Glenn Jones: Walking In His Own Shoes

Neo-Takoma School guitarist Glenn Jones trips himself up. By Elliott Sharp

Boston-based guitarist Glenn Jones began a musical odyssey in the early ’70s when a high school teacher turned him on to John Fahey. Soon after, he saw the guitarist perform at a concert in Harvard Square, and when Fahey asked the audience which composer had written the song he’d just performed—it was Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete—a young Jones shouted the correct answer. They spoke after Fahey’s set, became friends, and collaborated several times, including on The Epiphany of Glenn Jones (1997). Though Fahey died in 2001, their musical conversation continues.

Jones is the greatest living practitioner of the “American Primitive” guitar style Fahey founded and nurtured on his Takoma label with fellow guitarists like Robbie Basho and Harry Taussig. With its mixture of country-blues finger-picking, avant-garde experimentation and neoclassical flourishes, the “Takoma School” introduced a modern composerly orientation to traditional American musics.

While compositionally and technically sophisticated, Jones found the Takoma School’s expressiveness most compelling. “Fahey looked for emotion in music and didn’t deny his darker emotions,” Jones explains. “There’s joy and melancholy at once, vulnerability and also the will to be invulnerable, which are very complicated emotions to express musically.”

On his fourth solo album, The Wanting (Thrill Jockey), Jones’ debt to Fahey is evident, but, as always, these 11 new compositions for guitar and banjo show him successfully charting his own course. “I never set out to ape anyone else’s style, and always look for ways to trip myself up and make it difficult to walk totally in anyone else’s shoes.”

One way Jones does this is by experimenting with unorthodox tunings, which he compares to “exploring new landscapes.” It’s fitting that he uses this language, as his exuberant, mesmerizing and wide-open pieces evoke the feeling of barreling down a country road with the windows down on a warm day. Several songs, in fact, are inspired by places he has personally explored, like “Menotomy River Blues,” the old name for what is now called Alewife Brook, which runs miles away from his Boston home.

“The brook wends its way through the neighborhood,” Jones says. “But few of the thousands of commuters who zip by every day are aware of its existence. I’ve strolled there a few times. Fahey went there looking for turtles years ago. He didn’t find any, but one night I saw a huge one crossing a street near there.”