VA - Solstice: A Tribute to Steffen Basho​-​Junghans (2023)

Buck Curran is, in a similar vein to Glenn Jones, a stalwart and academic of the guitar soli universe and a spellbinding musician. Buck is also a generous curator, being behind the wonderful Ten Years Gone: A Tribute to Jack Rose album that was released a few years back. Buck was a close friend of the wonderful Steffen Basho-Junghans, himself an ace instrumental acoustic guitar player and Robbie Basho scholar. Steffen sadly passed away last December, leaving a hole in the genre he loved and bequeathing Robbie Basho’s iconic, badly functioning Mexican twelve-string guitar to Buck, an obvious choice of recipient. Buck has now used the guitar to create two haunting slide pieces, bookending a broad compilation of tunes from players paying their respects to Steffen.

His Winter Solstice 1 begins the set with low and slow slide notes (the guitar is currently only really playable with a slide), immediately creating a haunting atmosphere. The intimacy of the piece is gorgeous, with the slide across the strings on the fretboard and the odd knock against a fret audible. Twenty-one other players contribute to the album, each bringing a different sound and style to the table. Joseph Allred is a natural inclusion, being a dynamic and creative musician, a friend of Steffen’s and a Robbie Basho acolyte. An Upper Cumberland Raga is beautifully eerie and weird, with light percussion and woodwind hovering spectre-like behind a progressive and searching raga.

Nick Jonah Davis pops up later on with Every Blue, a tune unmistakably his and full of lovely slide notes and stark space, bringing to mind the more experimental side of When the Sun Came.

The excellent Rob Noyes’ Surmises is an altogether richer and fuller twelve-string guitar song, boasting Rob’s signature technical prowess and splendid structure. His music has the ability to switch from jagged and challenging to warm and heartfelt, and this bright piece belongs in the latter camp.

A far stranger and more esoteric track is E. Jason Gibbs’ Mostly Starlings Before a Storm, a sharp, disparate and spacious piece of music reminiscent of Tashi Dorji’s work. Shane Parish’s Zero In is another fascinating one; a more easily digestible piece than Gibbs’, this one still challenges, with scattered melodies and bent strings working alongside rhythmic picking. Rhythm also pervades Pino Nuvola’s Anime Brevi, a strongly melodic and solidly picked tune with the accuracy of Steffen’s own music. The above examples are not highlights on Solstice: A Tribute to Steffen Basho-Junghans; the music across all twenty-three tracks is of the highest quality, with players like Isasa, Henry Kaiser and Liam Grant, among many others, providing other excellent tributes to the sorely missed Steffen. This amount of musical quality and artistic depth is rarely found on one compilation; I urge you to purchase this remarkable collection immediately.