Sandy Bull was probably the single most original performer of the early 1960s. Alas, he was 30-40 years ahead of the rest of rock music, and therefore was still neglected at the end of the century. While the Merseybeat bands were flooding the charts…
Sandy Bull was probably the single most original performer of the early 1960s. Alas, he was 30-40 years ahead of the rest of rock music, and therefore was still neglected at the end of the century. While the Merseybeat bands were flooding the charts with idiotic three-minute ditties, Bull was already composing 20-minute long raga/jams that belonged to no known genre. These "blends" marked the first fantastic fusion of eastern and western music, even before western musicians learned what a sitar was.
Virtually no encyclopedia or history of music mentioned his name, but Sandy Bull is probably one of the few musicians of the 1960s who will be mentioned in every encyclopedia and history of music centuries from now.
Enfant prodige of the guitar and the banjo, student of jazz and Indian music, in 1963 Bull cut his first record, Fantasias For Guitar & Banjo (Vanguard, 1963) with the lone accompaniment of Ornette Coleman's drummer Billy Higgins, indulging in the luxury of a suite of twenty-two minutes, Blend, for guitar tuned as a banjo and battery.
Blend, influenced by oud player Hamza El Din who shared a Hollywood flat with Bull in 1963, is a rhythmic synthesis of jazz improvisation, raga syncopations, Arabic chords and folk melodies, an infectious sound excursus that explores fabulous worlds filtered through the feeling of a folk story-teller, alternating slow and transcendent parts with furious jams. The atmosphere is often psychedelic, two years before the psychedelic movement was born. A few classical arrangements, for banjo or guitar only, stand out among the other tracks of the album.
Source: https://www.scaruffi.com/vol1/bull.html
