Sandy Bull

Look in the dictionary under ecelctic, and there ought to be a picture of Sandy Bull. Long before Paul Simon visited Graceland, before the term world music was a twinkling in some journo's eye, Bull was there doing it. His Vanguard albums from the Sixties - Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo (1963), Inventions (1965), and E Pluribus Unum (1968) were virtual blueprints for what was to come, Bull playing guitars electric and acoustic, bass, banjo, and oud, Cuisinarting cultures and styles, from Indian to jazz in a way that hadn't been heard before. Think of him as an American Davy Graham (for whom he subbed at an English gig in 1966); it's not too far off the mark.

By rights he should be as revered as Graham; among musicians his influence is every bit as widespread. But even in the United States his isn't exactly a widely-known name. Isn't that always the way with pioneers?

Born in New York, he spent part of his childhood in Florida, where music made its first real impression on him.

"I was always trying to do something a little different, change, try different approaches."

"My first love was drums, " Bull says. "I lived near a football field in Delray Beach, Florida, and at night I could hear the black drum corps marching with this great beat. Then there was a radio station that featured military stuff, heavy on the drumming. I played drums to bagpipe records a lot, and studied drums for a while in New York. Once I took lessons it lost its luster."

Dad vetoed the idea of drums, however, so Bull took up the guitar. When he was eleven he moved back to New York to live with his mother.

"She was a harpist, she played all kinds of music. I'd hear her practising, hear her tune the harp, so I got an ear from that. I had all these tunes going by my ears, classics, boogie-woogie to Bach, Gershwin, everything you can imagine. By then I was well into the guitar. Hearing it, hearing the Weavers, seeing Mike Seeger. I liked the sound and the idea of a long-neck banjo.

Back in those days everybody sang together, the concerts had a wonderful spirit. I ended up taking banjo lessons from a great player,Eric Darling, who was in the Weavers after Pete left. He played some Scruggs style and exposed me to that. Then I discovered the oud, and didn't play the banjo again for about twenty years."

But the Seegers, along with his mother, opened his ears to a huge range of music. Not just from America and Britain, but all over the world, and from the classics to jazz and folk, an open mind that's remained with him.

"I got my ideas from people like Pete Seeger, and all the music that was going on after his heyday. I had my own influences, but Pete made everyone aware of the international scene, and the similarities between musics. I was playing banjo and guitar almost exclusively in my early years, so I played the mountain and modal stuff, the Scruggs stuff, and I saw the simliarities between that and the Indian and Afghani music. I was a big bagpipe fan, and I saw how that was similar to Arabic and Indian sounds. What attracted me was the grace notes and the little embellishments that make music so interesting. Bagpipe music spends a lot on those, and so does Indian music, which I studied for a while."

By the time he was sixteen, in the late Fifties, Sandy Bull was a gigging musician in New York, before going briefly to college in Boston, where he studied composition, string bass, and sang with the Choral Art Society, as well as in playing in the coffeehouses with a young Joan Baez. But New York called, and he was soon back there, part of the whole Greenwich Village scene

"I was in Paris in 1959, playing on the streets. Alex Campbell was there, and Billy Roberts, who wrote Hey Joe. I played banjo and 12-string. We played under the bridges along the Seine, and people would shower francs on us. We went to this cafe, Ali's, in the Algerian section, and that was the first time I heard people playing oud- like instruments and style."

Four years later "I was on my way to Beirut, actually to get an oud, and I met Hamza El Din in Rome, heard him play, and it blew me away. There was something very basic about it, the closest thing to simplicity you could get, with all this complexity within a very simple framework."

So fast forward to 1963, and Bull's first record, which had been recorded a year earlier and somehow managed to take in some William Byrd, a Fantasy based on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, gospel, mountain music, as well as a side long piece, Blend, which teamed his fretwork with the the drumming of Billy Higgins, best known for his time with Ornette Coleman. In other words, not your standard LP.

"The first record I did, I'd been hearing the Staple Singers, and that sparked my brain - I loved that vibrato sound on the Fender. So I got a Fender Strat in '62. I'd gone to high school where we did a William Byrd canon in the chorus. I'd heard Pete Seeger play some Beethoven on the banjo, so this canon had three parts. I figured out how to do two of them on the banjo and then whistled the third, which is how that came about. Blend was listening to Ravi Shankar and Ali Akhbar Khan in New York, and playing on a guitar tuned to Indian drums. I'd been looking into a lot of Folkways albums, music from all over, and I loved it all, and tried to take pieces and put it together. Two of the sections of Carmina Burana fell easily into banjo tuning, and that was pretty popular."

A year later, Inventions took it all a step further - Bach, Brazilian music, Blend II, and a unique version of Chuck Berry's Memphis.

"Memphis was influenced by Lonnie Mack's version of the song, and the jazz records I was listening to, particularly Bag's Groove," Bull explains. "I'd been messing around with a little tape recorder in the summer of '64, playing electric bass. I was listening to a lot of Chuck Berry and the Supremes, and I couldn't find any rhythm guitars players who were steady enough for my liking. So I put my own rhythm guitar on tape and played to that. Memphis was one of the tunes I liked for that; it was really meditative, and had interesting changes, almost blues but not quite. I was already into the oud by then, and Indian-style music on the guitar, along with standard guitar licks. It just all fell together."

Inventions is the only one of Bull's early albums still available, mostly because he sells it through his own Timeless Recording Society label. That situation will shortly change, however, as Vanguard is planning a record to encompass his years with the label.

If the first two records had seemed quite expansive, even for the Sixties, then it all came to a head on E Pluribus Unum, which had a total of two tracks - one on each side.

"I'd already done the other two albums with one track covering a side, so I figured why not! That whole record came about when I was in England in '66, and listening to my amp on earphones so as not to disturb the other people. I liked the sound, and found a hi-fi store, and he showed me how to put a tweeter in my concert amp and make it sound balanced. That's what I used, and it evolved into a bigger system. I would plug treble and bass boosts in and split the signal, and I liked that sound."

And it was also informed by the whole hippie thing in California, which Bull had witnessed after leaving England.

"Back in the U.S. I was in New York for six months, then I got a call to play at the San Francisco State Folk Festival. I did that, played the Fillmore, a bunch of clubs, and I was there for the whole scene."

After E Pluribus Unum, it was three years before another Sandy Bull record appeared, the slightly more mainstream - but still very diverse - Demolition Derby in 1972.

"It's probably a far cry from most peoples' idea of folk music; they just didn't know where to put me, so they threw me in the folk category."

"That one didn't make it to Europe; it really didn't make it anywhere! There are some things on there I like, but other things I wish I hadn't done, or had more time perfecting first. I'd been under a lot of pressure to become more accessible, and that album was my response. I had some drug problems. Demolition Derby was a good euphemism for what my life was about at the time. I got off drugs in '74, went to rehab."

Then that came a return to the stage, in the form of an invitation to guest on Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour.

"That was my reemergence into playing with a clear head. I spent a lot of time on the West Coast trying to right the wrongs I'd committed in the Sixties, not showing up and being unprofessional. It was great. I toured with Don Cherry in the summer of 1980. Don was a great part of my life. I got to know him best after I got off drugs. I sat in him with him on the oud a few times at the Five Spot in 1975, and he'd already got into world music then."

Musicians might have known who he was and cherished him, but record labels simply didn't care. Between 1972 and 1987 no Sandy Bull records appeared, not for want of trying on his part.

"I just couldn't get on a label. You have to realize it was the heyday of the Eagles and the Bee Gees, and people were into vocals. There was pressure on me to sing, and it wasn't my forte at the time. I was working on several tunes that made their way to my later CDs, but I couldn't get on a label. Some label people wanted me to play the way I'd done on my first two albums, and I was always trying to do something a little different, change, try different approaches.So I didn't want to repeat myself."

In '88, though, there finally came a contract with ROM, and Jukebox School of Music made its way into the marketplace. Whatever anyone had been expecting from him, he confounded it.

There was salsa (with Bull on piano!), steel guitar, country, Brazilian, and a return visit with Billy Higgins on Truth.

"There were hints of salsa on Demolition Derby, but not keyboard based. Jukebox was a result of Sandy Bull meets MIDI. I'd figured out some salsa on the piano by then, so I was able to program the keyboard parts to play against. I love salsa, I have since I first heard it in '68."

Playing with Higgins again was the highlight for him, though.

"It was wonderful. He's such an incredible player. He turned my life around the first time I heard him with Ornette in 1960. I was very lucky to be able to record him. Truth came out nicely; I'm very proud of that. I recorded a bunch of his solo percussion pieces back then; someday it might get released."

The gap between Jukebox and Vehicle was luckily a lot less than sixteen years. In '91 the new album appeared, and once more took him all over the map. There were tracks he'd recorded with the legendary Bernard Purdie, and a lot of percussive help from Aiyb Dieng.

"Don Cherry introduced me to Aiyb Dieng. I'd had a call from Van Morrison's people to open for him at the Beacon Theatre. I was excited, and I thought a percussionist would be great to have. I called Don, and he put us in touch, then Ayieb played on my next release, Vehicle. It was less computerized than Jukebox, and I've been working more that way since."

Following Vehicle's release, Bull decided the time had come for he and his family to get out of Venice (California, that is), and the place he picked to live was Nashville.

"It seemed like the logical place. LA was getting too crowded and too angry. I'd spent eight years there. I'd gone there to get a record deal, and I did that with ROM. I watched them and thought, 'I can do that.' I decided to do that (and he did, beginning Timeless Recording Society, which has released his albums since). I had a studio in Venice, California, but you can get a recording space anywhere. We had a bunch of friends moving from LA to Nashville, like Brian Ahern and some others. I'd been there often, and what better place to be around so many great instrumentalists? I get to use all the session guys when I need them."

The relocation proved fruitful, and resulted in Steel Tears (1996), the first album to really feature Bull's vocals on a disc that was largely covers, from Holland/Dozier Holland to Arthur Crudup and beyond.

"I'd had the idea for several years, and I thought it'd be interesting to do my instrumental stuff subservient to a lyric. A lot of the songs had influenced me, and I wanted to try my hand at them."

Of course, the word eclectic still more than applied to his versions, and it was well enough received to win him a nomination for Best Folk album in the Nashville Music Awards.

"It's probably a far cry from most peoples' idea of folk music; they just didn't know where to put me, so they threw me in the folk category."

Following that, he's spent time out of the limelight, such as it has been.

"The last couple of years I've had health problems that have kept me from doing a lot of stuff, like playing out in public. I had cancer surgery in '96, had half a lung taken out, chemo and radiation, and that knocked me back a year or so. I'm getting radiation for my spine now, because they found a vertebrae that was all lit up. But I recently did two gigs, in Amherst and New York, and they whetted my appetite for getting out again."

And something we can all look forward to is a new Sandy Bull album in the near future.

"Now I'm back to instrumentals. I've got that singing out of my system. I'm recording at the moment. I've just finished a salsa-type piece, and I got a couple of guys from Tito Puente's orchestra to do percussion on it. They were in town playing at a club. I went down and asked if they'd be interested, and they said sure. I'd say that by the fall or winter the album should be ready. My concept is to do the rest of the record solo instrumentals, with all the instruments I used on the salsa piece, some solo oud, and maybe a couple of Bach chorales on piano."

He's been there and done that, long before most people ever heard of it. Been in the right place at the right time, lived the life, paid the price, but still going remarkably strong, and made some amazing music along the way. And by the look of it, he'll be doing that for a long time to come.

(Sandy Bull's records can be ordered from Timeless Recording Society, PO Box 1177, Franklin, TN 37065, USA)

First printed in Folk Roots

Sandy Bull

"I was always trying to do something a little different, change, try different approaches."

"It's probably a far cry from most peoples' idea of folk music; they just didn't know where to put me, so they threw me in the folk category."

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