Nick Jonah Davis - Of Time and Tides
Artist: Nick Jonah Davis
Album: Of Time and Tides
Label: Tompkins Square
Of all post-war musicians, it could be said that John Fahey casts the longest shadow. His presence is monolithic and pretty much any musician wielding a guitar is de facto influenced by Fahey, and even those innovating away and beyond his reach are often classed as post-Takoma – Fahey-influenced by association. The oddest thing about this all-pervading sense of influence is that rarely, if ever, does a musician emulate Fahey, or even try to. Fahey occupied some other space, and his frazzled, wound style doesn’t bear copying or repeating. Yet the comparisons persist, and his presence is there behind everything, shamanic, like some pan-ancestral ur-musician.
Nick Jonah Davis, a Nottingham based musician, is the latest in a long line of solo guitarists who have been compared to Fahey (and who it has to be said, have cited Fahey as an influence), but the comparison is largely needless, or at least has been filtered through a very European/Celtic sensibility to the point of remaining but a distant echo. Though Of Time and Tides does move through differing moods (including a bright waltz in the closing ‘Fred and Evelyn’) the largest influence here is the damp autumnal melancholy of Bert Jansch – who is increasingly becoming some kind of ur-figure himself. Two pieces, ‘Cold Wind on the Long Mynd’ and ‘Nine Stones Close’, could take Jansch’s lugubrious whisper with ease, and the guitar playing has much of the same poise and fluidity. Of Time and Tides also has a great sense of age about it: at times it’s tempting to think of it as having a Gothic lineage, but something like a British Primitivism might be more accurate. In the main, this is music that sounds of age, weathered and elemental.
Read the rest of the review over at The Liminal.
06. Nine Stones Close by Nick Jonah Davis