Time for another palette cleanser. You already know mine: folk music. Doug Smith’s Order Of Magnitude is more of that same vein. However, it’s a bit of its own tributary. Here, largely acoustic guitar of the American Primitive style, get’s us one step closer to what a larger, universal other expects of “their” type of sonic wash.
One expects great things of someone born with a name like Pierre Bensusan, Robbie Basho, and John Renbourn. If you’re born in the great American Northwest, and release a record on a nondescript label found the great flatlands of Nebraska — you best realize that having a name like Doug Smith (unfortunately) dooms you to a certain type of obscurity. Which is a shame, truth be told, because far from being a “musician’s musician”, Doug learned from the best and took those lessons in places that are his alone.
1990’s Order Of Magnitude, Doug’s first major label release showed what new territory that first generation of John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Robbie Basho followers were capable of…before the dreaded scourge of smooth jazz swept them away. Here all sorts of open intonation combines that classic sound of steel string guitar with styles that run the huge scope of simply inventive neofolk music.
In a perfect word, with better word of mouth, slightly better production values and editing, Doug could have been remembered as a big an influence as one of his label’s, Solid Air Records, hat-tipped guru (John Martyn). However, our tastes in music (and its ties to au courant technology) tends to move much faster than good taste itself. Doug was doomed for a small niche audience
Doug, originally, like many guitar aficionados gravitated towards musicians like Chet Atkins and the much tamer sounds of ’70s singer-songwriters. Classically-taught, he graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a major in classical guitar with all the technique to eke out a living as a session man. However, when he discovered the music of John Renbourn, Alex de Grassi and Michael Hedges, Doug began to avail himself to the liberating sounds of alternate-tuned guitars. With this knowledge, maybe Doug went out and forged his own compositions.
Working under the auspices of American Gramaphone Records, cornhusker label home and label run by Mannheim Steamroller, Doug found himself in a special nook where AGR was trying to sneak into the increasingly lucrative New Age market. Allowing him to venture a bit further away from pure folk instrumental music, Doug came ready with different styles, done in myriad ways, that spoke of his interest in things that were less delineated.
Order Of Magnitude is “American” to its core. The opener, the album’s radio single, “Renewal”, instantly puts you on the open roads of our great grasslands, hills, and valley with gorgeous Americana-indebted fingerpicking. Great, easy listening, doesn’t get much more inviting than this.
Then you get to its obvious highlight, “The Old Road”, a song that seemingly starts off as the opener. We imagine the long vistas of any open road. However, little things like slight ambient touches and sparse orchestration, take the song off somewhere else with a stately, quietly, bittersweet complexity that is refreshingly forward thinking.
Unless you enjoy someone describe 43-odd minutes of a largely instrumental guitar album, I’d rather you treat this one as an authoritative way to meander through some relaxing, “me” time. Bits touch on latin jazz, others use Spanish sarabande, the title track or “Spiral Staircase” floats off with open-string reverberation. Going through copious amount of technique — slaps, pulls, hammer-ons, finger tapping, harmonics, glissandos, etc. — to make something so difficult sound effortless. It’s not a terribly difficult record — it doesn’t have to be.
Much like Bert Jansch’s Avocet or one of his idol’s Mr. Renbourn’s The Nine Maidens, music like this is more tied to seasonal listening…and perhaps to those quiet, lonely times when we can crack open the window just a bit, open up the blinds, sit down, look outside, and appreciate that radiating warmth coming from watching a sunlit sky slowly fading off into an increasingly longer day. It’s jazz and folk music in a way that is more personal to your own wintry history.
Six strings. One guitar. What more “else” do you need?