In the 1920s, a reactionary trend began to take hold in classical music. Composers began to imitate and quote styles from centuries past: particularly, the music of Baroque and Classical masters like Bach and Mozart. Simplicity and symmetry became the order of the day, instead of density and sharp dissonance (hallmarks of the prevailing avant-garde). "Neoclassical" is a fitting descriptor to use when comparing the bulk of Sir Richard Bishop’s solo recordings to the far-flung experiments of the Sun City Girls, his disbanded, performance art-inclined avant-rock trio. As the Girls did, Bishop mixes and matches pan-continental musical styles (from East Asian traditional music to gypsy jazz), but he does so less abrasively: with simple tools (a guitar or two) and little theatricality. As in the most compelling neoclassical compositions, Bishop’s music is driven by clever stylistic juxtapositions and attractive melodicism.
Tangier Sessions, Bishop’s latest album of solo guitar music, was recorded in just a week during a short visit to the Moroccan city. Like much of his output both alone and with the Girls, it’s largely improvised. Bishop circles around and tries out instantiations of a melodic phrase before committing to one, seemingly debating where to move in real time. A particularly clear example of this phenomenon is the speed-ramping "International Zone", which grows in rhythmic complexity and tempo as the guitarist hones in on a central, raga-like melodic pattern.
Stylistically, the album evokes Morocco as a hub of cultural exchange. Bishop often explores the Andalusian flamenco guitar style, infusing it with gestures from across the country’s other borders. In the seductive, cyclical crocheting of "Mirage", there’s traces of the Mali-centered "desert blues," a style sometimes considered to have inspired the American blues, but which now, in contemporary practice, re-emulates it. Elsewhere, Bishop’s haunting melodies recall the sound of the oud, a popular lute-like instrument in North Africa, as well as in the Middle East and Greece.
This image of Moroccan culture as manifold and mysterious is a prevalent one in literature and film, usually contributing to an atmosphere of intrigue or seediness (see Casablanca, Naked Lunch or Jim Jarmusch’s recent Only Lovers Left Alive). Bishop playfully evokes some of the Hollywood Morocco on Tangier Sessions. There is the flamenco chugging of the appropriately titled "Safe House", which comes across like Bishop scoring a farcical chase scene in a spy film. The energetic piece not only breaks up the otherwise meditative album nicely, but seems to acknowledge the music’s inherent cultural tourism, or the way this part of the world has historically captured the Western imagination.
The Sun City Girls’ tendency toward exoticism is hard to avoid; indeed, when doing something like shrieking in faux-Far Eastern gibberish, they push it in their listeners’ faces. Does Bishop’s more polite collage-artistry, too, condescend to and totemize its source material? To some extent (so, often, does the music of John Fahey, Claude Debussy and The Nutcracker), but Bishop’s irreverence doesn’t overshadow the beauty and gentle, sometimes breathtaking intricacy of this music. He’s spent decades getting musical vocabularies from all over the world under his fingers, and even when his improvisations begin to meander, what he creates from his well of options is remarkable and wholly his own.
