Concert: In the West, Hayden

There's something offbeat about Hayden Pedigo's instrumental music, which his mischievous, big-child face placed on a breathtaking technique confirms: it's western music, certainly, but it's aimed less at the Grand Canyon than at the ghost towns that litter its path and where the wind gently sweeps the rolling grass. More Kelly Reichardt than John Ford, The Last Trail than The Heroic Charge . A discrepancy accentuated by the personality and look of the guy: always wearing a huge Stetson and colorful clothes reminiscent of the sartorial excesses of a Gram Parsons or a Porter Wagoner, Pedigo is a model in his spare time (for Gucci) and even a candidate in the municipal elections of the city of Amarillo (Texas) where he is from (an adventure recounted in a documentary not bad at all, called Kid Candidate ), he does not hesitate to publish hilarious tutorials on social networks on how to play his pieces, which are obviously unplayable.

A True Story

Unplayable in particular because they are part of an instrumental tradition born with John Fahey who gave birth to American Primitive Guitar by combining folk, blues, Brazilian music, Indian music and classical music to bring forth something that was not at all primitive, which earned him comparisons with the masters of musique concrète. A kind of revolution that contained at its very heart the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, who would have ended up embracing each other. Like Fahey and like many other masters of fingerpicking (Robbie Basho, Jack Rose, Steve Gunn…), Pedigo draws, under his jokey airs, a great pastoral and almost meditative fresco and yet of great luxuriance and full of vivacity. And whose content often stumbles upon videos without rhyme or reason, shoehorned with absurdity and disturbing strangeness (Pedigo could easily be a character from David Lynch, somewhere between The Cowboy & The Frenchman and a Twin Peaks cactus option, just as he could have written the soundtrack for A True Story , a film which features an old cowboy crossing the United States on a lawnmower).

Tragedy and absurdity

Even more than the two previous albums in what he considers a trilogy, I'll Be Waving as You Drive Away is the quintessence of all this. Released this year, the album owes its title to the particularly tragic double episode in Little House on the Prairie in which Mary Ingalls loses her sight after contracting scarlet fever. As always with the animal, it's unclear whether to see this as a first-degree homage or a burst of scathing irony. Pedigo always seems to oscillate between the literal and the pastiche, darkness and overexposure, discretion and broad underscore, gravity and bawdiness. It could actually be that the guitarist is working more to highlight (as the famous series did in its own way) the permanent tension between tragedy and absurdity. After all, aren't tragedies immense manifestations of the absurd that go wrong? Likewise, aren't they, as Marx said, meant to be repeated in the form of farces? This is what this strange character, a sort of tragic turkey, as sincere as he is positively disillusioned, seems to have understood.

Hayden Pedigo – September 17 at Sonic