Jazz Articles about James Blackshaw

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James Blackshaw: The Glass Bead Game

by David Rickert
August 19, 2009

Had Ira Gitler not encountered John Coltrane and heard James Blackshaw instead, he might have used his famous “sheets of sound" to describe the guitarist's music. Blackshaw uses his twelve-string guitar to create giant waves of chords that repeat motifs, creating a harmonious and meditative music that is like new age music for the intelligentsia. New age has such a negative stigma that I hesitate to use that word in describing what Blackshaw does, but there's no denying that that's ...

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James Blackshaw: The Cloud Of Unknowing

by Chris May
July 20, 2007

Music of such shimmering, unalloyed, heavenly beauty as this doesn't come along very often. Maybe once or twice a decade. Guitarist Johnny Smith's early masterpiece Moonlight In Vermont (reissued Roulette, 2004) and harmonica player Hendrik Meurkens' Amazon River (Blue Toucan, 2005) are amongst recent releases of comparable loveliness.

British 12-string acoustic guitarist James Blackshaw's roots lie in the Takoma school of American primitivism led by guitarist John Fahey--in the “cosmic sentimentalism" which Fahey turned against in his final ...