Shane Parish - Solo At Cafe Oto LP

This album was recorded on November 14, 2023.  I was on tour with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet and we played an evening of solo sets at a sold out Cafe OTO in London. It was the night before our concert at London Jazz Fest.  
This set explores British Folk ballads by Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins, American folk ballads by John Jacob Niles, and a song by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, from the television program Twin Peaks, called “Sycamore Trees”. 
All of it was played on a naked Fender Squier Telecaster plugged straight into the house amplifier.  It is the same guitar I played when we recorded “4 Guitars Live” at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht the night before, and it is the same guitar that Bill Orcutt gave me two years prior, when he first hired me to transcribe Music for Four Guitars.
In contrast to the rehearsal-intensive tight-knit arrangements of my 2024 studio album, Repertoire (Palilalia Records), my approach to interpreting the songs in this collection is more akin to the way that I played on my 2016 album of folk music, Undertaker Please Drive Slow (Tzadik Records), where the melody of the ballad is a catalyst for discovery, allowing the song to steer the ship, and occasionally pulling ashore to tarry in a tide pool.
-SHANE PARISH