Shawn Phillips
Album: Rumplestiltskin's Resolve
Label: Talking Elephant
Tracks: 7
Website: http://www.shawnphillips.com

Shawn was born in Texas in 1943, but he's still little more than a name to most music fans, and yet he's unquestionably one of the most talented and genuinely innovative of the musicians to have arisen out of the Southern California and Greenwich Village scenes of the early 60s. He's always been an enigma, as well as one of those cult figures oft described as a best-kept secret (actually, I'd be most tempted to label him a true polymath!). For, like other performers who have been awarded those epithets, his talents have never been easy to describe, reference, pigeonhole or assimilate - and so he's slipped through all the usual nets and in doing so has largely eluded critical appraisal. And yet he worked with many 60s luminaries (including Eric Clapton, Tim Hardin and Paul Buckmaster), his impressive CV also embracing a close collaboration with Donovan (and playing sitar on the Sunshine Superman album).

Shawn's early performing and recording history included the writing of an ambitious masterwork (Trilogy), much of which was never to see the light of day except in radically altered form at the start of the 70s on the pair of albums Contribution and Second Contribution (which were finally reissued on CD by BGO around three years ago and are well worth investigating). He certainly proved his chops as an astonishingly expert guitarist (indeed, multi-instrumentalist) and a fierily individual singer. During the ensuing five years, Shawn released four more albums while chalking up a healthy quota of BBC radio sessions (available on a Hux CD) and exploring jazz and funk with members of the prog band Quatermass, so his 1976 album Rumplestiltskin's Resolve would be released to a bewildered public who wouldn't know what to expect, especially in the fickle climate of the mid-70s. It's actually a bit of a rag-bag, albeit an intriguing one, where strongly characterised contemporary folk-styled songwriting (Early Morning Hours) abuts slightly funky rock (Spitefull), and weird, florid vocal gymnastics on the intense, instrumentally unadorned Wailing Wall complement the episodic title number (which seems to marry west-coast and late-Cat Stevens sensibilities) and the more relaxed ten-minute stretch of Today. Here too, Shawn's chameleon-like singing voice is very persuasive indeed, with its tremendous range and stylistic versatility. Elsewhere, intermittent gentle ARP-synthy backdrops prove more tasteful than they might sound on paper (except perhaps in the case of the vapid, disco-flavoured Hie Away, a track clothed much in the fashion of the time, and the cheesy cinema-pop of Serendipity Peace).

In spite of those occasional dated gestures, Rumplestiltskin's Resolve still sounds good (and fresh) today. It's a confident, interesting and appealing album, of which I'm glad to make the acquaintance at long last through the auspices of those good guys at Talking Elephant (and I do rather hope they'll be acquiring the rights to more of Shawn's albums in due course).

David Kidman