EXPERIMENTAL
BY JOHN MULVEY
Shane Parish
★★★★
Repertoire
PALILALIA. DL/LP
Journey In Satchidananda and Europe Endless, John Fahey-style? Yes please!
In his notes to this album of solo performances, Shane Parish refers to an Andrés Segovia quote about the guitar being “an orchestra in miniature”. Parish has lately been on manoeuvres in an actual guitar orchestra of sorts, as part of the heavy-duty, electrified Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Here, though, he uses exceptional fingerpicking technique on acoustic to tackle a canon of mostly non-guitar tunes: jazz by Mingus, Dolphy, Ornette, Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra; electronica by Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk; prepared piano by John Cage. Parish’s label boss Orcutt made experimental capital out of the Great American Songbook on 2013’s A History Of Every One, but on Repertoire Parish is almost flipping those polarities, taking some pretty outré music and exposing the accessible melodies at their core. And while Parish is candid about his process, discussing how his take on Roland Kirk’s Serenade To A Cuckoo is informed by Davy Graham’s Angi, the album plays less like a scholarly treatise, more a love letter to great music – and to its enduring flexibility.