Music Outpost

Richard Leo Johnson is one of the most innovative and inspired acoustic guitarist on the current American scene. Amazon.com's editors hailed him as "the next in a short line of guitar greats - a line that includes [Michael] Hedges, Derek Bailey, Pat Metheny, Sonny Sharrock, and a few others, while Playboy touted him as "the most innovative guitarist since Jimi Hendrix." A passionate and intuitive player, he is often compared to such masters of the 12-string as Bruce Cockburn, John Fahey, Michael Hedges, Burt Jansch, Adrian Legg, Leo Kottke, Steve Tibbetts, Ralph Towner, and Pete Townsend. But Johnson's style, characterized by complexity, exhilarating speed, and hauntingly unfamiliar harmonies created through "found" tunings, marks this self-taught player apart from any other musician.

Johnson was raised in a small Arkansas town in the Missippi Delta. He began playing guitar at age 9, briefly taking lessons from a hard-drinking oil-field worker before deciding he'd learn more on his own. Johnson recalls that his "real jumping off point" was a cassette he received as a teenager, including John Mclaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra's Inner Mounting Flame on one side, and Leo Kottke's Greenhouse on the other. Says Johnson: "I thought it was one prson playing this stuff! The initial impact was that it was somewho possible to make something happn that fused th linear liquidity of McLaughlin and the dense harmonic structure and drive of Kottke." Practicing on his own, and alternating between 6, 12 and 18-string guitars, Johnson created his own system of (30 different!) tunings, and developed an idiosyncartic playing style that utilyzed all parts of the guitar and combined plucking and strumming.

Johnson has released six albums, all of which received a tremendous amount of attention in the music press.  Two of them, Fingertip Ship and Language, came out on Metro Blue, a subsidiary of major-label Blue Note. Cuneiform released three others: The Legend of Vernon McAlister, featuring Johnson solo; Who Knew Charlie Shoe, a duo recording of Johnson and percussionist Gregg Bendian (who leads The Mahavishnu Project), and Poetry of Appliance, by the Richard Leo Johnson Trio.

In addition to his work as a musician, Johnson is also a filmmaker. His new film, Estancia (Stay), is a poetic gem that uses music and visuals and avoids dialogue to weave a gorgeous, nostalgic story of change and loss in the Mexican village of San Cristano. Johnson directed the movie and created the complete music soundtrack; it was filmed by Johnson with Skip Terpstra and Russ Powell.

Besides his music and film work, Johnson is reknowned as an architectural photographer.