I don't know how true this conclusion is, but the Tibbetts/Tibet connection is true, from his records with the Tibetan Buddhist singer Choying Drolma, to the song titles on his recent (i.e. the last 16 years' worth of) albums ("Dzogchen Punks", "Sitavana", "Lupra"). Although this obsession, as I am lazily naming it (it makes you think something might be wrong with him, right? When we know there's nothing wrong, of course, except for the fact that he persists in the relatively arcane in a world that generally looks for the in-arcane, which means he has faith in something, which is what is really wrong, because belief is so, I don't know, pre-technology) seems to have overtaken Tibbetts slowly, in time, like a creeping suspicion that all is not right with the world, that everything that is out there is daring you to name it, to make it be more than what it is, to demand everything of it such that it demands back, from you, everything that you are.
What's the opposite of a Real Life Living Tibetan Buddhist? A Downtown Greenwich Villager? How about a wind-whipped, snow-soaked Minnesotan? Perhaps it is Bob Dylan himself, who wanders with the wonder of a sage on endless sabbatical on 1970's "New Morning": "If dogs run free / Then why not we / Across the swooping plain"? These lines link Tibbetts's "The Big Wind" -- from his 1982 Acoustic Guitar'ed, Effects Percussion Duo'ed, Open Plain Dream of Repressed Americana ECM debut Northern Song - to "Dzogchen Punks" -- from the Wild-Eyed Guitar Ghost Screech of 1994s The Fall of Us All, a record that proves that ECM would go where an artist would'st go, if only said artist would take them there. Where does Tibbetts take us who are them? Into the Heart of a Night that Repeats Itself until All Embers Die Away with the Dawn.
"Night Again", from 1984's Safe Journey, neatly nutshells the Tibbettsian aesthetic -- acoustic guitars like lonely telephone wires stretched in an empty field of distanced sky. An overarching undercurrent of swelling, absent sound wind blows in from the north, the east, the west, each of which carries its grains of cultural sand, and your vision is empowered, for a moment, with a clarity, that "cutting clarity" (as the Edge once called the motivation for his delayed guitar chiming) at center of darkness. And always at this black center, a guitar so swollen with meaning that it spills inarticulately into the free space and lightning slashes in, raging on, from the north, under cover of darkness. This darkness from which, as in Will Oldham's "I See A Darkness", you would wish to be rescued, that darkness from which there is no -where or -one to be rescued to.
Life Is Suffering. Suffering Is Life.
Steve Tibbetts' Tibet shares the singularity of vision unique to original and unoriginal artists alike -- Gwen Stefani and Miles Davis have each enclosed their audience in a total aesthetic world, whose signposts, roads, rivers, and land's ends are all constructed out of subjective and interpretive atoms. The limits of Tibbetts' world are always the limits of the guitar, volcanic yawp of the modernized post- Hendrix, McLaughlin, Beck, Holdsworth, Di Meola, Van Halen universe. Tibbetts reminds us, always, that this universe is part of the sum total, the ethereal milky way that serves as his separate galaxy of inter-earth travel. As early as Northern Song (the first of his eight ECM records, which span twenty-eight years between them!), he titles a track "Aerial View"; by Safe Journey (1984), he is "Going Somewhere", a ten-and-a-half minute track whose path-like wandering meanders and settles upon a Lydian modal drone, with Buddhist peace drums and bleeding guitar feeding its distortion into the milky sky. It's a hungry sky.
Tibbetts has said that he is looking for something interesting "far from home" -- he records the sounds of where he goes (all of his records credit him as playing "Tapes") -- and builds tracks around them. These tracks proceed with a logic that, after years of relistening, I cannot grasp, but this logic does not escape me -- it is as if the logic of this music exists purely to wriggle, slipping, from mind into air; as if this sound waxes as rhetorical as air, whose infinite patterns are accessible only when we determine ourselves of value to imagine them. As if we could actually determine our value in the face of "the world". As if "value" was ours, or anyone's, or anything, to determine. Tibbetts-ian Tibet makes sense of what has not yet been determined, of musical firmament whose elements peel back all four corners of the earth and reveal a perfectly smoothed surface, like the mind at rest in its Buddhist nest of purest cloudnoise.
Quick Postscript -- Although I am in possession of all of Tibbetts' records, I still look for his name amongst the "Jazz" CD's when I go to the record store, hoping to find some of my familiar friends in his bin. I like to re-experience the excitement of seeing one or more of these records, which I love so dearly, and imagining taking them home again for the first time. There is no suffering in desire, after all.
(Check out all of Tibbetts's work, with some excellent writings and biographical info, at http://stevetibbetts.com. And of course, www.ecmrecords.com, the label smart enough to anticipate him while knowing that he was the one to begin the anticipation.)
