Repertoire, a hot release from Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label, sees guitar intellectual Shane Parish flex across fourteen cover songs arranged for acoustic guitar inside a tidy thirty-two minutes, a detail very much in keeping with Bill’s own music, which never outstays its welcome. For those unfamiliar with Shane, he is a prolific player, arranger and educator of the guitar, his most notable outfits being instrumental trio Ahleuchatistas and Bill’s guitar quartet (Shane also transcribed Music for Four Guitars to tab, which is part of the download). Here, he goes it alone, and the resulting set is quietly satisfying and the playing subtly virtuosic.
There are many points of interest here, and Shane unsurprisingly unleashes several styles and shades across the album, but Serenade to a Cuckoo is a wonderful starting point. Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s flute tune transfers beautifully to guitar, with Shane’s arpeggio intro and sympathetic main body slowing things down and creating a tune that actually works better than the original. There are shades of Glenn Jones’s Everything Ends, the best song from The Giant who ate Himself here, which is no bad thing.
Elsewhere, opener Lonely Woman, with its thumbed bass line, is reminiscent of John Fahey at his most grown up, whereas John Cage’s Totem Ancestor is weird and wonderful, packing a huge amount of technique and moods into two minutes thirty. This one begins with a furtive frown, before shifting into a scurrying rhythm and then a more playful chase run. It is a testament to Shane’s playing that he can create the many nuances of Cage’s work with the humble acoustic guitar because this one is a finely nuanced miniature.
As is Reincarnation of a Lovebird, to be fair. Charles Mingus’s brass and percussion-heavy jazz tune has plenty of scope when applied to the guitar, so Shane has fun adding brushes of flamenco around a slowed-down mid-section that manages to squeeze as much life and dynamism as the original into a less than three-minute piece. And then there is Journey in Satchidananda, one of Alice Coltrane’s masterpieces, a spellbinding piece of music for harp, soprano saxophone, bass and percussion that Shane takes on single-handedly. Folly, you might think, but this little gem manages to both pay tribute to and encapsulate the magic of the piece inside a fraction of the original’s run time. What Shane does here is give the listener the essential bones of the piece while maintaining its magic. It works beautifully alongside the original, encouraging the listener to seek it out, as I would encourage anybody to check out this excellent collection of beautifully performed songs.
Repertoire is released on 10th May via Palilalia Records. Pre-Order here: https://shaneparish.bandcamp.com/album/repertoire
Connect: https://www.shaneparish.com/