Robbie Basho

American guitarist, pianist, singer and composer, associated with the American Primitive guitar movement.
Born August 31, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Died February 28, 1986, in Berkeley, California, USA.
Orphaned as an infant and adopted by the Robinson family, he grew up as Daniel R. Robinson Jr. and attended Catholic schools in Baltimore. He sang in school choirs and played trumpet and euphonium before taking up the guitar as a pre-med student at the University of Maryland, where he was a room mate of the musician Max Ochs. Through the Washington folk scene he met John Fahey, moved on to Berkeley and adopted the name Basho after the seventeenth century Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Bashō. Hearing recordings by the sitar player Ravi Shankar in 1962 proved decisive, and he went on to study North Indian music with the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan. He specialised in the acoustic steel string guitar, working mainly on twelve string with open tunings, Eastern modes and scales, and set out to establish the instrument as a concert instrument. He recorded first for Takoma, then for Vanguard from 1972 and later for Windham Hill, before self releasing cassette editions on his own imprint. He was a follower of Meher Baba and a member of the spiritual school Sufism Reoriented. His death was caused by a stroke following the rupture of a vertebral artery during a chiropractic treatment. In October 2015 a documentary about Basho premiered in London, directed by and titled Voice Of The Eagle (The Enigma Of Robbie Basho).