Glenn Jones Since 1989, Glenn Jones has led Boston’s “avant -garage” instrumental rock band, Cul de Sac, whose musical adventures are documented on nine albums to date, including a soundtrack for cult-director Roger Corman (The Strangler’s Wife, 2003), and collaborations with guitarist John Fahey (The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, 1996) and former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (Abhayamudra, 2004). In 2001, Glenn began playing acoustic guitar in earnest, which he hadn’t touched in more than a ...

Glenn Jones Since 1989, Glenn Jones has led Boston’s “avant -garage” instrumental rock band, Cul de Sac, whose musical adventures are documented on nine albums to date, including a soundtrack for cult-director Roger Corman (The Strangler’s Wife, 2003), and collaborations with guitarist John Fahey (The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, 1996) and former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (Abhayamudra, 2004). In 2001, Glenn began playing acoustic guitar in earnest, which he hadn’t touched in more than a decade, and both Cul de Sac’s The Strangler’s Wife and the rapturously received Death of the Sun (2003) have featured as much of his acoustic guitar as his electric. A 30-plus-year devotee of the so-called “Takoma school,” Jones has written extensively on the steel-string guitar’s leading lights: John Fahey, with whom he was friends for nearly 25 years, and Robbie Basho, who befriended Jones during the five years before his untimely death in1986. With former Takoma label guitarists Peter Lang and Michael Gulezian -- along with Loren Mazzacane Connors, Henry Kaiser, Gary Lucas, Tony Conrad and others -- Jones performed at sold-out concerts honoring John Fahey, in NYC and San Francisco, shortly after Fahey’s death in 2001. As interest in the “old guard” -- Fahey, Basho, Lang and others -- has grown, a new fraternity of “guitar soli” tunesmiths has come to the fore, artists whose reason for playing is exploration, communication and expression -- not to show off their chops, display flashy technique, nor to create sonic wallpaper. In 2004, Jones stepped out of the long shadow cast by Takoma’s guitar visionaries and offered his own "new possibility" -- This Is the Wind That Blows It Out -- for Strange Attractors Audio House. In the spirit of the great Takoma Records releases of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, This is the Wind that Blows it Out wends its way through a varied stylistic terrain, charting its own unique course. "American Primitive," blues, rustic Mississippi Delta slide and classical forms cozy up fluently to one another, sometimes within the same tune. Jones’ fingerstyle and slide technique is on dazzling display, guiding the music across scenic vistas of mood and color. Its release was followed by a month-long tour of Europe with guitarist Jack Rose. In the year since, Jones has shared bills with Berlin-based Steffen Basho-Junghans, Max Ochs, Matt Valentine / Erika Elder; he’s toured with Peter Lang, and with some of the best of the new breed of solo guitar upstarts: Harris Newman, Sean Smith, and James Blackshaw. Jones contributed a track to the widely-praised guitar anthology, Imaginational Anthem, issued by Tompkins Square Records in 2005, and has just finished recording his second solo guitar album -- titled Against Which the Sea Continually Beats — to be issued by Strange Attractors in February 2007. The new album will be followed by a tour of the U.S., with Steffen Basho-Junghans, in March / April of next year. * * * * Reviews of This is the Wind that Blows it Out: “. . . gorgeous luminous settings . . . scored across a series of open tunings, which he threads with beautiful rolling melodies, his slide work soundings like the flutter of tiny metal butterflies . . . one of the best of the recent deluge.” --David Keenan, The Wire “. . . a lean and lively hound among the sheep.” --Bill Meyer, Dusted “. . . done with a natural, unforced feel devoid of flash and etched in slow detail so every nuance of his vibrato and tone can be absorbed. Really, the right word is ‘felt,’ since these instrumental compositions all have genuine emotional resonance, no slight accomplishment.” --Ted Drozdowski, Boston Phoenix “Jones dispenses with the modern aesthetic, and instead delves deeply into the traditional, and comes up with a beautiful, haunting, and indeed poetic album. . . .” --Jeff Fitzgerald, Aural Traditions “. . . sensitivity and power that instantly communicates . . . demonstrates that his mastery of his instrument goes well beyond the speed of his fingers and lies in the investment of his mind and soul in his art." --Michael Patrick Brady, Brainwashed “Fahey gathered in the blues, traditional folk, experimentalism, slack key, and a dozen other strains to birth a whole school of thinking about acoustic guitar. Jones is a worthy student, especially because he both incorporates doctrine and gently plays against it. Moments can feel downright epic (‘Sphinx Unto Curious Men’), gleeful (‘Linden Avenue Stomp’), and believably melancholy (‘Doll Hospital’). . . . Solo displays can often feel labored or too demonstrative but Jones conveys a profound pleasure in excavating this music that dispels any thoughts of scholarship or technique. This is what one person can do with one instrument and it is a beautiful thing.” --Dennis Cook, Jambase “. . . in light of modern trends in fingerstyle (anti-structure exemplified by Jack Rose and Six Organs of Admittance), Jones conceives his songs with a degree of competence and sensitivity unparalleled by any of today’s musicians . . . the first non-Fahey fingerstyle album worth buying in years. . . .” --Matthew Baldwin, Monterey County Weekly