He was featured in Dec. Sete has toured widely on his own as well as with jazz trumpet great, Dizzy Gillespie, and has received frequent musical honors such as the New Guitarist Of The Year award from Down Beat Magazine in His style defies classification: It is a synthesis of European, African, Latin, Brazilian, and American influences achieved through a combination of classical, folk, and jazz techniques on a classical guitar. John Fahey - an acoustic magician himself - is the founder and Kingpin of Takoma Records, for which Sete now records.
By permission Guitar Player I n order to write anything about Bola Sete I must descend from this altitude, this thin air of obscurity, of indirectness, deceit, and hiddenness. I must free myself from what I once considered a great virture - the demonic stance of Inwardness vide early Kierkegaard. My reactions to Bola Sete and his music are so intense and so subjective that I cannot talk about him and be honest without talking a lot about myself. Please forgive me, Bola. Few living people have had such an enormous influence on my life, my music, my soul, my religion - you name it - as has Bola Sete.
That night, I was high on drugs as I had been for several years, and - as also had been the case for years - I felt that I was one isolated example of an experimental species that God had forgotten about I was wrong there. I felt I had been - wand was still - walking and talking among shadows: "People" who had no depth, who were not related to themselves, did not know anything about themselves - endless, phony, shadow-people.
And I was one of them. Only when I played the guitar did I, to some extent, make contact with the real John Fahey and with other people as yet, I was unable to make contact verbally or emotively. Bola played for about 45 minutes and grimaced and grunted through the whole set.
Something was wrong. He couldn't "get it out. I was intrigued by his obvious frustration having felt that way myself almost all my life. The performance had been mediocre so far. However, the audience gave him a long ovation, and he reluctantly got up and started to play an encore, still looking frustrated, impotent, mad, seething. I knew that feeling well. But then suddenly he got hot. He got so cooking, he played song after song for another 45 minutes, forgetting or not caring that he was doing an encore, playing many of the same songs he had just played.
