 (7).”
1968 The Pentangle releases their first album “Sweet Child” immediately followed by the amazing albums “The Pentangle” and “Basket of Light.” The same year Incredible String band released “Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” and “Wee Tam” featuring Robin Williamson and Mike Heron. These albums are hippie psychedelic folk with whimsical charm and eastern raga-acid-folk embellishments. Green Crown is a notable track which is a wonderfully psychedelic raga folk song the likes of which have yet to be recreated.
Takoma Records released Minneapolis based Leo Kottke’s second album “Circle Round the Sun” in 1970 which sold well (3). The rare and classic band Magic Carpet released its one and only self-titled album which infuses sitar into folk music.
Leo Kottke – Circle Round the Sun
In 1972 Glenn Jones is introduced to John Fahey in high school. (2)
1973 Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan release “Ragas” a stunning double disc LP featuring two of India’s greatest musicians.
On Feb. 28 1986, Robbie Basho dies on a chiropractor’s table in Berkeley after an “intentional whiplash” procedure causes several blood vessels in his neck to burst.
At the same time thirty-three-year-old guitarist Steffen Basho-Junghans first hears Basho’s music while living in East Berlin. “I discovered it with a German-licensed release of the first Windham Hill guitar sampler from 1981… About five or six months later, I got a message that Robbie died nearly at the same time that I was discovering him.” Throughout the 1980 to present day Steffen Basho-Junghans has been playing in the raga folk style. He was born in 1953 in Germany and toured extensively and developed a guitar festival in Berlin. In the 2000s he began releasing solo guitar albums which display incredible musical talent, creativity and impeccable skill. One of the most refined and polished integrations of folk and raga in meditative form. Steffen added Basho to his name out of respect and to honor his fallen musical hero’s legacy.
1992 Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, a world renowned Indian musician, had his first major album release. He transformed “the Hawaiian slide guitar into a more Indian instrument, adding chikaris and sympathetic strings, and eventually coming out with a 24-string instrument based on the old Hawaiian six-string. This is universally regarded as the highest form of the slide guitar’s development anywhere, making Bhattacharya one of the masters of the instrument, especially when considering his amazing abilities in playing Indian forms on it (19).” Bhattacharya is one of the greatest musicians I have ever witnessed play on stage.
”In 1997 “Twenty-seven-year-old musician Jack Rose hears Fahey’s 1974 LP “Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier’s Choice)” on WUVT FM in Blacksburg, VA. “Basically that record was the blueprint for me on how to merge Asian and American country blues into a raga form,” he says. “When I first heard it I thought the entire record was improvised. Later I found out ‘Thus Krishna on the Battlefield’ was improvised, but that the…title track was completely composed (2).”
In 1998 Ben Chasny released his first album under his moniker Six Organs of Admittance. This was the same year the Chasny first heard a cassette of Peter Walker’s “Rainy Day Raga” and it deeply influenced his guitar playing. He would go on to make many albums evolving the psych folk, psych rock, American primitive and raga guitar styles as well as noise and avant-garde.
1998 Sir Richard Bishop released his first solo album “Salvador Kali.” He was a founding member of the experimental rock outfit the Sun City Girls and has continued his love of eclectic musical styling. His albums range from the avant-garde, jazz, blues, folk, world music, raga, ragtime and free form improvisations.
February 22, 2001, John Fahey left his body for the unknown expanse.
Jack Rose released his first homemade CD-r in 2001.
In 2003 Chesny (Six Organs of Admittance) would release “For Octavio Paz” a solo guitar album which is a gem in the instrumental American Primitive style and one of two solo guitar albums (7).
Six O