Steve Tibbetts
Encyclopedia
Steve Tibbetts is a Saint Paul-based American guitarist known for an original approach to both composing and sound-forming. Tibbetts views the recording studio as a tool for creating sounds. Most of his releases include world percussionist Marc Anderson
.
as well as exotic percussive instruments such as the kendang
and kalimba. His musical compositions span several genres and styles including experimental
, jazz
, rock
, ambient
, and world music
. He has self described his music as "post modern
neo-primitivism". Often more than one genre or style is found in a single composition. A variety of techniques may be used with the guitar such as a string-bending technique sonically imitating a sarangi
with a 12-string guitar while also alternating between ambient soundscape and Hendrix-like distorted and feedbacked leads with an electric guitar. He incorporates field-recordings such as the footsteps in the track "Running" from Safe Journey, or the chanting of Nepalese villagers from the last tracks of Big Map Idea. Tibbetts' recordings often include percussion by St Paul's Marc Anderson
.
All Music
states Tibbetts music is like "mosaics of world music doused in Tibbetts' particular brand of gasoline; not many explosions, but rather a steady wall of flame." The BBC
noted Tibbetts' music as a "rich atmospheric brew" and "brilliant individual music making." Rolling Stone
described the 1994 The Fall of Us All as "a trip of another, more explosive and enriching kind, a dynamic study of Eastern modality and universal spiritualism driven by rock & roll ambition." Stereophile
promoted A Man About a Horse as "album of the month" January 2003.
Tibbetts also uses recording and editing as a creative process. The album A Man About a Horse features many tracks based on rhythms built from acoustic drumming recorded at various tape controlled pitches and speeds. These recordings were then sampled, sequenced and looped on synthesizer
s. He states, "I go back and forth between the sampler
and tape machine
so much--looping, cutting, offsetting, and layering--that eventually I don't know where the sounds come from." A collection of his loops and sound textures entitled Friendly Fire were released 2002 by Sonic Foundry
for their Acid Loops
series.
, in 1954. His first two records were created when he was in college. The second, Yr although self-released (and eventually rereleased by ECM Records), gained a degree of notice, especially from fans of the electric guitar. That record featured many overdubs, on one track as many as 50 overdubs creating a unique soundscape.
The first record Tibbetts created for a major label was Northern Song, for ECM Records
in 1982. This was an attempt to fit Tibbetts music into Manfred Eicher
's style of very rapid recording. Usually ECM albums are recorded in just two to three days. However, Northern Song received scathing reviews. Perhaps as a result, Tibbetts went back to his previous method of recording very slowly over a period of months (or longer). His subsequent records gained better reviews and, somewhat unusually for ECM Records, were among the only not produced by Manfred Eicher
.
He released five albums in the 1980s, three in the 1990s, and, as of this writing, two in the 2000s. He has also collaborated with other artists including Norwegian hardingfele
player Knut Hamre and Tibetan Buddhist nun Chöying Drolma
. His longtime collaborator, percussionist Marc Anderson
, has appeared on all the recordings in the discography except the inaugural 1977 Steve Tibbetts album.
Tibbetts stopped doing live performances regularly in the mid-1980s. Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson have toured on other occasions including a 1988 "YR" tour, a 1991/1992 "Big Map Idea" tour and shows with Chöying Drolma in 1997, 1999, and 2005. Starting in the late 1980s he travelled extensively in Nepal
, which is where he met Chöying Drolma, a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Their first collaboration, Chö, was not intended as a commercial record but it was released and gained some positive notice. The second project,Selwa, was a far more carefully considered musical collaboration and it received some very positive reviews as an example of a successful meeting of two very different musical traditions. These releases helped establish what would become Chöying Drolma's Nepalese chart topping music career.
Marc Anderson
Marc Anderson is an American percussionist who has toured and recorded with Steve Tibbetts since 1977. He hasalso toured and/or recorded with artists such as Lorie Line, Bradley Joseph, Butch Morris, Tony Moreno, Don Cherry, Peter Ostroushko, Claudia Schmidt, Dave Moore, Greg Brown, Max Roach, Taj...
.
Style
Tibbetts plays acoustic and electric guitarGuitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
as well as exotic percussive instruments such as the kendang
Kendang
Kendhang is a two-headed drum used by peoples from Maritime Southeast Asia....
and kalimba. His musical compositions span several genres and styles including experimental
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
, jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
, ambient
Ambient music
Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
, and world music
World music
World music is a term with widely varying definitions, often encompassing music which is primarily identified as another genre. This is evidenced by world music definitions such as "all of the music in the world" or "somebody else's local music"...
. He has self described his music as "post modern
Postmodern music
Postmodern music is either simply music of the postmodern era, or music that follows aesthetical and philosophical trends of postmodernism. As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in reaction to modernism...
neo-primitivism". Often more than one genre or style is found in a single composition. A variety of techniques may be used with the guitar such as a string-bending technique sonically imitating a sarangi
Sarangi
The Sārangī is a bowed, short-necked string instrument of India which is originated from Rajasthani folk instruments. It plays an important role in India's Hindustani classical music tradition...
with a 12-string guitar while also alternating between ambient soundscape and Hendrix-like distorted and feedbacked leads with an electric guitar. He incorporates field-recordings such as the footsteps in the track "Running" from Safe Journey, or the chanting of Nepalese villagers from the last tracks of Big Map Idea. Tibbetts' recordings often include percussion by St Paul's Marc Anderson
Marc Anderson
Marc Anderson is an American percussionist who has toured and recorded with Steve Tibbetts since 1977. He hasalso toured and/or recorded with artists such as Lorie Line, Bradley Joseph, Butch Morris, Tony Moreno, Don Cherry, Peter Ostroushko, Claudia Schmidt, Dave Moore, Greg Brown, Max Roach, Taj...
.
All Music
All Music
All Music was an Italian free-to-air television station which mainly broadcast music videos and music programs. Originally called Rete A, the name was changed to Rete A - All Music , and for a brief period was affiliated before with MTV Italy and after with VIVA.-History:In late 2004 the former...
states Tibbetts music is like "mosaics of world music doused in Tibbetts' particular brand of gasoline; not many explosions, but rather a steady wall of flame." The BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
noted Tibbetts' music as a "rich atmospheric brew" and "brilliant individual music making." Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
described the 1994 The Fall of Us All as "a trip of another, more explosive and enriching kind, a dynamic study of Eastern modality and universal spiritualism driven by rock & roll ambition." Stereophile
Stereophile
Stereophile is a monthly magazine that focuses on high end audio equipment, such as loudspeakers and amplifiers, and audio-related news, such as online audio streaming. It was founded in 1962 by J. Gordon Holt....
promoted A Man About a Horse as "album of the month" January 2003.
Tibbetts also uses recording and editing as a creative process. The album A Man About a Horse features many tracks based on rhythms built from acoustic drumming recorded at various tape controlled pitches and speeds. These recordings were then sampled, sequenced and looped on synthesizer
Synthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
s. He states, "I go back and forth between the sampler
Sampler (musical instrument)
A sampler is an electronic musical instrument similar in some respects to a synthesizer but, instead of generating sounds, it uses recordings of sounds that are loaded or recorded into it by the user and then played back by means of a keyboard, sequencer or other triggering device to perform or...
and tape machine
Tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, tape deck, reel-to-reel tape deck, cassette deck or tape machine is an audio storage device that records and plays back sounds, including articulated voices, usually using magnetic tape, either wound on a reel or in a cassette, for storage...
so much--looping, cutting, offsetting, and layering--that eventually I don't know where the sounds come from." A collection of his loops and sound textures entitled Friendly Fire were released 2002 by Sonic Foundry
Sonic Foundry
Sonic Foundry is the former developer of various media software suites, which were purchased by Sony in late 2003 for $18 million in cash and the assumption of certain liabilities and obligations...
for their Acid Loops
Acid Loops
Acid Loops is a technology used with the music making software originally from Sonic Foundry called Acid. Created in 1998, it refers to the repetition, and transposition of sound clips, to form a song. The Acid Pro program is now owned and distributed by Sony, and is on version 7...
series.
History
Tibbetts was born in Madison, WisconsinMadison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. It is also home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison....
, in 1954. His first two records were created when he was in college. The second, Yr although self-released (and eventually rereleased by ECM Records), gained a degree of notice, especially from fans of the electric guitar. That record featured many overdubs, on one track as many as 50 overdubs creating a unique soundscape.
The first record Tibbetts created for a major label was Northern Song, for ECM Records
ECM (record label)
ECM is a record label founded in Munich, Germany, in 1969 by Manfred Eicher. While ECM is best known for jazz music, the label has released a wide variety of recordings, and ECM's artists often refuse to acknowledge boundaries between genres...
in 1982. This was an attempt to fit Tibbetts music into Manfred Eicher
Manfred Eicher
Manfred Eicher is a German record producer and the founder of ECM Records and its subsidiaries.Eicher studied music at the Academy of Music in Berlin. He is a record producer and a double-bass player. In 1969 he founded a record label in Munich called ECM - Edition of Contemporary Music...
's style of very rapid recording. Usually ECM albums are recorded in just two to three days. However, Northern Song received scathing reviews. Perhaps as a result, Tibbetts went back to his previous method of recording very slowly over a period of months (or longer). His subsequent records gained better reviews and, somewhat unusually for ECM Records, were among the only not produced by Manfred Eicher
Manfred Eicher
Manfred Eicher is a German record producer and the founder of ECM Records and its subsidiaries.Eicher studied music at the Academy of Music in Berlin. He is a record producer and a double-bass player. In 1969 he founded a record label in Munich called ECM - Edition of Contemporary Music...
.
He released five albums in the 1980s, three in the 1990s, and, as of this writing, two in the 2000s. He has also collaborated with other artists including Norwegian hardingfele
Hardingfele
A Hardanger fiddle is a traditional stringed instrument used originally to play the music of Norway. In modern designs, the instruments are very similar to the violin, though with eight or nine strings and thinner wood...
player Knut Hamre and Tibetan Buddhist nun Chöying Drolma
Ani Choying Dolma
Ani Choying Drolma , also known as Choying Drolma and Ani Choying , is a Buddhist nun and musician from the Nagi Gompa nunnery in Nepal...
. His longtime collaborator, percussionist Marc Anderson
Marc Anderson
Marc Anderson is an American percussionist who has toured and recorded with Steve Tibbetts since 1977. He hasalso toured and/or recorded with artists such as Lorie Line, Bradley Joseph, Butch Morris, Tony Moreno, Don Cherry, Peter Ostroushko, Claudia Schmidt, Dave Moore, Greg Brown, Max Roach, Taj...
, has appeared on all the recordings in the discography except the inaugural 1977 Steve Tibbetts album.
Tibbetts stopped doing live performances regularly in the mid-1980s. Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson have toured on other occasions including a 1988 "YR" tour, a 1991/1992 "Big Map Idea" tour and shows with Chöying Drolma in 1997, 1999, and 2005. Starting in the late 1980s he travelled extensively in Nepal
Nepal
Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...
, which is where he met Chöying Drolma, a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Their first collaboration, Chö, was not intended as a commercial record but it was released and gained some positive notice. The second project,Selwa, was a far more carefully considered musical collaboration and it received some very positive reviews as an example of a successful meeting of two very different musical traditions. These releases helped establish what would become Chöying Drolma's Nepalese chart topping music career.
Discography
- Steve Tibbetts (Cuneiform, 1977)
- Yr (Frammis, 1980—re-released by ECM/Universal Classics, 1988)
- Northern Song (ECM/Universal Classics, 1982)
- Safe Journey (ECM/Universal Classics, 1984)
- Exploded View (ECM/Universal Classics, 1986)
- Big Map Idea (ECM/Universal Classics, 1989)
- The Fall of Us All (ECM/Universal Classics, 1994)
- Chö (Hannibal/Rykodisc, 1997) (with Chöying Drolma)
- Å (Hannibal/Rykodisc, 1999) (with Knut Hamre)
- A Man About A Horse (ECM/Universal Classics, 2002)
- Selwa (Six Degrees RecordsSix Degrees RecordsSix Degrees Records is an independent record label noted for its catalog of recordings from international musicians and vocalists. It has been described by the journalist and producer Derek Beres as "one of the most groundbreaking labels of the past decade."...
, 2004) (with Chöying Drolma) - Natural Causes (ECM/Universal Classics, 2010) (with Marc Anderson)