Not Afraid to Play It by Ear

People were calling Martin Simpson a virtuoso when he was still in his teens, but it’s taken the acclaimed British folk guitarist a few extra decades to become similarly sanguine about his abilities.

“I’ve finally reached a point where I feel really good about what I’m doing on stage,” Simpson said by phone from his home in New Orleans, “where the connection is seamless between the tradition-based material I play and the improvisational content, which I’ve really been pushing into new places. It’s been getting very stream-of-consciousness on stage, where I don’t know what I’m doing until I’m doing it.”

Yet Simpson seems obsessed with continually moving ahead. Although a decade ago he had pretty much risen to the top of the English folk music scene (where he had backed folk diva June Tabor for several years), he chucked that to move to the United States.

Here, he’s tackled a daunting variety of musical projects, including an album with Chinese pipa player (and Kronos Quartet collaborator) Wu Man and another of improvisations with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo. He’s toured with rocker Steve Miller and with Hindustani slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya. He’s done a blues album featuring cello, band and spoken-word projects with his poet-wife, Jessica Ruby Simpson, and a host of other ever-challenging pursuits, including his own 1997 album “Cool and Unusual,” a spellbinding, soulful set of instrumentals performed with David Lindley, Kelly Joe Phelps, Malagasy musician Sammy and others.

And once again, he’s looking to move on. Now he’s planning to reduce his touring drastically, though not until sometime after his two shows tonight at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments in Laguna Niguel.

No Time to Improve

“I’m in an interesting position in the music business,” Simpson explained. ‘I’m up to my [ears] in accolades, as they say, and I’m very proud of the work I’ve done. But at the scant level of success I’m at, you tend to take every bit of work that comes up, because you don’t have the luxury to pick and choose.

“So you just end up going around and around, running in the same spot trying to survive. . . . It’s not the playing--getting to play is great, but it’s all the traveling, the basic exhaustion, not really having time to sit at home with my guitar and get better,” he said.

To that end, Simpson wants to do more teaching and workshops close to home. Last year he and Jessica moved from Santa Cruz to the more musically lively city of New Orleans, where they have a home in the French Quarter, “on the quiet end,” he stressed.

Like his pal Lindley and other musicians, he’s exploring the Internet and other nontraditional means of disseminating his music.

‘Everybody I know is investigating alternative ways to do what they do,” he said. “I don’t think the large commercial end of the music business has ever been unhealthier. Everybody talks about the influence of multinational companies on business and politics. Well, how about when a distillery [Seagram’s] owns most of the music business? It makes no sense whatsoever.”

Simpson probably makes as little sense to the music business honchos. What use do they have for an English guy in his mid-40s who revels in mixing venerable Northumberland airs with old-timey American banjo styles and Mississippi Delta slide guitar?

In his way, Simpson is a one-man compendium of the American folk music experience. There was a club in the northern England town of Scunthorpe when he was growing up where one night he might hear Irish pipers and the next night the wondrously unintelligible American blues man Big Joe Williams, who befriended the young Simpson.

He grew up combining the same Celtic and African American influences in his playing that had cross-pollinated here to become country, blues, bluegrass and other styles.

“I love the fact that the banjo and the guitar entirely crossed race,” he said. “In the 1800s, while the banjo was being the seminal black instrument in the U.S., the acoustic guitar was the polite parlor instrument of the white middle class.

“Now that’s switched to the point where there have scarcely been any black banjo players within memory in New Orleans, because the instrument now has the connotations of minstrel shows and Jim Crow and all that. It isn’t cool.

“But listen to Robert Johnson, who everybody thinks of as being the cutting-edge blues guitarist of the 1930s, and partly what he was doing was recycling minstrel banjo stuff from the 1850s,” he said. “If you listen to those old minstrel banjo compositions, some have the exact same rhythmic variations that Robert Johnson used in several of his signature recordings like ‘Terraplane Blues,’ ‘Traveling Riverside Blues’ and ‘Milkcow’s Calf Blues.’ ”

Emotional Goals

As much as Simpson delights in such arcane discoveries, his performances are anything but professorial. He may indeed be applying some toothless Tennessean’s banjo technique to an ancient hornpipe tune on his guitar, but it is always in pursuit of some emotional goal.

“I really try not to do that ‘Hey, look at me!’ stuff, perhaps sometimes to my own detriment,” Simpson said. “I sometimes feel I’m playing so inside the music that I’m invisible. Clearly, that isn’t for everybody, but I don’t care. I hope I get more subtle as the years go by.”

Simpson isn’t sure what’s next on his plate, though he says he and Lindley have been talking for some time about doing an entire album together and may finally get around to it.

In cutting back from the grind of touring, Simpson sees himself not as retreating but deepening his musical efforts, which he takes pretty seriously in the scheme of things.

“I think there’s been some extraordinarily positive stuff in this century,” he said. “I veer between mild optimism and total, utter distress over the state of humanity and the destruction of the planet.

“As much as life seems to be getting locked down by corporations and everything, I think people are longing for alternatives, and what we have to do as artists and writers and musicians is demonstrate the viability of humanity, really,” he said. “We have to open hearts and help to examine the positive. It’s so battering and alienating out here otherwise.”

* Martin Simpson plays at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 #D Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. 7:30 (sold out) and 9:45 p.m. tonight. $20. (949) 364-5270.