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Toullusions
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“TOULLUSIONS” Review, by Richard Foss, courtesy of All Music Guide
[Please visit http://www.allm...“TOULLUSIONS” Review, by Richard Foss, courtesy of All Music Guide
[Please visit http://www.allmusic.com, enter “Toulouse Engelhardt” in the search box, then on the Toulouse Engelhardt page, click on the “Toullusions” CD cover to reach the album review page.]
The term "lost classic" is bandied about a lot in the rock world, but in the case of the Toullusions album, the phrase is appropriate. At the time this album was released on the tiny Briar Records, Toulouse Engelhardt was playing to huge audiences, and along with John Fahey and Leo Kottke, was regarded by some critics as one of the three acoustic instrumental guitarists who really mattered. The album was greeted with ecstatic reviews, and it's easy to see why. Engelhardt picked up ideas from bluegrass, flamenco, ragtime, and surf music in a way that nobody else was doing then. He moved easily between acoustic six- and 12-string guitars and an electric Mosrite, playing both with such dexterity that it sounds like the man must have at least 15 fingers. Though multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band plays on a few tracks and even tap dances on one cut, on the majority of the tracks there is only one guitar and no overdubs. Engelhardt's natural compositional style is the tone poem, making each cut a soundtrack for incidents that happened only in his mind. "The Fire in O'Doodlee's Popcorn Factory" is as frantically percussive as, well, a fire in a popcorn factory, and "Sailkatz Lament" is the musical depiction of a cat dashing through city traffic. The simply but warmly recorded album was a showcase of his technical brilliance, and as a masterpiece of both composition and performance, the album seemed unstoppable. Unfortunately, distributor Takoma Records was completely unprepared for Toullusions to take off, and copies weren't available when Engelhardt went on the road for the tour that was supposed to break the album into the mainstream. This and other difficulties with the label made Engelhardt decide to quit the music industry, and he didn't play in public again for several years. Briar nearly disappeared due to bad distribution, and the album became an almost legendary collector's item, both for the music and the fact that cover artist Rick Griffin went on to fame in the field of comic books. Copies of the LP in good condition were routinely fetching 200 dollars when Sierra Records (a re-named Briar) decided to reissue the album in 1994. Engelhardt responded with four new tracks, three of which have more orchestration and instrumentation than anything on the original album. The fourth, "Autopia," is a wonderful little blast of fun, a loopy musical depiction of getting thrown off a children's ride at Disneyland for being drunk. New listeners will find the album as fresh as the day it was made, still compelling evidence of a talent who was and is unique. Highly recommended.
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Reed's Ramblings
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Page 10 FolkWorks November-December 2004
REED’S RAMBLINGS
CD REVIEWS BY DENNIS ROGER REED
...Page 10 FolkWorks November-December 2004
REED’S RAMBLINGS
CD REVIEWS BY DENNIS ROGER REED
Dennis Roger Reed is a singer-songwriter, musician, and writer based in San Clemente, CA. He is apparently somewhat of an expert on Gram Parsons, with his writings on the subject having been featured in Mojo and in God’s Own Singer: ALife of Gram Parsons by Jason Walker. Writing about his music has appeared in Acoustic Musician, Bass Player, Bluegrass Now, Bluegrass Unlimited, Blues Access, Blues Revue, Blue Suede News, Dirty Linen, the LA Times, Living Blues, and Sing Out! He is still decidedly not famous.
Artist: TOULOUSE ENGELHARDT MEETS REMI KABAKA
Title: A CHILD’S GUIDE TO EINSTEIN
Label: LOST GROVE RECORDS
Release Date: JULY 2004
Fingerstyle guitar can be an acquired taste. The most repeated version of the beginnings of this genre has the late, great John Fahey as the inventor of “American Primitive Music.” That’s probably an oversimplification of the process, but it works fine as an encapsulated history. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a heyday for this music, with guitar hero Leo Kottke as the keystone player of that era. In 1975, Takoma Records, home of the heavy hitters of fingerstyle guitar, released Toullusions by Toulouse Engelhardt. Engelhardt carried the same oddball humor that Fahey and Kottke exhibited, and his playing style was somewhat similar, but with some gratifying oddball twists. For one, besides the requisite six and twelve string workouts, he plunked on a Mosrite solid body electric guitar. Mosrites were the axe of choice of the Ventures, the stalwart 1960s instrumental giants of twang. Solid body electric guitars were not being used by any of Engelhardt’s fingerstyle peers.
Time passes. Engelhardt continues to play, teaches college. A few years back, he crosses paths with percussionist Remi Kabaka. Kabaka has played with Paul McCartney, Traffic, Paul Simon and many other major talents. According to both, it’s almost a case of musical love at first sight. They connect, they do some gigs.
The new CD, A Child’s Guide to Einstein, is the record of this collaboration. Engelhardt’s style has matured, and taken a long leap into the joys of improvisation. Some of the tunes are not much more than the two artists exploring a concept. Two of the tunes are “tributes.” The first cut is Telstar, the British surf instrumental from the early sixties. The CD closes (sort of, there is a “hidden” track) with Jimi Hendrix’s Third Stone from the Sun. In between, Engelhardt’s compositions do full justice to his admirable technique. On many of the cuts, he drives his Taylor 12 string guitar into seriously bent territory. Producer Chris Darrow adds slide guitar and other touches to several of the tunes; ex-Byrd and World Music maven John York plays the Chinese table harp to one tune, the Chinese reed flute to one and bass to another; and Kaleidoscope-ian Max Buda adds violin to two songs. There are other guests, but overall this is Engelhardt’s and Kabaka’s show. Theirs is a marriage of the minds. The speed of Engelhardt’s picking is often beyond mathematical comprehension, but Kabaka’s varied percussion work never fails to keep up. Engelhardt’s compositions trade on the Einstein theme, and his work on Titanium Dandelions on the electric solid body must go well beyond any Mosrite work recorded in these last two centuries.
In the 1980s, fingerstyle guitar moved into a sub-genre known as “New Age.” Often, that style promises peace and but delivers somnambulism. Nothing could be further from A Child’s Guide to Einstein. It’s great to hear Engelhardt help move the fingerstyle guitar genre forward.
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Toulouse Engelhardt Rides Again
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TOULOUSE ENGELHARDT RIDES AGAIN
The South Bay’s obscure ’70s guitar hero is back. Is the audience ... TOULOUSE ENGELHARDT RIDES AGAIN
The South Bay’s obscure ’70s guitar hero is back. Is the audience ready now?
~ By RICHARD FOSS ~
“I’m not going to quit playing again. I’m willing to sacrifice everything for it – I think the world’s ready for my sound this time.” These are brave words for Toulouse Engelhardt, a musician who verged on international stardom in the early 1970s, only to disappear for more than 20 years. He was called “The Segovia of Surf” for his wildly inventive 12-string and Mosrite guitar playing, which mixed classical technique with jazz, ragtime, and surf music. Now he’s back in the music-biz fray with a creative new album that proves he deserves reconsideration.
Thomas L. Engelhardt grew up in the South Bay area of Los Angeles and taught himself how to play guitar. He only had one lesson in his life – from jazz great Wes Montgomery outside Hermosa Beach’s famed Lighthouse Café after a show. Nevertheless, guitarists like John Fahey and Leo Kottke hailed Engelhardt as a kindred spirit, and concert offers and album deals followed his early shows. In 1973, he opened for the Byrds on their final tour, acquiring his stage name in the process. He was billed as T.L. Engelhardt at a show in Colorado, where a drunken heckler kept interrupting the performance. Engelhardt shot back with a stream of jokes and sarcasm that silenced the interloper. The next day, a critic’s review gave more space to Engelhardt than the Byrds, and it speculated that the initials stood for “Too Loose.” Other musicians on the tour made it Engelhardt’s nickname, and he accepted it – with a slight spelling change.
After that outing, Engelhardt went into the studio with producer Chris Darrow of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to record an album called Toullusions that showcased his unusual compositional style. His extended solos were conceived as tone poems, each piece the soundtrack to a movie going on inside the artist’s head. For example, “The Fire in O’Doodlee’s Popcorn Factory” has the frantic, percussive energy of exploding popcorn as Engelhardt plays two melodies at once with perfect clarity. The composition is delightful, and it demands a technical prowess few artists can match.
In 1975, Toullusions was flying off the shelves at record stores. Unfortunately, distribution problems made the album impossible to find just as demand was peaking. Frustrated by the music business and burned out from a tough touring schedule, Engelhardt quit to pursue his other passion: He became a professor of botany, specializing in carnivorous plants.
Fast-forward through a generation of students who had no idea the lanky teacher with the caterpillar moustache once played for audiences numbering in the thousands. Toullusions became a collector’s item, and copies in decent condition sold for more than $100 apiece. By the early ’90s, Professor Engelhardt had raised a family and was leading a quiet life in coastal Orange County when an offer came from Hollywood Records – did he want to rerelease the old album with some new material? Engelhardt did, and, in 1994, Toullusions came out on CD. A tour was arranged, a few dates were played with Engelhardt opening for Todd Rundgren and other artists – and then Hollywood Records reorganized, dropping many of its acts, including Engelhardt.
This time, he didn’t stop playing and composing. He spent a few years perfecting a project called Martian Lust, a delirious album of electric guitar solos inspired by surf music and science fiction. This collection of “cartoons for your ears” was only available at live shows but still earned some positive reviews. After two recordings of solo guitar compositions, he was ready to try something a bit different, and executive producer Harvey Kubernik arranged a meeting that set Engelhardt on a new path.
“I first saw Remi Kabaka onstage at the Key Club in West Hollywood, and I knew it was going to work out right – he was my guy,” says Engelhardt now. “Remi grew up next to a river in Africa; I grew up next to the ocean in California. The water is in both our sounds.”
Percussionist Kabaka had played with artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Paul Simon, the Rolling Stones, Traffic, and Paul McCartney, and he immediately adapted to Engelhardt’s complex rhythms. After a few jam sessions, the two men went into the studio to make the new album A Child’s Guide to Einstein, released by Laguna Beach-based Lost Grove Records (lostgrovearts.com). Engelhardt says the collaboration was natural and almost instantly spawned a theme.
“The concept of the disc is ‘Thought has wings,’” he says. “It’s an old Nigerian proverb that Remi told me. We don’t really rehearse; we just get together and work things out. It’s almost the way that baroque music was composed – a lot of thought about counterpoint, and the themes agreed upon, but plenty of room for variations. I go into the studio with a concept, an idea of what is going to happen, but I leave room for the other musicians to improvise.”
Improvise they do. Einstein is packed with intricate yet highly melodic playing, and both artists seem at the peak of their powers. In fact, the selection of material is amazingly eclectic – there’s an electric tune that shows what might have happened if Johann Sebastian Bach had written surf music, a piece inspired by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and 12-string acoustic covers of the Tornadoes’ 1962 hit “Telstar” and Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun.” Although African drums and acoustic guitar is an unconventional pairing, they sound great together, and you can hear the musical communication. Guest artists on the album include Chris Darrow, Byrds bassist John York, and violinist Max Buda, all of whom contribute tasteful solos. The star of the show is still Engelhardt, but it’s as much for his compositional skills as for his playing. There are plenty of fast guitarists out there, but few could play this music, and none could compose it like Engelhardt.
The release of A Child’s Guide to Einstein has energized Engelhardt’s career, and he is doing a series of concerts with Kabaka and Richard Hardy, a musician who plays wind instruments as diverse as baritone sax and Oriental reed flutes. Performing with an ensemble will be an interesting stretch for a musician who’s been a soloist for 30 years, but Engelhardt relishes the challenge. “I needed a bigger canvas to work with,” he says. “Most of the tunes from Einstein could be played as solos, but I decided it would be a whole nother angle, to collaborate with other musicians. I have a bigger palette of sound to work with, and I’m using all of it.”
Engelhardt has quit teaching botany and is pinning his hopes on a good response to Einstein, which Lost Grove will soon follow with a remastered Martian Lust. Asked if he’s considered teaching his unique guitar style instead, he laughs ruefully. “When you sit around and play the guitar eight hours a day, and you’re so wrapped up in your little universe of composition, you don’t have time to teach.”
Toulouse Engelhardt and Remi Kabaka perform Saturday, with opening act Insect Surfers, at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana, at 8 p.m. $15. (714) 957-0600 or Galaxytheatre.com.
05-13-04
© 2005 Southland Publishing, All Rights Reserved.
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Into the Night/"Sonic Toons"
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SONIC TOONS
Guitar genius Toulouse Engelhardt re-emerges at Coffee Gallery Backstage
By Bliss
...SONIC TOONS
Guitar genius Toulouse Engelhardt re-emerges at Coffee Gallery Backstage
By Bliss
Timing's the essence of everything for musicians. For instance, a well-timed departure from the spotlight can recast an artist's legend with a mystique that familiarity would deny. Just ask guitarist Toulouse Engelhardt.
By the time he was 20 in the early 1970s, South Bay native Engelhardt was opening for his heroes, the Byrds, on tour, being mentored by revered guitarist Clarence White, and reaping awed reviews from critics who considered him peer to acoustic-guitar gods John Fahey and Leo Kottke. A preternaturally gifted, basically self-taught composer and performer, Engelhardt was poised for breakthrough success when lousy management and poor record distribution clouded his starry horizon, and he walked away.
For almost 20 years even colleagues like David Lindley had no idea what he was doing. That guaranteed his reclusive reputation.
That he opted to study plants and become a professor of botany could be interpreted as a succinct response to the music industry's business practices, but that wasn't quite the case according to the perpetually jovial Engelhardt.
"I just went to do other things," he explains. "I moved on in my life. ... I was a very naive person. Y'know, it was the music business, and I got eaten up alive."
But he never stopped playing, so his music's become even more dizzying.
"Just to keep my licks up, for the challenge, I was playing Bach on a Mosrite surf guitar," he laughs.
Engelhardt, who jokingly refers to himself as "the guitar god of Laguna," speaks like he plays: in such a fearless rush that his words, like his notes, tumble over one another with sparkling energy and humor.
He's got "all kinds of crazy stories," and he's quick to share them.
Returning to public view, he senses a big change: "I have this feeling of motion [on the scene], that something new is coming. There are people out there willing to take chances again because the public is demanding high-quality, somewhat visionary music."
Urged on by longtime supporter Lindley, he's slowly started giving concerts again, and last year released the wildly psychedelic "A Child's Guide to Einstein." That slow re-emergence was first sparked in 1997 when his 1975 cult classic, "Toullusions," was reissued by Hollywood Records with bonus tracks.
"My dad always said, 'Whatever you do in life, do a good job and people will remember you.' I've grown so much as an artist ... I will no longer let anything restrict me or my playing. It's like a botanist says: there is no such thing as a weed; everything has a scientific name. Well, to me there is no atonality, no dissonance; everything has its place. ... I'm not afraid to try anything now."
Toulouse Engelhardt plays at 7 p.m. Sunday at Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N. Lake Ave., Altadena. Admission is $14. For reservations, call (626) 398-7917. www.lostgrovearts.com.
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A Child's Guide to Einstein
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A CHILD’S GUIDE TO EINSTEIN
Reviewed by DAN ROPEK, 12th April 2005.
When asked who his favorite ...A CHILD’S GUIDE TO EINSTEIN
Reviewed by DAN ROPEK, 12th April 2005.
When asked who his favorite composer was, Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, did not disappoint as a music critic: “Most of all, Mozart. I think that Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as the inner beauty of the universe itself.”
If Einstein’s connection of music and the universe was dead-on and elegant, someone has finally returned the compliment. Toulouse Engelhardt’s collaboration with Remi Kabaka, “A Child’s Guide to Einstein,” has a celestial flow that would have likely brought a smile to Albert’s lips.
In no way a kids’ album - although they could easily dig it too - the instrumental concept album is based around Toulouse’s masterful fingerings on twelve string, and Spanish six string guitars. Opening with an ascending whoosh skyward, Toulouse establishes his vision and sound - taking on the classic 1962 instrumental Telstar. The guitars cascade shimmering waves of sound, an auditory Aurora Borealis punctuated with well placed streaks of fingerpicked lightning. And he’s just warming up.
Beyond Mare Tranquillitatis, Emancipation of Gravity, and Albert’s Gyroscope roam from inner to outer space, anchored by Remi Kabaka’s impeccable sense of time. In a long career that has seen him adding beats for the likes of the Rolling Stones and Traffic, Kabaka’s drumming pulses throughout the music, providing a necessary earthiness for tunes that might otherwise float a little too far away. Additional sympathetic playing comes from ex-Byrds bass man John York, and Kaleidoscope’s Max Buda - proving the point that some of those who lived through the sixties actually do remember what it was all about.
That he manages to build and sustain a unique turn into space music is an amazing accomplishment. Engelhardt’s magic is in his ability to imbue his instrumental tunes with warmth and a sense of humanity. Repeated listening only reveals more layers.
A version of Hendrix’s Third Stone From The Sun ends the disc - and Jimi would no doubt approve. Only touching on the original, Toulouse concludes the CD by making the song his own, a twelve string hymn to the universe and the mind that best imagined its depth and dimensions.
How to obtain the album: Visit CDBABY at www.cdbaby.com/cd/toulouse2. There are also some interesting comments on this link page attributed to Steve Winwood, who says of the album, “Is Toulouse playing in fast forward?”
THE COLOURED RAIN E-ZINE and THE COLOURED RAIN MAGAZINE are dedicated to the works of Traffic, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood and musical associates and associations Past, Present and Future.
Subject material covers amongst many things founder member Dave Mason, the solo careers, The Spencer Davis Group, Blind Faith, Jose Neto and any subject matter that relates to the musical paths taken by Traffic, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood and their musical associates.
http://www.senzatempo.co.uk/html/toulouse_englehart_meets__remi.html
