Weird, wonderful guitarist charms Frist Museum audience

I heard a truly weird set Friday by experimental guitarist/composer John Danley on Friday evening in the glorious Grand Lobby of the Frist Museum, the re-purposed Art Deco building on Broadway, formerly Nashville's main post office. As I said to him during the break, "I don't know what's more impressive, your playin' or your talkin'. Either way, it's an irresistible combination." Here's why that artist (a term I don't use loosely) charmed me so.

Danley played entrancing instrumental pieces with percussive flair, picking notes & striking chords enhanced by occasional taps on his acoustic guitar. Sometimes he used only his hands & other times he employed a tool that he'd concocted out of a 3-inch housepainter's brush, a fingernail-file, a raised felt pad, Velcro & black electrical tape. The titles ("Logarithms," "Obscurantis," "Coriander," "Free Association," etc.) fit his idiosyncratic New Age style perfectly. It was like entering the mind of some idiot savant, a quirky genius uncannily attuned to the strange harmonies & melodies of the universe. All while playing a 6-string guitar with the down-to-earth skill of a master folk musician. The atmospheric sounds echoed off the granite & glass walls, gleaming floor & high-ceiling like urgent dispatches from the long-lost Telstar satellite.

Danley added to the sonic fun by treating his small audience to the weirdest, hippest & funniest stream-of-consciousness stage patter I've ever heard from a serious musician. One monologue focused on memories of his Irish Catholic grandfather, a man who moved from Kansas to Montgomery (Alabama) & alarmed his neighbors by lighting brushfires in the backyard, an individualist who drove a Ford "ANGER" (after the initial 'R' fell off its tailgate). Danley gently detoured our attention into discussions of Nashville trolleys & the DSM mental-illness diagnostic manual (where he hoped to find his obsession with Velcro as an official disease one day), existentialism, tossing out such terms as "Kottke-esque" (a dual homage to guitarist Leo Kottke & writer Franz Kafka) along the way. Citing a riff he'd stolen from Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, Danley added with deadpan understatement that "We don't need no education" was the state motto of Mississippi, Alabama & Louisiana. Ya gotta love a Southerner who tells it like it is. Maybe it helps to have some Russian Jewish ancestry, as the bemused Danley said he does.

Discussing his affinity for physics, Danley quipped: "If we didn't have quarks and gluons, we just wouldn't have a good weekend." Thanks in part to that dignified -- albeit eccentric -- musician, I had a very good weekend indeed. I tipped him without hesitation but, alas, did not have enough cash to buy a CD. (When I mentioned that I was a music blogger, he offered me one gratis, but I politely declined. Even artists have to buy groceries now & then.) Check out his website (www.johndanley.com) & hear why the weekly Nashville Scene selected him as "Best Guitar Hero" of 2002. He is also a regular contributor to a pair of excellent radio programs: NPR's All Things Considered & Public Radio International's To the Best of Our Knowledge, produced by Wisconsin Public Radio (shout out from a Badger in Dixie).