Leo Kottke
Leo Kottke is a legendary acoustic guitar virtuoso who has developed a cult following of fellow guitarists and fans over the span of a 30-year career of recording and performing. Blending folk, jazz, and blues influences into a signature finger-picked style of syncopated, polyphonic music, Kottke pre-dated and predicted much of the New Age instrumental music movement while never being confined within a genre. Kottke has overcome a series of personal obstacles including partial deafness and a nearly career-ending bout with tendon damage to emerge as the widely-recognized master of his instrument.
Focusing primarily on instrumental composition and playing, Kottke has sporadically moved in a vocal direction, singing in an unconventional yet expressive baritone famously self-described as sounding like "geese farts on a muggy day". In concert, Kottke intersperses humorous and often bizarre monologues with vocal and instrumental selections from throughout his career, played solo on his signature 6-and 12 string guitars.
His most well-known album continues to be 1969's instrumental 6 & 12-String Guitar, also kown as the Armadillo album. Pressured in the early 1970s to be a folk singer-songwriter rather than an instrumentalist, he recorded with backing musicians on albums such as Mudlark, Ice Water and Chewing Pine. Some of this production sounds dated now, and in recent years Kottke has begun re-recording tunes he wrote and recorded in the early 1970s. 1999's One Guitar No Vocals offered 1974's "Morning Is The Long Way Home", for example, opened up from behind the vocal line, stripped of its original trippy lyrics. During the 1980s, up to about Great Big Boy, the production on his records made them at times sound a little like New Age music in the Wyndam Hill style, but his writing and guitar playing has always been too eclectic to fit into that category as well as did that of his fellow acoustic guitarist Michael Hedges.
Leo Kottke has collaborated on his records with his mentor John Fahey, Chet Atkins, Lyle Lovett, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies and Rickie Lee Jones. He's recorded tunes by Tom T. Hall, Johnny Cash, Carla Bley, Fleetwood Mac, The Byrds, Jorma Kaukonen, Kris Krisofferson, Randall Hylton and many others.
Albums:
12-String Blues (1969)
Circle Round The Sun (1970)
6 & 12-String Guitar (1971)
Mudlark (1971)
Greenhouse (1972)
My Feet Are Smiling (1973)
Dreams And All That Stuff (1974)
Ice Water (1974)
Leo Kottke, John Fahey & Peter Lang (1974)
Chewing Pine (1975)
Leo Kottke (1976)
Burnt Lips (1978)
Balance (1979)
Live In Europe (1980)
Guitar Music (1981)
Time Step (1983)
Voluntary Target (1983)
A Shout Towards Noon (1986)
Regards From Chuck Pink (1988)
My Father's Face (1989)
That's What (1990)
Great Big Boy (1991)
Peculiaroso (1991)
Live (1995)
Standing In My Shoes (1997)
One Guitar No Vocals (1999)
Clone [with Mike Gordon of Phish] (2002)
Try And Stop Me (2004)
Read some contemporary and retrospective reviews of 6 & 12-String Guitar
Kottke Official Tour Schedule tours constantly, mostly in the United States:
Some of his essays have been posted on his official website.