David Torn - Live at Big Ears 2019

The Standard Friday, Mar 22 “Go to your music index of choice, and scroll the credits for David Torn: You might gasp before you reach the end. David Bowie, Tori Amos, Jeff Beck, Madonna, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Meshell Ndegeocello, Don Cherry—that’s just a sample of the icons with whom Torn has collaborated. He’s also a vaunted, in-demand soundtrack composer, having written for or played on scores for Friday Night Lights, Traffic, Twilight, and Lars and the Real Girl. Across the decades, Torn has played jazz fusion with the Everyman Band, delved deeply into electronic experimentation, and found favor among hip-hop legends and Nine Inch Nails producers. “I don’t want to be the same as I was two years ago,” he told one interviewer around the start of the millennium. “I want to be considered a conceiver of music.” Apart from the celebrities and scores, though, Torn has emerged as one of the most vivid and imaginative guitar composers and innovators of the last 40 years. Using a complicated system of intricate loops and effects, he builds soundscapes that suggest open plains and jagged canyons, northern lights and gray dawns. Conjuring alien landscapes and pastoral vistas, busy city avenues and oceanic depths, Torn elicits atmosphere like few other modern instrumentals. He has recorded for ECM for more than half of the label’s life, and his 2018 release under their auspices, Open Sky, is perhaps his best. A conceiver and composer and a legend, Torn is a guitarist who transcends the term.“