*Edition of 300* Melodies are alive, remolded and reshaped in each performance. Guitarist Shane Parish embraces this continual evolution by transcribing songs from across musical genres, instruments, and eras for solo guitar. Recent albums like 2024’s Repertoire, which features 14 songs across jazz, folk, and electronic music and played on acoustic guitar, showcase his skill in transcription, as does his work transforming Bill Orcutt’s Four Guitars from a multi-tracked solo project into a quartet played live by four musicians. His practice is that of musical curiosity and technical virtuosity, highlighting all the ways a good song can be unraveled and sewn back together into something new.

On Solo At Cafe Oto, Parish presents six poignant ballads reimagined for solo electric guitar as played at London’s legendary venue in fall 2023. A European tour with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet brought him to the venue; they did a one-off show at Cafe Oto in which each member of the group played a solo set. It ended up being a special night, one of those shows in which there’s magic in the room forged by a shared love of music.

Many of the songs Parish chose to perform that evening hold a sense of mysteriousness, something immersive and intriguing to get lost in. He picked them — some of which had stayed with him for many years — because of their attention to atmosphere. It’s a characteristically eclectic vision: Three songs are by John Jacob Niles, a Kentucky balladeer whom Parish had developed a deep knowledge of over recent years, two are by English songwriters, Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins, and one is by Angelo Badalamenti, known for his unique ability to capture the dreamy and surreal darkness of David Lynch’s storied worlds. Parish’s transcriptions highlight how each of these songs create a mood in their timeless melodies, and invite us to share in them.

As a player, and a listener, Parish is drawn to melody, and on Solo At Cafe Oto, that attention is evident. He plays each note with delicate precision, letting them sway with the push and pull of the music. On “Barbara Allen,” his bluesy chords swell and fade as they move from consonance into dissonance and back again, gradually disappearing into mere wisps; on “Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot,” his upbeat syncopations give way to melancholy. Later on, Parish takes “Sycamore Trees,” an eerie downtempo track famously premiered in the Twin Peaks Black Lodge, and funnels it through the overdrive pedal, cloaking each chord in chilling static. He leans into each dissonance, which, in turn, rattle back with the sting of a lightning strike.

"Most of all, that night at Cafe Oto was characterized by its shared joy, which still radiates through Solo at Cafe Oto. The walls between audience and musician were collapsed, disintegrated by the expressiveness of these songs. On recording, you can hear that intimacy — the meticulous detail in Parish’s picking, and how, in time, it yields something greater than the sum of its parts. Through transcription and reinterpretation, Parish shows us that music is a living being just waiting to be discovered again, together."
-Vanessa Ague

"This album was recorded on November 14, 2023.  I was on tour with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet and we played an evening of solo sets at a sold out Cafe OTO in London. It was the night before our concert at London Jazz Fest.  
This set explores British Folk ballads by Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins, American folk ballads by John Jacob Niles, and a song by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, from the television program Twin Peaks, called “Sycamore Trees”. 
All of it was played on a naked Fender Squier Telecaster plugged straight into the house amplifier.  It is the same guitar I played when we recorded “4 Guitars Live” at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht the night before, and it is the same guitar that Bill Orcutt gave me two years prior, when he first hired me to transcribe Music for Four Guitars.
In contrast to the rehearsal-intensive tight-knit arrangements of my 2024 studio album, Repertoire (Palilalia Records), my approach to interpreting the songs in this collection is more akin to the way that I played on my 2016 album of folk music, Undertaker Please Drive Slow (Tzadik Records), where the melody of the ballad is a catalyst for discovery, allowing the song to steer the ship, and occasionally pulling ashore to tarry in a tide pool."
-Shane Parish