Sir Richard Bishop

Sir Richard Bishop is the best guitarist I’ve ever heard or seen, or heard and seen, and he’s right around the world with it. About the only fact you need to know is that he really is that good, though here are a few others to help flesh out the portrait.

Bishop was in Sun City Girls, a group he formed in the early ’80s with his brother—Alan, who was, like him, fluent in many musical forms on many instruments—and drummer Charles Gocher. The breadth and depth of Sun City Girls’ 25-year career is flabbergasting: dozens of recordings that varied wildly but often combined a mischievous and bent post-punk aesthetic with one or many traditional and folkloric musics from around the world, especially the hot zones of Africa, India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. They played with virtuosity and manic energy, were capable of both heart-stopping beauty and mind-altering experimental journeys, and did everything with a caustic sense of humor.

Bishop’s first solo record, Salvador Kali, was released by John Fahey’s Revenant label in 1998, which is fitting not because Bishop and Fahey share a sound but rather a stature among guitarists of their respective eras. His albums since (there are seven, but more in small pressings) trace a voracious appetite for the new; they’re like stand-alone rough guides to sounds derived from Indian and Arabic sources that, together, make one incredible travelogue-in-progress. Bishop’s music bears the same reverence, playfulness, mastery and virtuosity as that of Sun City Girls.

His live shows—which have been frequent since the end of Sun City Girls in 2007—have left audiences everywhere awestruck. For one song, he’ll pick gorgeous melodies from exotic (possibly imaginary) lands; the next, he’ll tear into furious runs of astonishing power and dexterity. He’s really the best I’ve ever seen, but you don’t need to take my word for it. You can see for yourself in September. —Mike Wolf