Much of the attention around California-based
Frank Fairfield can be summed up simply enough -- the contrast of his young age with the fact that he plays old-time folk music, at least as seen through the eyes of any number of commentators who (perhaps too often) equate musical realness with the possession of a banjo and fiddle, a knowledge of old 78s, and thoughts about the seriousness of things. That
Fairfield's debut album on Tompkins Square is recorded and presented as an artifact and with the trebly fidelity of a
Lomax field recording from the '30s is doubtless equally intentional and equally guaranteed to garner glowing comments for its authenticity in a supposedly impure world. (It's not that
Fairfield lacks for company in this general approach, either, given any number of acts ranging from the
Black Twig Pickers to
Fire on Fire and more tackling the same approach -- though one wonders sometimes whether the original artists would have been more than happy with full recording studios and more fidelity if they'd had the opportunity.) The quandary of
Fairfield's album is that it's almost hard to say anything about it, but being a museum piece on its own particular terms as a result, it wants to show and does show
Fairfield's skill at up-country, front-porch picking and fiddling songs and performances, and his reedy voice is as skilled for the art as his choice of song selections is tasteful. Perhaps perversely, it's the fact that he's good at what he does -- capturing the sound and feeling of the old recordings that inspired him -- which make his album almost irrelevant, an addendum to his whole approach, when listening to those recordings he loves would produce the same effect. For now,
Fairfield's recorded work is therefore something of a quixotic victory. ~ Ned Raggett