Cabin Songs by Jeremy Bass

Adhyâropa Records is thrilled to announce Cabin Songs, the gorgeous new release by fingerstyle guitar virtuoso Jeremy Bass.

A former Brooklyn resident and current Woodstock emigre, Bass is a true polymath. After years of studying creative writing and classical guitar, he took his studies abroad to Italy and Spain, eventually settling in New York City where he earned a Masters of Music in Classical Guitar at the Mannes College of Music and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Along the way, Bass became the Music Director and bandleader for the OBIE award-winning The Secret City, an arts collective that hosts gatherings in Woodstock, New York City, and Los Angeles, and performed alongside such artists as John C Reilly, Patrice Quinn (Kamasi Washington), and Roseanne Cash. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary and mainstream publications, and he has been a visiting scholar at both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences. Songs from his two independently released EPs, Winter Bare and New York in Spring, won awards from the John Lennon Songwriting Competition (Best Jazz Song) and the UK Songwriting Contest (Mozart Award/Best Song), and his covers of early American spirituals were used as theme songs to multiple episodes of A Crime to Remember.

Cabin Songs is a departure from Bass’s previous release, 2016’s The Greatest Fire, which was a showcase for Bass’s vocals and songwriting acumen. His current venture, a purely instrumental display of achingly intimate solo guitar, is full of Celtic influence as well as the classical technique and composition forms he absorbed as a younger musician.

“This album represents a musical adventure that I always wanted to embark on but never allowed myself until I moved up to Woodstock, starting a new chapter of my life,” Bass says. “I’d been a classical guitarist since I was very young and still am, but I’d made songwriting my world for a long time. I wanted to bring these two passions together – instrumental music and songwriting forms, in an exploration of fingerstyle guitar in a Celtic or Americana vein. It created interesting questions – what were some of these new melodies I could create in this style, and what would I have to do technically to be able to execute them on a steel-string guitar? So I taught myself Travis picking and alternating thumb patterns in the manner of a Geoff Muldaur, Michael Hedges, Andy McKee, or Leo Kottke, the sort of thing that’s normally the bread and butter of fingerstyle guitarists but that I’d never really learned. Once that clicked in for me, I could just travel that path towards things I had already been hearing in my head.”

The first track, and first single, is indeed Muldaur’s own ‘Mole’s Moan,’ made famous in the version by Tom Rush that was used as the theme music for Gene Shay’s legendary folk music radio program. The alternating thumb pattern, which has roots in country blues and was adopted by Chet Atkins, Scotty Moore, James Taylor, John Prine, and Tommy Emmanuel, here announces the album’s soundworld and intent.

“My stepmother used to go to Club 47 (now called Club Passim) in Cambridge to hear Tom Rush play this song every week. When it came time to do this recording I sat down with the song over a weekend and eventually had it down, or at least my own version of it. It’s a gorgeous piece and it fits so comfortably under the fingers. I tried that recording with at least 10 different guitars and finally settled on a Martin D-1 Authentic that’s one of the largest guitars I own, not what you’d expect for fingerstyle. But the whole instrument came alive when I played this tune on it. And maybe I did too, in a way.”

“The music on Cabin Songs is an exploration of something that felt very familiar, but still completely new to me,” Bass says. “I think it was tapping into music I’d never explored, but had always been inside, wanting to come out. There’s so much joy in it, and attention to beauty, and a meditative spirituality that permeates all of the pieces on the record. Where does my spirit want to spend its time? This album is an expression of my response to that question.”

Bass speaks like a poet, and on the album’s second single, ‘Part of the Journey,’ he plays like one as well. A minor key filigree heralds a modal texture that carries us through the first section of the piece until landing finally in a satisfying Bb “chorus” section, and a melody James Taylor himself would be proud of.

“‘Part of the Journey’ was one of the first pieces I wrote for Cabin Songs. It has a much more mystical feeling to it – it was like I was channelling Woodstock, the Catskills, and the natural world around me. I recorded these pieces in my home near Mount Guardian just north of
Woodstock and you can hear the sounds of nature creeping in; peeper and crickets or even the occasional woodpecker, all of which of course I decided to keep in there,” Bass says with a grin. “To a listener hearing this for the first time I would hope that it would communicate alternately a joy and excitement at living, or a feeling of having set out on a new journey, and of the beauty of this instrument that I’ve fallen in love with all over again.”

“These pieces were recorded on Martin guitars that were somewhat new to me but had all been pre-loved,” Bass says, “so I was exploring sonic spaces that had been lived in by musicians before me but were waking up in my own hands for the first time. What separates me from other fingerstyle players is that I’ve never tried to imitate any one of them. It helps, in a way, to be slightly under-educated about the history of this style of playing! But as I was recording this music I did start to investigate it more and more and the players I found myself being the most inspired by were Celtic musicians like Tony McManus and Al Petteway, along with my classical touchstones like Leo Brouwer, Sergio Assad, and the lutenist Ronn McFarlane.”

“When I sit down to compose music, I’m essentially improvising everything, so at first what comes out are my deepest influences – that’s classical guitar music, but it’s also folk music with a bit of bluegrass ambition that I might not have really earned yet,” he chuckles. “So I’m really navigating a sort of middle ground that not too many people dwell in. It creates something organic and improvisatory in between worlds.”

Jeremy Bass is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. Originally trained in classical and flamenco guitar, he now focuses on roots-inspired rock 'n' roll and acoustic instrumental music. He is the Musical Director for the OBIE award-winning Secret City and an award-winning poet and critic.

jeremybassmusic.com
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