Daniel Bachman // Jake Xerxes Fussell

Excited to welcome Daniel Bachman to Liverpool from Virginia and overjoyed he'll be playing our bunker space - Kolbox .. he'll be joined by Jake Xerxes Fussell.

Artfully crafted solo acoustic guitar with storytelling capabilities that belie the lack of lyrics. Rolling Stone named him Daniel 'an artist you need to know'.

Jake is one helluva bluesman: my favorite of his generation, in fact; and, in my opinion, the best young traditional blues artist performing today.
- George Mitchell

Donation Entry...

Daniel Bachman is a 6 string and lap steel guitar player from Virginia currently living in North Carolina. Bachman grew up steeped in the traditional music of the Commonwealth, drawing from and expanding on it in his own fingerstyle guitar albums including Seven Pines(Tompkins Square, 2013), Orange County Serenade (Bathetic, 2014), and the new LP River (Three Lobed, 2015).

On record and in person you’re introduced to a veritable landscape of winding guitar with Bachman treating his guitar lines and licks in a way that resembles the earth itself, at its most pristine, delicate, yet also primal and overpowering. Pieces move, ascending and descending in the same way that the clouds roll through blue skies, the same way brooks babble down rocky fronts carving their paths in the land.

Solo guitarists come and go and it takes Daniel Bachman, like John Fahey or Jack Rose before him, to completely show you the power in one man and his instrument. You don’t need an ensemble of players and dense layers of dissonance to create a fully realized, and actualized, chunk of music. With every new album Bachman continues to push the boundaries of solo acoustic guitar and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

Jake Fussell
Durham, North Carolina singer and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell’s self-titled debut record, produced by and featuring William Tyler, transmutes ten arcane folk and blues tunes into vibey cosmic laments and crooked riverine rambles. Jake Xerxes (yes, that’s his real middle name, after Georgia potter D.X. Gordy) grew up in Columbus, Georgia, son of Fred C. Fussell, a folklorist, curator, and photographer who hails from across the river in Phenix City, Alabama (once known as “The Wickedest City in America” for its rampant vice, corruption, and crime.) Fred’s fieldwork took him, often with young Jake in tow, across the Southeast documenting traditional vernacular culture, which included recording blues and old-time musicians with fellow folklorists and recordists George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum (which led Jake to music, and to some of the songs herein) and collaborating with American Indian artists (which led Jake eventually to his graduate research on Choctaw fiddlers.)

As a teenager Jake began playing and studying with elder musicians in the Chattahoochee Valley, apprenticing with Piedmont blues legend Precious Bryant (“Georgia Buck”), with whom he toured and recorded, and riding wild with Alabama bluesman, black rodeo rider, rye whiskey distiller, and master dowser George Daniel (“Rabbit on a Log”). He joined a Phenix City country band who were students of Jimmie Tarlton of Darby and Tarlton; he accompanied Etta Baker in North Carolina; he moved to Berkeley, where he hung with genius documentary filmmaker Les Blank and learned from Haight folkies like Will Scarlett (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, Brownie McGhee) and cult fingerstyle guitarist Steve Mann (“Push Boat”); he appeared on A Prairie Home Companion. He did a whole lot of listening, gradually honing his prodigious guitar skills, singing, and repertoire. In 2005 he moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he enrolled in the Southern Studies department at Ole Miss, recorded and toured with Rev. John Wilkins, and, last year, met up with acclaimed artist William Tyler to begin recording his first solo album.

Collaborating with Tyler and engineer Mark Nevers in Nashville was a conscious decision to depart cloistered trad scenes and sonics for broader, more oblique horizons. Tyler, a guitar virtuoso known for his own compositions that untether and reframe traditional six-string forms and techniques, helmed the push boat in inimitable fashion, enlisting crack(ed) Nashville session vets Chris Scruggs (lap steel, bass, mandolin: Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Marty Stuart), Brian Kotzur (drums: Silver Jews), and Hoot Hester (fiddle Bill Monroe, Ray Charles) to crew.

Jake X. Fussell is certainly one of America’s finest young tradition-based songsters and guitar pickers. He had an ideal start: as a kid traveling the back roads of Georgia, Alabama, and even out to the Indian regions of Oklahoma with his folklorist dad, hearing and absorbing not only the vocal styles and guitar licks of such greats as Precious Bryant, but also developing a sure sense of the expressive core of Southern roots music. From Georgia’s Sea Islands and Chattahoochie Valley to the Mississippi Delta to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Jake is still listening and learning, and coming up with music that takes us to a deep place in the American spirit.

- Art Rosenbaum