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Sandy Bull, a Master of Musical Fusion With Open Ears, Dies at 60
By JON PARELES 4/14/01 for NYT
"Sandy Bull, a guitarist, composer and improviser whose extended fantasias merged American
folk styles with jazz, classical and world music, died on Wednesday at his home in Franklin,
Tenn. He was 60.
The cause was cancer, said a friend, Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Mr. Bull came out of the folk revival of the 1950's and the early 60's. But while many of his
contemporaries were trying to recreate backwoods American styles, Mr. Bull turned his ear to
the wider world. During his career he performed not only on acoustic and electric guitars, but
also on electric bass, piano, banjo, oud, sarod and pedal steel guitar. His instincts, and his
fondness for the drone at the basis of many music styles, led him to what would later be
called fusion or world music.
Mr. Bull was born in New York City and grew up in Florida, living with his father after his
parents separated. He briefly studied drums and got his first guitar when he was 8. His
mother, Daphne Hellman, is a harpist whose repertory spans jazz and classical music, and he
began living with her in New York when he was 11.
He listened to Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Pete Seeger, and as a teenager he took banjo
lessons from Erik Darling of the Weavers.
By the late 1950's, Mr. Bull had begun a peripatetic career as a performer. In 1959 he played
on the streets in Paris, where he first heard Algerian music.
While studying music at Boston University in the late 1950's, he performed at Boston and
Cambridge clubs, sitting in with singers including Joan Baez. In New York in the early
1960's he worked around Greenwich Village at the Gaslight, Folk City and the Bitter End.
His music was constantly broadening. He heard Lebanese music in a friend's jewelry shop on
Macdougal Street in the Village and the Indian sarod on an album by Ravi Shankar and Ali
Akbar Khan.
Mr. Bull recorded his first album, "Fantasias," for Vanguard Records in 1962. It included
arrangements of classical pieces by Carl Orff and William Byrd, gospel and Appalachian
tunes and an extended piece based on Indian tunings; the band featured the drummer Billy
Higgins, who had been working with Ornette Coleman. Mr. Bull's next album, "Inventions,"
included Bach, Brazilian tunes and Chuck Berry's "Memphis." Mr. Bull also became a disc
jockey for a radio program called "Music of Man" on WNCN-FM in New York.
Mr. Bull moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963 and shared an apartment with Hamza
El Din, the Nubian oud master. In the late 1960's Mr. Bull spent time in London and in
Egypt, where he performed on Radio Cairo. But by the end of the 60's he had become
addicted to heroin, a habit he finally broke in 1974. He re- emerged playing oud at shows in
Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, and he studied sarod with Mr. Khan in 1976.
But from 1972 to 1987 he could not get a recording contract. "Some label people wanted me
to play the way I'd done on my first two albums," he said in an interview with Folk Roots
magazine. "But I was always trying to do something a little different, change, try different
approaches. I didn't want to repeat myself."
He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980's. His 1988 album, "Jukebox School of Music"
(ROM), included salsa-flavored tunes and programmed keyboard parts. His "Vehicles" in
1991 featured the Senegalese percussionist Aiyb Dieng.
Mr. Bull moved to the Nashville area in 1992 and in 1996 started his own label, Timeless
Recording Society, which released "Steel Tears," the first album to feature his singing. He
had surgery for lung cancer in 1996. In 1998 Vanguard released a compilation album, "The
Vanguard Sessions." Mr. Bull had been working on an album of instrumentals, including
solos for oud, sarod and electric guitar and a piece with percussionists from the Tito Puente
Orchestra.
He is survived by his wife, Candy; a daughter, K. C.; two sons, Jesse and Jackson; a sister,
Daisy Paradis; a brother, Digger St. John; and his mother."