A Man About A Horse was Steve Tibbetts's first album for ECM in eight years, after The Fall Of Us All. The Minnesota guitarist builds dense, layered pieces from acoustic and electric guitars, hand drums, gongs and studio treatments. The improvising impulse comes from jazz and the colours from rock and world folk music. The enveloping textures would now be called ambient, though Tibbetts set that course long before the word was in use.
Tibbetts plays guitars and percussion. His long-time partners Marc Anderson and Marcus Wise add interlocking drum and tabla rhythms, and Jim Anton plays bass. The album was recorded in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2001. Writing in the Madison weekly Isthmus, Tom Laskin reported that Tibbetts had injured a wrist while working on his house. He then went for broke in the studio in the month before major surgery. The German magazine Jazzpodium also noted that the record was made after a broken wrist and before the operation it required.
The opening Lupra, written with Wise, sets ringing steel-string guitars against tabla. The core of the album is a run of three related pieces, Red Temple, Black Temple and Burning Temple. Here anxious, nearly atonal electric guitar meets clanging sampled gongs, gamelan and heavy drumming. Black Temple, at ten minutes the longest track, moves from delicate atmospheres to furious guitar passages. The closing Koshala, again co-written with Wise, ends in a swirl of percussion that fades into quiet ambience.
In Down Beat in 2002, Jon Andrews found Tibbetts's established strengths in place, "feral electric guitar solos, complex percussion and meticulously detailed production", and heard a new balance between drums and strings. Peter Marsh, writing for BBC Online, regretted that he goes largely unnoticed by followers of Bill Frisell, Terje Rypdal or David Torn, and ended his review with "Brilliant, individual music-making". Laskin, for his part, heard a guitar player's record rather than a world music one, its percussion from the East set under molten, distorted chords. The Sensible Sound recommended it as a good place to start for listeners new to his music.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1814, first released on 17 June 2002.
