Review by AVA LIVERSIDGE
The experimental jazz guitarist behind Tim Buckley’s jazz-psych 60’s and 70’s catalog, Lee Underwood, is set to re-release his 1988 solo instrumental masterwork California Sigh on Drag City Records this Friday.
A fully remastered version of the record, which was initially self-issued from at-home cassette recordings, will be available on vinyl and digital streaming platforms, finally affording the meditative foray its rightful place in Underwood’s legacy.
Underwood has largely been remembered as Buckley’s lead guitarist—the one who can be attributed with Buckley’s inching away from his folk rock roots and into experimentation with jazz, psychedelia, and funk in his later career. Underwood was the driving force behind the Buckley avant-garde.
The oft-unrecognized California Sigh stands almost as the guiding text behind Underwood’s methodology for experimentation. I say this not because the record is particularly virtuosic, flashy, or mind-bending, but because it is the opposite. California Sigh is controlled innovation, completely out of its time and jettisoning any reference to eighties maximalism in favor of a surprising austerity.
Again, austerity is not what one expects of a psych-jazz titan. But, this stand-alone solo work seems to be the result of Underwood’s efforts to distill his musicianship. The elements that remain after all the noise fades out become pillars to his style: roaming finger-picking guitar runs, atmospheric synth tracks (courtesy of synthster Steve Roach), and a near-trancelike embrace of repetition.
And these elements do leave the impression of a sigh, finally released and free to echo into oblivion. At the time of its recording, Underwood was reading the psycho-spiritual works of Alan Watts and Osho, and beginning to embrace the meditative potential of immersing oneself in soundscapes over the performance aspects of musicianship that he spent much of his professional life a part of.
At the intersection of transcendence and prayer, California Sigh subverts expectations for an experimental magnum opus, choosing the minimalism of unfettered guitar acuity over the cacophony that often accompanies the psychedelic-curious.
Listen to Lee Underwood here:
