Enter the Realm of the Unguitarist
Encountering Rick Deitrick
There’s that naming convention for albums where an artist will use a work’s title to boast a little bit, while letting prospective listeners know what to expect. See: Willie Dixon’s I Am the Blues, or Lou Donaldson’s Everything I Play is Funky, to name two released in 1970.
This week I stumbled on one from an artist I’d never heard – the solo guitarist Rick Deitrick. It’s a 5-disc collected works set on Tompkins Square Records, and it’s called The Unguitarist.
The Ohio-born Deitrick began recording in 1969; this anthology covers unreleased early pieces and several records from the 1970s, including the spellbinding Gentle Wilderness (1978), which has never been out on CD.
Not gonna lie: The title got me to listen. Given the universe of guitar sounds and approaches in our guitar-saturated universe, it’s something of a large claim to say “This guy is not like the others.” In fact, he does have peers and artists with similar sensibilities. Deitrick plays earthy, meditative solo pieces that dwell in the general vicinity of John Fahey and not too far from Leo Kottke; it’s possible to imagine that some originals, like “Little Tujunga,” could have influenced Michael Hedges and the chiming, naturalistic guitarists of Windham Hill.
Though the moods are calm and meditative, there’s sophisticated chordal harmony going on in Deitrick’s music – several of his minor-key works recall the compositions of Paraguayan guitarist Agustin Barrios. Unlike Fahey and others, Deitrick relies on standard tunings. His quote from the accompanying booklet explains a bit of his thinking: “During those years, the ‘60s/70’s, there was a lot of acoustic guitar playing, often using open tuning as a base. I wanted to create whole tones without de-tuning and keep access to the complex sounds stock tuning provided.”
Yes, there are complex sonics operating here. What struck me most about Deitrick’s music, though, was the clarity of its ideas, and the measured, placid, unadorned beauty of its settings. There’s truth in this title.
