Del.icio.usLeo Kottke
Fact Sheet
| Occupation | Guitarist |
Focusing primarily on instrumental composition and playing, Kottke has sporadically moved in a vocal direction, singing in an unconventional yet expressive baritone famously self-described as sounding like "geese farts on a muggy day". In concert, Kottke intersperses humorous and often bizarre monologues with vocal and instrumental selections from throughout his career, played solo on his signature 6-and 12 string guitars.
His most well-known album continues to be 1969's instrumental 6 & 12-String Guitar, also kown as the Armadillo album. Pressured in the early 1970s to be a folk singer-songwriter rather than an instrumentalist, he recorded with backing musicians on albums such as Mudlark, Ice Water and Chewing Pine. Some of this production sounds dated now, and in recent years Kottke has begun re-recording tunes he wrote and recorded in the early 1970s. 1999's One Guitar No Vocals offered 1974's "Morning Is The Long Way Home", for example, opened up from behind the vocal line, stripped of its original trippy lyrics. During the 1980s, up to about Great Big Boy, the production on his records made them at times sound a little like New Age music in the Wyndam Hill style, but his writing and guitar playing has always been too eclectic to fit into that category as well as did that of his fellow acoustic guitarist Michael Hedges.
Leo Kottke has collaborated on his records with his mentor John Fahey, Chet Atkins, Lyle Lovett, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies and Rickie Lee Jones. He's recorded tunes by Tom T. Hall, Johnny Cash, Carla Bley, Fleetwood Mac, The Byrds, Jorma Kaukonen, Kris Krisofferson, Randall Hylton and many others.