West Park Presbyterian Church
165 West 86th St.
Sunday, September 25, $15, 7:00
www.thrilljockey.com
Glenn Jones is a god of the guitar, so it’s only fitting that he’s holding his record release party for the extraordinary The Wanting (Thrill Jockey, September 13, 2011) in a place of God, the West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th St. in a program tonight with Hauschka: A Prepared Piano Performance. On the gorgeous new disc, Jones, who came of age in the late ’60s and acknowledges that his “head was blown off by Jimi Hendrix’s second album,” leading to getting his first guitar at the age of fourteen, plays acoustic steel string, six-string, ten-string, and bottleneck guitars and a five-string open-back banjo on The Wanting, which features such dazzling sonic forays as “A Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957,” “The Great Swamp Way Rout,” “Anchor Chain Blues,” and “Twenty-three Years in Happy Valley, or Love Among the Chickenshit,” each with its own unique tuning. Recorded in his apartment in Massachusetts, the album reveals the continuing influence of John Fahey on Jones, who in 1997, in the liner notes to Fahey’s The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, wrote, “I was introduced to the music of John Fahey in the early ’70s by my high school art teacher, who played me ‘The River Medley’ from the first of his two Reprise albums, Of Rivers and Religions. The first album I bought myself was Fahey’s fourth for his Takoma label, The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party. It was, for me, one of those life-changing albums, important as only the right album at the right time is to a curious kid with a growing interest in esoteric music.” Jones has also just edited John Fahey: Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965), an eighty-eighty-page book with five CDs that comes out on October 11. The Wanting concludes with the seventeen-minute duet “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville,” with Chris Corsano on drums, a tour de force for Jones and his remarkable mastery of his instrument. The show tonight with Hauschka at the West Park Presbyterian Church should be, as one of Jones’s new songs says, “Of Its Own Kind.”