INFINITY BLUES

We’re only months past the Spring Equinox and a local player has released a strong contender for Northeast Florida’s Album of the Year. Is this an actual award? Probably not. And the recipient in question is such a humble player that he’d probably cringe at the very idea of this imaginary prize. Since 1979, multi-instrumentalist Arvid Smith has been both a ubiquitous and anonymous presence on our music scene. Smith is a veteran of playing everything from grimy rock clubs and the Florida Folk Festival to his regular gig providing a soundtrack of Eastern-fueled drones for local yoga studios. Over the decades, just a few of the bands he’s played with include the Great Invisibles, Nerve Meter, Tammerlin (originally, Tory Voodoo), Canary in the Coalmine, and his current project, the New Moon Ramblers.

All of these musical aggregates are indicative of the range of instrumentation, versatility, and Smith’s deliberate “open-ness” toward the art of performing music. In addition, Smith has been a longtime music scholar and scribe. In 1976, music imprint Mel Bay published Smith’s book-and-LP set, Contemporary Slide Guitar. Locally, he’s written for now-defunct rags like Vue and GO. Smith is also one of the longest-running writers for Folio Weekly Magazine; his first piece was a 1987 feature on Pili Pili.

As a player, Smith is fluent on an arsenal of “wood and wire” instruments, including acoustic and electric guitars, Melobar and lap steel, Dobro, and the Eastern-born instruments sitar, swaramandala, saraswati vina, and tanpura, as well as the Indonesian kapaci.

The many elements and skills merge in Smith’s debut release, The Journal of Sir Tarry Boy. Over the span of seven pieces, Smith is joined by musicians whom he describes as players from the “local World Music, esoteric-yoga-music scene.”

That lineup includes Joe Yorio (reeds and saxophones), John Guinta (handpans), Sandie Lythgoe (flute and percussion), Peter Mosely (double bass), Lisa Myers (percussion), and Windy Weather (violin). Collectively, the album has a kind of group languid, call-and-response ambience, resulting in a sonic dialogue that is worthy of much repeated listening.

The “World Music” that Smith and band conjure is more akin to truly free ’60s spirits like Don Cherry, Sandy Bull, the Sea Ensemble, and NYC drone avatars like La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, rather than the saccharine-saffron “global” dreck served up by Enya, Yanni, and the other “sampled pygmies-meet-techno”-style drivel that plagues, if not sadly defines, much of the current genre.

If there’s a precedent for Smith’s acoustic guitar “otherness,” it’s surely found in the realm of the late, great guitar polymath John Fahey. Smith’s tune “Song of the Summer Squall,” with its eerie mix of acoustic and slide guitar, sitar, tanpura, and double bass, is a fitting evocation, and literal dedication, to Fahey. In the past two decades, Fahey (1939-2001) has been canonized by players like Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke, but Smith’s fascination and study of Fahey goes back to the ’60s, and Smith was heavily featured on 1979’s A Tribute to John Fahey (Kicking Mule Records), the first and only album of its kind released during Fahey’s lifetime.

Smith agreed to a Folio Weekly Magazine Q&A via email. A transcription of that exchange follows.

Folio Weekly Magazine: What’s the story behind the album title, The Journal Of Sir Tarry Boy?
Arvid Smith: The release ended up with much more sitar than I imagined it would. It’s been a journey with the instrument and I’m still playing my first one here and there. His name is “Sir Tarry Boy” — the name just came to me one day. Looks like a coded phrase for “sitar,” wouldn’t you say? And to “tarry” is to delay or lay about, and I didn’t pick up the instrument until age 53 … come lately.

What kind of effect has playing Eastern instruments and Western, i.e., acoustic and electric guitars had on you? Through both technique and melodic vocabulary, but also in regard to your perceptions as an artist?
I don’t play Indian classical music; I have no tuition in it, only some lessons sitting with a friend who is a classically trained Indian singer. He would play harmonium and sing bhajans and filmi songs composed in the raags, and I would learn them and play them back to him on sitar. This was to learn raga properly. On my own, I know some scales, etc., but to learn to capture their essence and develop them properly takes a long time of steady tutelage under a teacher, which I don’t have. To answer your question, I see a correlation between what a blues player, in any blues style, does with his instrument and what an Indian musician does, technique-wise, with the string bending and microtones, etc. Just look at how magnificently they have elevated the violin and slide guitar into their own music. Sitar just comes out that way; it’s made for that approach. Thing is, anything you do on it sounds “Indian,” in the same way that anything on a banjo conjures a barnyard to our ears.

Much of the music on the album seems based on motivic ideas, but while the players might revisit these motifs, they sound abandoned altogether and shimmer out into improvisation. Was this a deliberate idea on your part, as the de facto leader?
You took the words right out of my mouth. “Summer Squall” was thoroughly composed, as was “Cirrus” — no improvisation on those.  Everything else was as you put it. Joe Yorio is possessed by melodic invention … I am humbled by his talent; Peter Mosely’s, too.

I don’t think that, overall, the album has a menacing aspect, but some of the pieces seem to have a darker, arcane quality; particularly in the somber chiming of “A Bell Ringing in an Empty Sky” and “The Rite of the Black Sun.”
Music so rarely stands still; those two tracks do stand alone. “Empty Sky” grew out of the wood melding with the strings of a hammered acoustic guitar and swaramandala, and then Windy’s violin gave it shape. “Black Sun” was totally spontaneous, Joe’s clarinet and my sitar, we used the morning raag ‘todi’ as a framework, but with some abstracts that a guru would slap the shit out of us for.

John Fahey created a fairly seismic shift in how we listen to, assess, and play acoustic guitar. He was certainly more than mere virtuoso — he was a seeker, memoirist, raconteur, etc. — the whole hit. Earlier in your career, you were featured on the first Fahey tribute album. What is your personal view of Fahey?
One has to take time out to absorb John’s music. Yes, you’re right, he did dozens of releases in his life and there’s not a hot lick not to be found on any of them. What I find intriguing, rather than his devotion and compositional sense, is taking a well-worn, simple folk blues passage from Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues,” and turning it into the majestic/contemplative, “Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania/Alabama Border.” Fahey was the original DIY musician, had his own label as early as 1958, so he answered to no one, an American original, iconoclast as surely as Charles Ives or Henry Cowell.