Guitarist /composer Glenn Jones claims a lengthy and rich relationship to what his longtime friend John Fahey so famously dubbed "American Primitive Guitar". Aside from being seduced by punk in its latter-70's heyday and brandishing the electric for a large portion of his career (including 20 years as a founding member of post-rock instrumentalists Cul de Sac), it was the acoustic steel-string and the seemingly multi-directional genres born from Fahey's homespun Takoma imprint that informed much of Jones' early musical vision. He's also an accomplished writer and producer, penning notes for many of Fahey's reissues as well as his final posthumous album Red Cross; it was from Jones' personal archive that the Robbie Basho live concert album Bonn 1st Supreme he produced for Bo' Weavil Recordings (entrusted to him by the late Basho, whom he befriended in the latter years of his life) was exhumed. In short, he's an authority on the subject, both as a player and scholar, and with two gorgeous, critically-acclaimed solo albums under his belt, Jones is widely and justly recognized as one of the major voices of the international wave of acoustic steel string players that seemingly crested in the wake of Fahey's death. Barbecue Bob in Fishtown is Jones' latest, a disarmingly elegiac foray into wider and deeper streams of ever-chiming steel string.
Returning to Martha's Vineyard where Jones recorded his previous masterwork (Against Which the Sea Continually Beats, Strange Attractors, 2007), Barbecue Bob in Fishtown explores the possibilities of classical composition within American folk forms and solo instrumentation. Its precisely this stylistic melding which sets Jones apart from his modern-day acoustic underground brethren. Jones is able to discover and project wide-screened cinema from just 6 & 12 strings, coaxing vivid panoramic images from his sparkling fingerstyle playing. Experimentations with tuning and various capos of his own invention are wed with delicately expressive playing and a remarkable compositional prowess. Barbecue Bob in Fishtown also finds Jones' performing solo on 5-string banjo for the first time on record, exhuming the spirit of Clive's Original Band as seen through a Dock Boggs-esque prism.
Barbecue Bob in Fishtown distills the best qualities of Jones' musical vision into a finely honed summation of his distinctly singular style. A timeless recording, one to be held up as one of the best examples of the genre by a unique player dubbed by writer Bill Meyer in Signal to Noise as "…an elder amongst the disciples".