“Primitive” is an intriguing descriptor when marketing the lively instrumental prowess of Glenn Jones. Stylistically, Jones is an ancient bard, peddling textured six-string stories that sound as if plucked directly from the musical residue of the Appalachian Mountains. Influenced as he is in the John Fahey school of American Primitive Guitar, Jones’ skills are anything but basic. Long ago eschewing the confines of standard tuning, Jones has reinvented the standard of the picked acoustic-stringed realm, forging new aural pathways for banjo and guitar, most undeniably so on his latest collection, Fleeting.
Jones possesses the disarming ability to wring emotion from every pluck, utilizing custom capos and advanced picking techniques to flesh out fantastically alive, heady works. Much like his 2013 collection, My Garden State, Jones finds inspiration completely outside of the contemporary mire, employing bucolic environments through which to guide his muses and record them.
Beginning with “Flower Turned Inside-Out,” Jones propels his adventurous anthems with harp-like picking, generating spellbinding tones that offer calm and promise. Throughout “In Durance Vile,” you hear the minutiae of nature fluttering from outside the house where Jones and recording engineer Laura Baird set up for Fleeting, which sits by Rancocas Creek in Mount Holly, New Jersey. You actually hear rustling winds swishing through the trees and birds chirping; there were no attempts made at soundproofing the recording environment. This stroke of minimalism fits nicely with Jones’ sonic palette and attention to both the notes themselves—their malleability and willingness to whisper little stories—and the spaces between those notes, where life is still happening, chirping, blowing all around you, even if you’re making a record.
The ominous minor notes and bold bass notes of “In Durance Vile” contain an inherent auditory conflict, which manifested naturally from Jones’ original desire to have the piece accompany three poems by the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky. The sweeping brilliance of that standout track, though, is matched in emotive resonance on nearly every piece on Fleeting.
“Spokane River Falls” emerges as a reverberating homage to Jones’ hometown of Spokane, Washington, exhuming a kind of Spanish-Appalachian fusion that echoes and resonates mightily in perhaps one of the album’s only real engineering deviations from simply setting up a mic. As the piece devolves into repetition, the rushing tones of a river dominate and hiss in an analog roar.
“Portrait of Basho as a Young Dragon” finds Jones at perhaps his most compositionally beautiful, in what is doubtless a song dedicated to guitarist Robbie Basho. In this song and throughout the album, the adventurous element on the listening end is what engenders a palpable air of calm to Fleeting.
Music is portable, in ways other than simply physically. That perspective can be a valuable prism with which to guide your way through the transformative properties of the instrumental canvas. Take the music where you want it to go. In that way, Jones is a masterful pilot in the melodic skies of your psyche.