One of my favorite things to see on an album are liner notes listing guitar tunings used within. As a musician myself, I see a certain humility in doing this for others, because in essence you’re exposing some of the magic you had to conjure up for others.
I think doing so, I think you’re telling the listener that they’re invited to use that same intonation as a starting point for their own exploration. It’s like like cooking. Here are the exact ingredients I used to make this: Would you like to join in? When you hear Dagobert Böhm’s Acoustic Moods, the ingredients might appear rote at first — acoustic guitar, again?! — but like any good bake the magic lies in the hands of its creator.
On Acoustic Moods we have a familiar mix — New Age, minimal Jazz and solo guitar — trekking elsewhere, somewhere near Köln, trying to get to a wonderful autumnal place where slightly chilly environs give way to the addition of new layers, rendering an inviting, warm feeling that can only come across such a time and place. One could say that Mannheim’s own Dagobert’s guitar playing fits perfectly a bill required to create such music.
Dagobert’s artistic career began way before he placed a note on tape. Educated within a Waldorf Rudolf Steiner curriculum in both Freiburg and Schloss Hamborn, from a young age, Dagobert was taught a holistic way of coming through his artistic endeavors. Spirituality, wellness, service to others, and tying various studies together in a way that each proposition could inform the other. Originally, his vocation was to continue in the line of his family as a violin maker. However, as he grew up, Dagobert would turn his eyes towards the acoustic guitar and Indian music, self-teaching in both instruments and going so far as to build a sitar himself.
Personally, as he moved towards living a simpler life — going so far as to work the fields of an organic farm and to turn towards baking itself, as a gluten-free baker. Music was a love, but it wasn’t entirely what nourished his life.
In the mid ‘70s, Dagobert would turn to busking on the streets with guitar and sitar, parlaying that playing by gaining entry to the German acoustic folk circuit. There he would gain notoriety by playing in his quiet, dreamy, meditative manner, one could say was deeply inspired by Carnatic music, Jazz, and folk. His first LP, 1982’s Sound of Wood would introduce German audiences to his ideas on a privately pressed debut. Then five years later, honing his technique and gaining a few simpatico friends/players, he’d sign with Jazzline treating us to something new and interesting.
Sounding like the fork in the bend of ECM and Windham Hill, Acoustic Moods, released in 1987, mixed the delicate, meditative “acoustic” folk of American New Age with this other moody, ambient, shifty “jazz” of the European kind. Highly melodic and experimental (in its own way), Dagobert invited sax, synth, and drummers to flesh out his nostalgic mood music. Largely based on remembrances of people who left his life, on little moments that inspire melody, and on using open intonation to drive out sonic pictures of special places, Dagobert Böhm’s song cycles recall the actual feeling of how perfect autumnal music can be.
I’ll single out “Für Nana” on this album. Dedicated to Christjana Natalie, a young girl that might have been his daughter or someone else’s (something not laid clear here), Quiet Force’s Stefan Toeteberg and free jazz fretless bassist Manfred Zepf lay back and create a sublime, sacred dance around Dagobert’s rooted picking, recalling those glorious tracks by early English folk-rockers that tried tie infinity to modernity, imploring us to find our own stories to comb through. Luckily for us, you could get to the same place — just tune in and look for it.
As our days get shorter, somehow the simple things in life cycle through that stage in life where they explode in color, leaving us shortly with memories that remind us of what’s coming next, shortly. Here’s to another album that fits these quiet, resonating moods.