Steve Tibbetts‘ oeuvre is criminally undersung. For its openness to distant horizons, its exploration of studio technology’s imaginative potential, its instrumental facility and sheer beauty, Tibbetts‘ music deserves much wider recognition. That said, no guitarist got more airplay on my Klanghorizonte nights between 1990 and 2021.
Ir feels like a special journey to live with his music for decades now. Where beauty and silence quickly became central elements of the music after the first two albums‘ youthful exuberance, passages of anger and darkness have gradually cast shadows over the later music (after his fantastic debut „Northern Song“ on ECM Records, and those journeys into faraway worlds like „Big Map Idea“, „The Fall Of Us All“ and „A Year About A Horse“), while a sombre sense of the passage of time and ultimately of mortality suffuses Natural Causes and, a late masterpiece without doubt, Life Of.
We swim in oceans of music. Many musicians and listeners move in ever smaller circles, swim in a straight line or disappear over the horizon never to be heard from again. A small number master the currents, learn the influence of the moon, tides and storms. Steve Tibbetts is one of the few.
written by Colin Buttimer, and a tiny bit of Michael E. (the wonderful double-cd-anthology „The Hellbound Train“, is out now)