Peter Walker
Rainy Day Raga

Cambridge, the one in Massachusetts, is, if you have never been there, probably much like you might imagine it. Very similar to the “real” Cambridge: Victorian-style buildings, a gentle river flowing through it, the university's rowing club weaving its way among the ducks. And then the fundamental presence of the most historic and important American university, Harvard, the center, along with Berkley's universities, of the student movements of the '60s and American counterculture of the period. The entire Boston area has always been a political stronghold of the American “left” on the East Coast, and of course, it gladly welcomed a plethora of beatniks from the '60s to the present. And Peter Walker was the perfect example of a beatnik artist of the time

Coming from a family of musicians from Boston, Peter began playing classical guitar and, little more than a teenager, started traveling, driven by the desire to broaden his musical and mental horizons. Besides gaining knowledge of Appalachian folk, he studied Flamenco guitar in Spain, toured North Africa to experience Arabic scales, and returned to the USA. Here he encountered an Indian musician, Ravi Shankar, and was captivated by Indian ragas and Shankar's approach to the instrument. This approach is well explained in the notes on the back cover of the album: “Raga starts from a drone, to which is added a scale based on that drone, and then a melodic line based on that scale, and you begin to interweave these three elements”

Peter possesses a huge syncretic ability, which allows him not to adhere to any of the music he studied but to take a little from each (flamenco, Indian ragas, Arabic music, and American folk primitivism) and fuse it uniquely. Only his friend Sandy Bull managed, in the same years, to propose music as free as it was accessible. As described in the 2008 album edition notes written by Ben Chasny, a devoted follower of Walker:

“Walker did not follow the American finger-picking artists, who were committed to technically developing the right hand, navigating between arpeggios and bass lines; nor did he follow their British counterparts, who were instead committed to traveling as fast as possible along the guitar's fretboard with their left hand. No hand was dominant for Walker; the heart was in command”

And there is probably no better definition to describe “Rainy Day Raga”, his 1966 debut. Instrumental music, yet so rich and multifaceted as to be as verbose as a hip-hop track. Some inserts of flute or dulcimer, and little else. Not much is needed to speak with the heart, Walker seems to tell us. Just be ready to live in the here and now. After a second album also devoted to modal improvisation, he withdrew to family life as early as the '70s, only to be rediscovered in the late '90s by a host of young musicians dedicated to the revival of American Primitivism of his contemporaries such as Fahey, Basho and Kottke. Though retired from public life, he has never stopped studying the instrument, even now at 80.

An example of how, sometimes, the reasons of the heart and soul should come before everything else.