Robbie Basho

Steel-string guitarist Robbie Basho, who also sang and composed, struck listeners as an elusive figure. Fans bestowed on him the moniker “Father of American Raga,” yet he preferred to call his own work “Zen Buddhist cowboy songs.” Equally adept on twelve-string and six-string instruments, his approach drew deeply from East Indian, Asian, and twentieth-century classical sources, from harmonic and dissonant improvisation, from Persian modal traditions, from Native American chants, and from modal blues. Among Takoma Records’ “Big Three” alongside John Fahey and Leo Kottke, Basho remained the most demanding and least recognized. Following his unusual passing in 1986, his name slipped from view for roughly ten years. Renewed attention from fellow musicians and collectors during the 1990s eventually restored his standing. The earliest Takoma sessions—1965’s The Seal of the Blue Lotus and 1966’s The Grail & The Lotus—now stand as benchmarks of the American Raga idiom. On 1967’s Falconer’s Arm I and 1968’s Falconer’s Arm II, the guitarist probed the archaic foundations of raga, Persian folk forms, flamenco, and North American Indigenous practices. His early-seventies Vanguard releases, The Voice of the Eagle and Zarthus, reflected a sustained engagement with Native American culture and with the silent teacher Meher Baba.

Basho’s biography itself carried an air of secrecy and legend. Born in Baltimore, he lost both parents in infancy; his original vital records stay sealed. Adopted by the Robinson family, he received the name Daniel Robinson, Jr. During adolescence he performed in choirs and played euphonium in the school band. While studying pre-medicine at the University of Maryland, he discovered folk music and the acoustic guitar, meeting fellow students John Fahey (then focused on philosophy and religion), Ed Denson (a physics major), and Max Ochs (an acquaintance of Denson from a creative-writing course). Fahey, Ochs, and Basho turned professional, while Denson and Fahey established Takoma Records. In a later interview Leo Kottke recalled trailing Basho from venue to venue as a teenager, captivated by both the man’s eccentricity and his technique. Basho relocated to Berkeley, California, in the early 1960s to pursue graduate studies.

His travels, both inward and outward, produced vivid episodes. Fahey’s liner notes for the 2000 Bashovia compilation recount that Basho acquired his stage name after “spending a night on a mountaintop and ingesting a great deal of peyote.” Upon descending at dawn, he declared himself the reincarnation of the fifteenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. He began appearing in Berkeley clubs and bars, yet an encounter with Ravi Shankar swiftly redirected his musical path. Rooted in Western folk fingerpicking, he started weaving Eastern modes and scales into extended, raga-inspired pieces that fused his admiration for Indian music, koto repertoire, and European classical methods—especially the piano works of Bela Bartok—with altered guitar tunings, thereby forging an evolving American raga language on steel-string instruments. Signing with Takoma, he issued his debut, The Seal of the Blue Lotus, in 1965, a recording steeped in Shankar’s influence. Its successor, The Grail & the Lotus (recorded the same year yet released in 1966), presented six lengthy tracks that intermingled American, Asian, and Indian folk elements. Seeking broader reach in 1967, he released Basho Sings, a comparatively conventional mid-sixties folk set in which his intricate guitar work receded behind Middle Eastern-flavored vocals and straightforward blues, offering early hints of his mature vocal manner while occasionally echoing Tim Buckley’s initial recordings.

Basho subsequently studied with Hindustani sarod master Ali Akbar Khan, prompting further expansion. The two volumes of Falconer’s Arm, issued in 1967 and 1968, found him primarily on twelve-string and extended the exploratory spirit of prior work while incorporating touches of flamenco and Spanish medieval modality; the pieces grew denser, their tunings more idiosyncratic. The second volume added vocals and featured the enduring “Song of the Snowy Ranges.” In 1969 he recorded Venus in Cancer for Blue Thumb, an album alternating vigorous instrumentals with ethereal vocal passages that met with harsh initial reviews owing to widespread unfamiliarity with his Sufi-derived singing style. Although grounded in Appalachian folk roots, the playing’s velocity and intricacy stood in contrast to Far Eastern classical stasis; the record failed commercially. Tompkins Square later remastered and reissued it to widespread praise. After embracing the silent Persian mystic Meher Baba and joining Sufism Reoriented—an organization that still holds several of his scores and poems—Basho abandoned intoxicants. He observed Baba’s prescribed routines of sleep, diet, exercise, and labor, experimented with Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and massage, and tested macrobiotic and vegetarian regimens. His final Takoma album, 1971’s Song of the Stallion, first aligned the enigmatic character of his singing with the intensity of his instrumental technique, transmuting modern Western classical language through roots-folk sonorities and swift minor-key modal explorations. The set contained three widely recognized pieces: “North American Raga,” “Hajj,” and the title track.

Signing with Vanguard, Basho delivered 1972’s The Voice of the Eagle, an album “dedicated to Avatar Meher Baba, and in the spirit of love and respect to the American Indian.” Eight of its nine songs are vocal, their structures modeled more on Indigenous chants and ceremonies than on standard folk forms; the guitarist’s detailed liner notes elucidate these Native American references. The record’s abundant vibrato vocals perplexed contemporary listeners. Zarthus followed in 1974; its liner essay describes the work as “an album of Persian, Arabic, Westerns Themes (sic), woven together into a single ‘Fabric D’Amour’ to cover the barren manekin (sic) of modern times.” Arguably the fullest realization of Basho’s fascination with Eastern modal scales, irregular meters, and Western classical procedures, the album features driving twelve-string pieces such as the title track and “Khoda é Gul é Abe,” both animated by the pulse of the mridingham as much as by open-tonal fretboard wanderings. On “Mehera” and “Khalil Gibran” he adds piano to guitars and voice. For listeners unsettled by the vocals on The Voice of the Eagle, Zarthus offers more immediately melodic, if unconventional, lines paired with spiritually inflected lyrics. The nineteen-minute closing “Rhapsody in Druz.” remains among his most esteemed compositions, its first half a devotional song and its second half a microtonal drone for piano and guitars.

Commercial indifference prompted Basho’s departure from Vanguard. Four years without a label ensued, during which his catalog went out of print and live opportunities dwindled. In 1978 former pupil Will Ackerman placed him on the fledgling Windham Hill roster; Visions of the Country appeared as the label’s fifth release. Though later reissues have elevated it to cult-classic status, the album vanished from the Windham Hill catalog soon after issue, possibly because of its prominent vocals. A subsequent recording for the cassette-only Lost Lake Arts subsidiary, The Art of the Steel String Guitar 6 & 12, marked Basho’s first wholly instrumental outing since his Takoma era, yet poor distribution rendered it nearly invisible. In 1981 he issued Rainbow Thunder: Songs of the American West on his own Silver Label Recordings, revisiting three Vanguard-era pieces alongside new material often augmented by drums and piano, with only a single instrumental track. After Lost Lake Arts reissued Art of the Steel String Guitar 6 & 12, Basho founded Basho Productions and self-released the 1983 collection Bouquet, containing songs, instrumentals, and poetry. He likewise self-issued his final album, the solo-instrumental Twilight Peaks, initially on cassette through the Relaxation Company and later on LP in Belgium via Smeraldina-Rima.

On 26 February 1986 Basho visited his longtime chiropractor. During an adjustment a vertebral artery ruptured, triggering a massive stroke. Taken to Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley in a confused, disoriented state with slurred speech, he was found to have a torn artery, slipped into coma, and was placed on a respirator; he died two days later at age forty-five.

At the moment of his death Basho remained largely unknown to the wider public, though certain musicians continued to honor his example. Guitarists Glenn Jones, Henry Kaiser (who once constituted an audience of one), Richard Osborn, and Kyle Fosburgh, proprietor of Grass-Tops Recordings, all cited his influence. East German guitarist Steffen Basho-Junghans issued the live recording Bonn Ist Supreme on Bo’ Weavil. While the 2000 Bashovia compilation appeared, broader rediscovery awaited Tompkins Square’s remastered reissues of Venus in Cancer and Vanguard’s re-releases of its Basho catalog. Buck Curran of Arborea produced tribute collections We Are All One, in the Sun (2010) and Basket Full of Dragons (2016), both featuring contemporary interpretations. British filmmaker Liam Barker completed the documentary Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho, which premiered in London in 2015, screened at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater in April 2018, and earned a Jury Award nomination at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The film draws on previously unseen archival footage and conversations with Townshend, Ackerman, Kaiser, Jones, Country Joe McDonald, Basho-Junghans, and Ochs. Fosburgh’s Grass-Tops label has also authorized live recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, among them the widely praised Live in Forli, Italy 1982. In early 2020 the documentary received DVD and Blu-Ray editions. In April, Real Gone Music released Songs of the Great Mystery. During 2009 Vanguard informed Jones, custodian of numerous Basho tapes, that an undocumented reel had surfaced. Twelve years later, while preparing liner notes, Jones ascertained that this reel, along with The Voice of the Eagle and Zarthus, had been captured in a single marathon 1971 or 1972 session in New York engineered by Jeffrey Zaraya. Songs of the Great Mystery: The Lost Vanguard Sessions constitutes the third album Basho recorded for the label; it extends Native American themes first explored on The Voice of the Eagle, while additional material later resurfaced in altered form on subsequent releases. Vanguard once offered the sessions digitally as Indian II, yet this constitutes their first physical appearance; an alternate take of “A Day in the Life of Lemuria” remains previously unissued.