About a Horse is a rompin', stompin', name-takin' recording that keeps the energy level right up there where Tibbetts's previous ECM CD, The Fall of Us All, had previously pegged the meter. Tibbetts plays guitar and percussion, and is supported by his long-time sidekick Marc Anderson on percussion, plus Marcus Wise on additional percussion and Jim Anton on bass. Tibbetts has set up his guitar to trigger other sounds through a MIDI connection, and the resulting sound field is dense and multi-layered. Played at low to moderate listing levels, the music is engaging and inviting; played more loudly, the music seems to become more intense and dynamic. Some music seems to have an optimal volume level, but this music seems to expand to fill the volume as the volume increases. Interesting...

Tempos shift, drums thunder, birds twitter, voices drift in and out--is that the wind suddenly picking up, or is it in the recording? Like Mahler's music, Tibbetts's music seeks to create a world. I only wish my meager descriptive powers could do it justice. If you have never heard the music of Steve Tibbetts, A Man About A Horse would be a great place to start.

Steve Tibbetts is a guitar -- wait -- a music God.

As per his other collections this is yet another step into previously uncharted musical territory. I know of no other music that sounds anything even vaguely like what Tibbetts constructs, this makes it especially hard to describe. This could be a sound track for another world, one where emotions have texture and exhibit color while they make sounds. Against Eastern drums, Tibbetts' guitar work is alternatively etherial and warlike in it's ruthless aggression, only to suddenly fall back to the etherial. If the world were a complex machine directed by a sea of emotion, it might perhaps sound like this. Like I said, this music is difficult to describe -- but it is real and it is music and I like it very very much.

...that's all you need to call this. One of the keys to appreciating the creativity of Steve Tibbetts is to force yourself to shed any preconceived notions of 'genre'. It's fine in the case of some artists -- but when relating to the music of Tibbetts, it will only impose limitations that are destined to be shattered.

There are elements of assorted styles present in Tibbetts' compositions and playing -- but in the manner of many contemporary classical composers, he has passed through these territories, absorbing and metamorphosing the aspects of them that touched him, emerging with new forms at his command. His guitar is his voice, reflecting the creativity that lives and breathes in his soul. He combines acoustic and electric guitars on this recording -- ably aided by long-time collaborators Marc Andersen (percussion), Marcus Wise (percussion) and Jim Anton (bass) -- into a shimmering audio landscape. The percussion drives the pieces along nicely, without ever overpowering -- the presence of a 'standard' drumkit would be an obstacle, I think, to the mood-generating ability of Tibbetts and crew.

Steve Tibbetts is a master of mood -- the 'story' or 'narrative' aspect of his work is strong as well, but not as overtly presented as in the music of other artists. The listener has to be willing to devote some time and attention to this recording -- but it's more than worth the effort.