Two Guitar Icons Display Artistry

It would be convenient to attribute the vision and depth displayed by guitarists John Fahey and Rainer Ptacek at the Ash Grove on Friday to their recent descents into their respective hells.

Fahey, a guitar icon for nearly four decades, became destitute a couple of years ago after a divorce and other setbacks, emerging only last year newly sober and embraced by such younger guitar adventurers as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Czech-born, Tucson-based Rainer (he performs under just his first name) learned that he had brain cancer two years ago. With the disease now in remission, he’s set for new recognition through an upcoming tribute album featuring such fans as Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Emmylou Harris and PJ Harvey.

Each musician’s artistry, though, had evolved well before those tribulations. Rainer showed that there are still surprising possibilities left in the basic tools of acoustic folk-blues. Dazzlingly idiosyncratic without forcing it, he won the crowd with his earthily affecting Dobro picking, writing and singing.

Fahey’s headlining set was less appreciated--though one wonders what the people who walked out expected to hear. As always, he channeled a vast array of musics into a meandering instrumental stream. In his first, 20-minute excursion alone, he moved from haunted, Mussorgsky-like progressions to becalmed, Satie-derived chording to syncopated blues picking to a slow raga. It was sometimes lovely, sometimes crude, sometimes smooth, sometimes stumbling, sometimes transporting, sometimes leading nowhere . . . just like life.