Nathaniel Braddock, Quadrille & Collapse

About

Musician and composer Nathaniel Braddock tours internationally and performs an array of different musical styles in venues as disparate as underground arts spaces and Lincoln Center. Based for years in Chicago, Braddock relocated to Sydney, Australia, in 2014, and to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2016.

Nathaniel leads the acclaimed Central African soukous ...

group the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, a collaboration between American, Ghanaian, Zambian, and Congolese musicians including the great Samba Mapangala and members of Ghana’s acclaimed Western Diamonds. Nathaniel has performed and recorded with a number of indie rock bands, including Tobin Summerfield’s gigantic band “Never Enough Hope”, The Zincs (Thrill Jockey), Ancientgreeks (Flameshovel), Edith Frost (Drag City) and others. He also played for years in the Butcher Shop Quartet, performing electric guitar arrangements of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and other 20th century classical works. Braddock leads an eight-piece electric guitar ensemble that plays his original compositions. He has twice been featured in Guitar PlayerMagazine.

Nathaniel teaches privately and at the Passim School of Music. He was a senior faculty member at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music until 2014, and Chair of the Chicago Waldorf School’s guitar program from 2005-12. Braddock’s class offerings include African Electric and African Acoustic Guitar Styles, Fingerpicking Around The World, Fingerboard Theory, and British Folk Revival, and specialized courses on the music of artists like Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Davy Graham, John Fahey and Bert Jansch. His ensemble classes include Reggae, Afrobeat, Ethiojazz, Instrumental Rock, and “Kill Yr Idols”–a survey of influential punk and underground rock. Braddock also offers workshops and masterclasses in Europe and N. America on African popular guitar styles and was a guest lecturer at both Northwestern and DePaul Universities. Braddock has co-presented workshops with Ghanaian Palm Wine guitarist Koo Nimo, Tinariwen guitarist Abdallah ag Alhousseini, and Malian songhai guitarist Sidi Toure.

Other non-guitar musics that Nathaniel has studied include church bell music, Javanese and Balinese gamelan. He has presented many new works for dance in collaboration with Khecari, Hedwig Dance and choreographer Asimina Chremos, and with Julie Atlas Muz at the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. He is also the recipient of 2002, 2004, and 2005 CAAP grants from the City of Chicago to fund the development of new work, and a 2013 DCASE granting funding music research in Ghana, West Africa.

Nathaniel Braddock & Balla Kouyate at The Lily Pad

Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the...

Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the work of players like John Fahey, Ali Farka Toure, Bert Jansch, and Boubacar Traore.

Then he wound up in Australia, caring for his infant son. As he played solo gigs, he began braiding his complex, divergent influences together in new ways, returning to more exploratory approaches. The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.

The album deconstructs the age-old underpinnings of Americana, British folk, and African string music, building an organic whole with a subtle, searing edge: a rhythmic twist here, a challenging chord sequence there. It’s the music 20th-century classical mavericks might have made, if they tackled fingerpicking, palm wine music, and American parlor tunes.

“I came to a reckoning point. I was spending so much time transcribing and learning to play other musicians’ tunes, that I really wanted to write my own music again,” Braddock recounts. “I was spending time alone with our newborn son--I wasn’t in rehearsal with my 6-piece African dance band. I started dealing emotionally with how my playing had changed after years of teaching folk music, in both positive and negative ways. But I was also then thinking analytically about my influences, and how to create something beautiful that honored these new influences, yet got me back into exploratory, experimental material.”

To do this, Braddock unites early American open tunings and post-bop harmonies, palmwine rhythms and classical composition techniques. He finds new voicings and robust arrangements that make full use of the instrument. “I’m trying to play within expected traditional music idioms, but also make them unsettling and different,” notes Braddock. “Not to disrespect the tradition, but to disregard what is proper or improper.”

Braddock won his reputation as an innovative, skilled player in the Chicago indie rock (Ancientgreeks, the Zincs) and improvised music scenes (Butcher Shop Quartet), yet he had a long-standing fascination with African music that began in his teens. Not content to merely listen or dabble, he spent years studying, playing, and traveling to deepen his understanding of West African popular music, collaborating with musicians from Mali, Ghana, Congo, and Zambia.

He eventually taught an African guitar class at the Old Town School, and his students were so into it, they insisted he needed to start a band. He did, the Occidental Brothers. Fronted by a respected Ghanaian vocalist, Kofi Cromwell, the group took the world and eclectic scene by storm, playing Pitchfork and numerous major jazz festivals.

Ghanaian and Northern Malian elements persist in Braddock’s compositions. “Kodjo Odo Fowaa” takes palmwine rhythms and sikyi harmonies, but then departs from them harmonically, in an intimate tribute to his son. “Tiger Bucket” draws firmly on folk, but also takes cues from Hamza el Din, an early influence on Braddock. “The Desert Within” posits what John Fahey might have played after a long sojourn in the Sahara.

At the same time Braddock was teaching and playing African music intensively, he developed classes on fingerpicking styles. He used the work of British Folk Revival players like Jansch and Nick Drake, as well as early American styles and techniques, as models. He became fluent in this guitar dialect, though Braddock was slightly ambivalent about the rhythmic impact of this style, a notion he explored in “Regression to the Mean.”

“After teaching this style of playing, it changed the rhythm of how I played,” Braddock reflects. “I was at this moment, when I said, ‘God, what happened to me?’ Truthfully, I’ve become a better player, but my voice had moved toward the middle of the road. I embraced that rhythm, that right hand pattern, but played blazingly fast and changed the harmony.”

Whether lyrical or more challenging, Braddock’s playing has a sparkling crispness, an evocative precision. Braddock sees technique and emotion as entwined, and compositional concepts, memory, and personal experience find equal footing in his pieces. “When people write music, there’s a lot of autobiography. They don’t pull it out of the air. It comes from their personal history, from their context,” Braddock reflects. “Context and story are part of what makes things like African music so amazing. The music theory is also a part of that cultural context.”

Braddock is building context for the project, creating a video and commissioning remixes of the tracks, to bring out other elements and sides of the pieces. Yet the tracks on Quadrille & Collapse speak boldly for themselves, in the unique dialect Braddock has developed. “As a more mature musician, I have a bit more perspective than just letting things burble out,” he muses. “That’s part of what happens when you develop a personal vocabulary. It’s influenced by all the music in your practice, that you play regularly.”

Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the work of players like John Fahey, Ali Farka Toure, Bert Jansch, and Boubacar Traore.

Then he wound up in Australia, caring for his infant son. As he played solo gigs, he began braiding his complex, divergent influences together in new ways, returning to more exploratory approaches. The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.

The album deconstructs the age-old underpinnings of Americana, British folk, and African string music, building an organic whole with a subtle, searing edge: a rhythmic twist here, a challenging chord sequence there. It’s the music 20th-century classical mavericks might have made, if they tackled fingerpicking, palm wine music, and American parlor tunes.

“I came to a reckoning point. I was spending so much time transcribing and learning to play other musicians’ tunes, that I really wanted to write my own music again,” Braddock recounts. “I was spending time alone with our newborn son--I wasn’t in rehearsal with my 6-piece African dance band. I started dealing emotionally with how my playing had changed after years of teaching folk music, in both positive and negative ways. But I was also then thinking analytically about my influences, and how to create something beautiful that honored these new influences, yet got me back into exploratory, experimental material.”

To do this, Braddock unites early American open tunings and post-bop harmonies, palmwine rhythms and classical composition techniques. He finds new voicings and robust arrangements that make full use of the instrument. “I’m trying to play within expected traditional music idioms, but also make them unsettling and different,” notes Braddock. “Not to disrespect the tradition, but to disregard what is proper or improper.”

Braddock won his reputation as an innovative, skilled player in the Chicago indie rock (Ancientgreeks, the Zincs) and improvised music scenes (Butcher Shop Quartet), yet he had a long-standing fascination with African music that began in his teens. Not content to merely listen or dabble, he spent years studying, playing, and traveling to deepen his understanding of West African popular music, collaborating with musicians from Mali, Ghana, Congo, and Zambia.

He eventually taught an African guitar class at the Old Town School, and his students were so into it, they insisted he needed to start a band. He did, the Occidental Brothers. Fronted by a respected Ghanaian vocalist, Kofi Cromwell, the group took the world and eclectic scene by storm, playing Pitchfork and numerous major jazz festivals.

Ghanaian and Northern Malian elements persist in Braddock’s compositions. “Kodjo Odo Fowaa” takes palmwine rhythms and sikyi harmonies, but then departs from them harmonically, in an intimate tribute to his son. “Tiger Bucket” draws firmly on folk, but also takes cues from Hamza el Din, an early influence on Braddock. “The Desert Within” posits what John Fahey might have played after a long sojourn in the Sahara.

At the same time Braddock was teaching and playing African music intensively, he developed classes on fingerpicking styles. He used the work of British Folk Revival players like Jansch and Nick Drake, as well as early American styles and techniques, as models. He became fluent in this guitar dialect, though Braddock was slightly ambivalent about the rhythmic impact of this style, a notion he explored in “Regression to the Mean.”

“After teaching this style of playing, it changed the rhythm of how I played,” Braddock reflects. “I was at this moment, when I said, ‘God, what happened to me?’ Truthfully, I’ve become a better player, but my voice had moved toward the middle of the road. I embraced that rhythm, that right hand pattern, but played blazingly fast and changed the harmony.”

Whether lyrical or more challenging, Braddock’s playing has a sparkling crispness, an evocative precision. Braddock sees technique and emotion as entwined, and compositional concepts, memory, and personal experience find equal footing in his pieces. “When people write music, there’s a lot of autobiography. They don’t pull it out of the air. It comes from their personal history, from their context,” Braddock reflects. “Context and story are part of what makes things like African music so amazing. The music theory is also a part of that cultural context.”

Braddock is building context for the project, creating a video and commissioning remixes of the tracks, to bring out other elements and sides of the pieces. Yet the tracks on Quadrille & Collapse speak boldly for themselves, in the unique dialect Braddock has developed. “As a more mature musician, I have a bit more perspective than just letting things burble out,” he muses. “That’s part of what happens when you develop a personal vocabulary. It’s influenced by all the music in your practice, that you play regularly.”

The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals, Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.
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Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the work of players like John Fahey, Ali Farka Toure, Bert Jansch, and Boubacar Traore.

Then he wound up in Australia, caring for his infant son. As he played solo gigs, he began braiding his complex, divergent influences together in new ways, returning to more exploratory approaches. The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals, Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.

The album deconstructs the age-old underpinnings of Americana, British folk, and African string music, building an organic whole with a subtle, searing edge: a rhythmic twist here, a challenging chord sequence there. It’s the music 20th-century classical mavericks might have made, if they tackled fingerpicking, palm wine music, and American parlor tunes.

“I came to a reckoning point. I was spending so much time transcribing and learning to play other musicians’ tunes, that I really wanted to write my own music again,” Braddock recounts. “I was spending time alone with our newborn son--I wasn’t in rehearsal with my 6-piece African dance band. I started dealing emotionally with how my playing had changed after years of teaching folk music, in both positive and negative ways. But I was also then thinking analytically about my influences, and how to create something beautiful that honored these new influences, yet got me back into exploratory, experimental material.”

To do this, Braddock unites early American open tunings and post-bop harmonies, palmwine rhythms and classical composition techniques. He finds new voicings and robust arrangements that make full use of the instrument. “I’m trying to play within expected traditional music idioms, but also make them unsettling and different,” notes Braddock. “Not to disrespect the tradition, but to disregard what is proper or improper.”

Braddock won his reputation as an innovative, skilled player in the Chicago indie rock (Ancientgreeks, the Zincs) and improvised music scenes (Butcher Shop Quartet), yet he had a long-standing fascination with African music that began in his teens. Not content to merely listen or dabble, he spent years studying, playing, and traveling to deepen his understanding of West African popular music, collaborating with musicians from Mali, Ghana, Congo, and Zambia.

He eventually taught an African guitar class at the Old Town School, and his students were so into it, they insisted he needed to start a band. He did, the Occidental Brothers. Fronted by a respected Ghanaian vocalist, Kofi Cromwell, the group took the world and eclectic scene by storm, playing Pitchfork and numerous major jazz festivals.

Ghanaian and Northern Malian elements persist in Braddock’s compositions. “Kodjo Odo Fowaa” takes palmwine rhythms and sikyi harmonies, but then departs from them harmonically, in an intimate tribute to his son. “Tiger Bucket” draws firmly on folk, but also takes cues from Hamza el Din, an early influence on Braddock. “The Desert Within” posits what John Fahey might have played after a long sojourn in the Sahara.

At the same time Braddock was teaching and playing African music intensively, he developed classes on fingerpicking styles. He used the work of British Folk Revival players like Jansch and Nick Drake, as well as early American styles and techniques, as models. He became fluent in this guitar dialect, though Braddock was slightly ambivalent about the rhythmic impact of this style, a notion he explored in “Regression to the Mean.”

“After teaching this style of playing, it changed the rhythm of how I played,” Braddock reflects. “I was at this moment, when I said, ‘God, what happened to me?’ Truthfully, I’ve become a better player, but my voice had moved toward the middle of the road. I embraced that rhythm, that right hand pattern, but played blazingly fast and changed the harmony.”

Whether lyrical or more challenging, Braddock’s playing has a sparkling crispness, an evocative precision. Braddock sees technique and emotion as entwined, and compositional concepts, memory, and personal experience find equal footing in his pieces. “When people write music, there’s a lot of autobiography. They don’t pull it out of the air. It comes from their personal history, from their context,” Braddock reflects. “Context and story are part of what makes things like African music so amazing. The music theory is also a part of that cultural context.”

Braddock is building context for the project, creating a video and commissioning remixes of the tracks, to bring out other elements and sides of the pieces. Yet the tracks on Quadrille & Collapse speak boldly for themselves, in the unique dialect Braddock has developed. “As a more mature musician, I have a bit more perspective than just letting things burble out,” he muses. “That’s part of what happens when you develop a personal vocabulary. It’s influenced by all the music in your practice, that you play regularly.”

Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the work of players like John Fahey, Ali Farka Toure, Bert Jansch, and Boubacar Traore.

Then he wound up in Australia, caring for his infant son. As he played solo gigs, he began braiding his complex, divergent influences together in new ways, returning to more exploratory approaches. The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.

The album deconstructs the age-old underpinnings of Americana, British folk, and African string music, building an organic whole with a subtle, searing edge: a rhythmic twist here, a challenging chord sequence there. It’s the music 20th-century classical mavericks might have made, if they tackled fingerpicking, palm wine music, and American parlor tunes.

“I came to a reckoning point. I was spending so much time transcribing and learning to play other musicians’ tunes, that I really wanted to write my own music again,” Braddock recounts. “I was spending time alone with our newborn son--I wasn’t in rehearsal with my 6-piece African dance band. I started dealing emotionally with how my playing had changed after years of teaching folk music, in both positive and negative ways. But I was also then thinking analytically about my influences, and how to create something beautiful that honored these new influences, yet got me back into exploratory, experimental material.”

To do this, Braddock unites early American open tunings and post-bop harmonies, palmwine rhythms and classical composition techniques. He finds new voicings and robust arrangements that make full use of the instrument. “I’m trying to play within expected traditional music idioms, but also make them unsettling and different,” notes Braddock. “Not to disrespect the tradition, but to disregard what is proper or improper.”

Braddock won his reputation as an innovative, skilled player in the Chicago indie rock (Ancientgreeks, the Zincs) and improvised music scenes (Butcher Shop Quartet), yet he had a long-standing fascination with African music that began in his teens. Not content to merely listen or dabble, he spent years studying, playing, and traveling to deepen his understanding of West African popular music, collaborating with musicians from Mali, Ghana, Congo, and Zambia.

He eventually taught an African guitar class at the Old Town School, and his students were so into it, they insisted he needed to start a band. He did, the Occidental Brothers. Fronted by a respected Ghanaian vocalist, Kofi Cromwell, the group took the world and eclectic scene by storm, playing Pitchfork and numerous major jazz festivals.

Ghanaian and Northern Malian elements persist in Braddock’s compositions. “Kodjo Odo Fowaa” takes palmwine rhythms and sikyi harmonies, but then departs from them harmonically, in an intimate tribute to his son. “Tiger Bucket” draws firmly on folk, but also takes cues from Hamza el Din, an early influence on Braddock. “The Desert Within” posits what John Fahey might have played after a long sojourn in the Sahara.

At the same time Braddock was teaching and playing African music intensively, he developed classes on fingerpicking styles. He used the work of British Folk Revival players like Jansch and Nick Drake, as well as early American styles and techniques, as models. He became fluent in this guitar dialect, though Braddock was slightly ambivalent about the rhythmic impact of this style, a notion he explored in “Regression to the Mean.”

“After teaching this style of playing, it changed the rhythm of how I played,” Braddock reflects. “I was at this moment, when I said, ‘God, what happened to me?’ Truthfully, I’ve become a better player, but my voice had moved toward the middle of the road. I embraced that rhythm, that right hand pattern, but played blazingly fast and changed the harmony.”

Whether lyrical or more challenging, Braddock’s playing has a sparkling crispness, an evocative precision. Braddock sees technique and emotion as entwined, and compositional concepts, memory, and personal experience find equal footing in his pieces. “When people write music, there’s a lot of autobiography. They don’t pull it out of the air. It comes from their personal history, from their context,” Braddock reflects. “Context and story are part of what makes things like African music so amazing. The music theory is also a part of that cultural context.”

Braddock is building context for the project, creating a video and commissioning remixes of the tracks, to bring out other elements and sides of the pieces. Yet the tracks on Quadrille & Collapse speak boldly for themselves, in the unique dialect Braddock has developed. “As a more mature musician, I have a bit more perspective than just letting things burble out,” he muses. “That’s part of what happens when you develop a personal vocabulary. It’s influenced by all the music in your practice, that you play regularly.”

Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the work of players like John Fahey, Ali Farka Toure, Bert Jansch, and Boubacar Traore.

Then he wound up in Australia, caring for his infant son. As he played solo gigs, he began braiding his complex, divergent influences together in new ways, returning to more exploratory approaches. The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.

The album deconstructs the age-old underpinnings of Americana, British folk, and African string music, building an organic whole with a subtle, searing edge: a rhythmic twist here, a challenging chord sequence there. It’s the music 20th-century classical mavericks might have made, if they tackled fingerpicking, palm wine music, and American parlor tunes.

“I came to a reckoning point. I was spending so much time transcribing and learning to play other musicians’ tunes, that I really wanted to write my own music again,” Braddock recounts. “I was spending time alone with our newborn son--I wasn’t in rehearsal with my 6-piece African dance band. I started dealing emotionally with how my playing had changed after years of teaching folk music, in both positive and negative ways. But I was also then thinking analytically about my influences, and how to create something beautiful that honored these new influences, yet got me back into exploratory, experimental material.”

To do this, Braddock unites early American open tunings and post-bop harmonies, palmwine rhythms and classical composition techniques. He finds new voicings and robust arrangements that make full use of the instrument. “I’m trying to play within expected traditional music idioms, but also make them unsettling and different,” notes Braddock. “Not to disrespect the tradition, but to disregard what is proper or improper.”

Braddock won his reputation as an innovative, skilled player in the Chicago indie rock (Ancientgreeks, the Zincs) and improvised music scenes (Butcher Shop Quartet), yet he had a long-standing fascination with African music that began in his teens. Not content to merely listen or dabble, he spent years studying, playing, and traveling to deepen his understanding of West African popular music, collaborating with musicians from Mali, Ghana, Congo, and Zambia.

He eventually taught an African guitar class at the Old Town School, and his students were so into it, they insisted he needed to start a band. He did, the Occidental Brothers. Fronted by a respected Ghanaian vocalist, Kofi Cromwell, the group took the world and eclectic scene by storm, playing Pitchfork and numerous major jazz festivals.

Ghanaian and Northern Malian elements persist in Braddock’s compositions. “Kodjo Odo Fowaa” takes palmwine rhythms and sikyi harmonies, but then departs from them harmonically, in an intimate tribute to his son. “Tiger Bucket” draws firmly on folk, but also takes cues from Hamza el Din, an early influence on Braddock. “The Desert Within” posits what John Fahey might have played after a long sojourn in the Sahara.

At the same time Braddock was teaching and playing African music intensively, he developed classes on fingerpicking styles. He used the work of British Folk Revival players like Jansch and Nick Drake, as well as early American styles and techniques, as models. He became fluent in this guitar dialect, though Braddock was slightly ambivalent about the rhythmic impact of this style, a notion he explored in “Regression to the Mean.”

“After teaching this style of playing, it changed the rhythm of how I played,” Braddock reflects. “I was at this moment, when I said, ‘God, what happened to me?’ Truthfully, I’ve become a better player, but my voice had moved toward the middle of the road. I embraced that rhythm, that right hand pattern, but played blazingly fast and changed the harmony.”

Whether lyrical or more challenging, Braddock’s playing has a sparkling crispness, an evocative precision. Braddock sees technique and emotion as entwined, and compositional concepts, memory, and personal experience find equal footing in his pieces. “When people write music, there’s a lot of autobiography. They don’t pull it out of the air. It comes from their personal history, from their context,” Braddock reflects. “Context and story are part of what makes things like African music so amazing. The music theory is also a part of that cultural context.”

Braddock is building context for the project, creating a video and commissioning remixes of the tracks, to bring out other elements and sides of the pieces. Yet the tracks on Quadrille & Collapse speak boldly for themselves, in the unique dialect Braddock has developed. “As a more mature musician, I have a bit more perspective than just letting things burble out,” he muses. “That’s part of what happens when you develop a personal vocabulary. It’s influenced by all the music in your practice, that you play regularly.”

Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the work of players like John Fahey, Ali Farka Toure, Bert Jansch, and Boubacar Traore.

Then he wound up in Australia, caring for his infant son. As he played solo gigs, he began braiding his complex, divergent influences together in new ways, returning to more exploratory approaches. The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.

The album deconstructs the age-old underpinnings of Americana, British folk, and African string music, building an organic whole with a subtle, searing edge: a rhythmic twist here, a challenging chord sequence there. It’s the music 20th-century classical mavericks might have made, if they tackled fingerpicking, palm wine music, and American parlor tunes.

“I came to a reckoning point. I was spending so much time transcribing and learning to play other musicians’ tunes, that I really wanted to write my own music again,” Braddock recounts. “I was spending time alone with our newborn son--I wasn’t in rehearsal with my 6-piece African dance band. I started dealing emotionally with how my playing had changed after years of teaching folk music, in both positive and negative ways. But I was also then thinking analytically about my influences, and how to create something beautiful that honored these new influences, yet got me back into exploratory, experimental material.”

To do this, Braddock unites early American open tunings and post-bop harmonies, palmwine rhythms and classical composition techniques. He finds new voicings and robust arrangements that make full use of the instrument. “I’m trying to play within expected traditional music idioms, but also make them unsettling and different,” notes Braddock. “Not to disrespect the tradition, but to disregard what is proper or improper.”

Braddock won his reputation as an innovative, skilled player in the Chicago indie rock (Ancientgreeks, the Zincs) and improvised music scenes (Butcher Shop Quartet), yet he had a long-standing fascination with African music that began in his teens. Not content to merely listen or dabble, he spent years studying, playing, and traveling to deepen his understanding of West African popular music, collaborating with musicians from Mali, Ghana, Congo, and Zambia.

He eventually taught an African guitar class at the Old Town School, and his students were so into it, they insisted he needed to start a band. He did, the Occidental Brothers. Fronted by a respected Ghanaian vocalist, Kofi Cromwell, the group took the world and eclectic scene by storm, playing Pitchfork and numerous major jazz festivals.

Ghanaian and Northern Malian elements persist in Braddock’s compositions. “Kodjo Odo Fowaa” takes palmwine rhythms and sikyi harmonies, but then departs from them harmonically, in an intimate tribute to his son. “Tiger Bucket” draws firmly on folk, but also takes cues from Hamza el Din, an early influence on Braddock. “The Desert Within” posits what John Fahey might have played after a long sojourn in the Sahara.

At the same time Braddock was teaching and playing African music intensively, he developed classes on fingerpicking styles. He used the work of British Folk Revival players like Jansch and Nick Drake, as well as early American styles and techniques, as models. He became fluent in this guitar dialect, though Braddock was slightly ambivalent about the rhythmic impact of this style, a notion he explored in “Regression to the Mean.”

“After teaching this style of playing, it changed the rhythm of how I played,” Braddock reflects. “I was at this moment, when I said, ‘God, what happened to me?’ Truthfully, I’ve become a better player, but my voice had moved toward the middle of the road. I embraced that rhythm, that right hand pattern, but played blazingly fast and changed the harmony.”

Whether lyrical or more challenging, Braddock’s playing has a sparkling crispness, an evocative precision. Braddock sees technique and emotion as entwined, and compositional concepts, memory, and personal experience find equal footing in his pieces. “When people write music, there’s a lot of autobiography. They don’t pull it out of the air. It comes from their personal history, from their context,” Braddock reflects. “Context and story are part of what makes things like African music so amazing. The music theory is also a part of that cultural context.”

Braddock is building context for the project, creating a video and commissioning remixes of the tracks, to bring out other elements and sides of the pieces. Yet the tracks on Quadrille & Collapse speak boldly for themselves, in the unique dialect Braddock has developed. “As a more mature musician, I have a bit more perspective than just letting things burble out,” he muses. “That’s part of what happens when you develop a personal vocabulary. It’s influenced by all the music in your practice, that you play regularly.”

Solitude re-created Nathaniel Braddock’s music. Braddock had spent years playing dance floor-packing West African music as part of the Occidental Brothers Dance Band Int’l. At the same time, he taught fingerstyle genres to guitar players at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, diving deep into the work of players like John Fahey, Ali Farka Toure, Bert Jansch, and Boubacar Traore.

Then he wound up in Australia, caring for his infant son. As he played solo gigs, he began braiding his complex, divergent influences together in new ways, returning to more exploratory approaches. The resulting album of solo guitar instrumentals Quadrille & Collapse (release: April 7, 2017), recorded in Melbourne, balances the avant and the lyrical, the traditional and the modern, the groove and the adventurous meter.

The album deconstructs the age-old underpinnings of Americana, British folk, and African string music, building an organic whole with a subtle, searing edge: a rhythmic twist here, a challenging chord sequence there. It’s the music 20th-century classical mavericks might have made, if they tackled fingerpicking, palm wine music, and American parlor tunes.

“I came to a reckoning point. I was spending so much time transcribing and learning to play other musicians’ tunes, that I really wanted to write my own music again,” Braddock recounts. “I was spending time alone with our newborn son--I wasn’t in rehearsal with my 6-piece African dance band. I started dealing emotionally with how my playing had changed after years of teaching folk music, in both positive and negative ways. But I was also then thinking analytically about my influences, and how to create something beautiful that honored these new influences, yet got me back into exploratory, experimental material.”

To do this, Braddock unites early American open tunings and post-bop harmonies, palmwine rhythms and classical composition techniques. He finds new voicings and robust arrangements that make full use of the instrument. “I’m trying to play within expected traditional music idioms, but also make them unsettling and different,” notes Braddock. “Not to disrespect the tradition, but to disregard what is proper or improper.”

Braddock won his reputation as an innovative, skilled player in the Chicago indie rock (Ancientgreeks, the Zincs) and improvised music scenes (Butcher Shop Quartet), yet he had a long-standing fascination with African music that began in his teens. Not content to merely listen or dabble, he spent years studying, playing, and traveling to deepen his understanding of West African popular music, collaborating with musicians from Mali, Ghana, Congo, and Zambia.

He eventually taught an African guitar class at the Old Town School, and his students were so into it, they insisted he needed to start a band. He did, the Occidental Brothers. Fronted by a respected Ghanaian vocalist, Kofi Cromwell, the group took the world and eclectic scene by storm, playing Pitchfork and numerous major jazz festivals.

Ghanaian and Northern Malian elements persist in Braddock’s compositions. “Kodjo Odo Fowaa” takes palmwine rhythms and sikyi harmonies, but then departs from them harmonically, in an intimate tribute to his son. “Tiger Bucket” draws firmly on folk, but also takes cues from Hamza el Din, an early influence on Braddock. “The Desert Within” posits what John Fahey might have played after a long sojourn in the Sahara.

At the same time Braddock was teaching and playing African music intensively, he developed classes on fingerpicking styles. He used the work of British Folk Revival players like Jansch and Nick Drake, as well as early American styles and techniques, as models. He became fluent in this guitar dialect, though Braddock was slightly ambivalent about the rhythmic impact of this style, a notion he explored in “Regression to the Mean.”

“After teaching this style of playing, it changed the rhythm of how I played,” Braddock reflects. “I was at this moment, when I said, ‘God, what happened to me?’ Truthfully, I’ve become a better player, but my voice had moved toward the middle of the road. I embraced that rhythm, that right hand pattern, but played blazingly fast and changed the harmony.”

Whether lyrical or more challenging, Braddock’s playing has a sparkling crispness, an evocative precision. Braddock sees technique and emotion as entwined, and compositional concepts, memory, and personal experience find equal footing in his pieces. “When people write music, there’s a lot of autobiography. They don’t pull it out of the air. It comes from their personal history, from their context,” Braddock reflects. “Context and story are part of what makes things like African music so amazing. The music theory is also a part of that cultural context.”

Braddock is building context for the project, creating a video and commissioning remixes of the tracks, to bring out other elements and sides of the pieces. Yet the tracks on Quadrille & Collapse speak boldly for themselves, in the unique dialect Braddock has developed. “As a more mature musician, I have a bit more perspective than just letting things burble out,” he muses. “That’s part of what happens when you develop a personal vocabulary. It’s influenced by all the music in your practice, that you play regularly.”