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. The cause was cancer, said a friend, Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. 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. ![]() 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. 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. Bull's next album, 'Inventions,' included Bach, Brazilian tunes and Chuck Berry's 'Memphis.' Bull also became a disc jockey for a radio program called 'Music of Man' on WNCN-FM in New York. 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. Sandy Bull, a guitarist, composer and improviser whose extended fantasias merged American folk styles with jazz, classical and world music, died on. His 'Vehicles' in 1991 featured the Senegalese percussionist Aiyb Dieng. 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.' 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. Bobby Moore & The Rhythm Aces![]() C.; two sons, Jesse and Jackson; a sister, Daisy Paradis; a brother, Digger St. John; and his mother. Sandy Bull was a composer and accomplished player of many stringed instruments, including guitar, pedal-steel, banjo and the middle-eastern oud. Sandy Bull's music and recordings are characterized by his blending of non-western instrumentation and improvisational traditions with the 1960's folk revival. His albums for Vanguard records often combined extended modal improvisations on oud with an eclectic repertoire of instrumental cover material. Bull is well known for his arrangement of Carl Orff's composition Carmina Burana for 5 string banjo on his. Card bin database.
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