Multi-instrumentalist David Lindley performs music that redefines the word “eclectic.” Well known for his many years as the featured accompanist of the singer-songwriter Jackson Browne and leader of his own band El Rayo-X, Lindley has long championed the concept of world music. The David Lindley electro-acoustic performance effortlessly combines American folk, blues, and bluegrass traditions with elements from African, Arabic, Asian, Celtic, Malagasy, and Turkish musical sources. He incorporates an incredible array of stringed instruments including but not limited to the Kona and Weissenborn Hawaiian lap steel guitar, Turkish saz and chumbus, Middle Eastern oud, and Irish bouzouki. The eye-poppingly clad “Mr. Dave” (as Lindley is popularly known) adds an uncanny vocal mimicry and a wacky sense of humor to make his onstage banter a highlight of the show.
David Lindley grew up in Southern California, first taking up the banjo as a teenager and subsequently winning the annual Topanga Canyon banjo and fiddle contest five times, as he explored the American folk-music tradition. Between 1967 and 1971, he founded and led what must now be seen as the first world-music rock band, the Kaleidoscope. In 1971, Mr. Dave joined forces with Jackson Browne, serving as Browne’s most significant musical collaborator until 1981. In 1979, Lindley began working with his old friend Ry Cooder on the album Bop till You Drop and The Long Riders film sound track—a musical partnership that lasts to this day and has spawned many recording projects and several world tours as an acoustic duo.
In 1981, Lindley created his own remarkable band El Rayo-X, which integrated American roots music and world beat with a heavy reggae influence. Lindley and guitarist Henry Kaiser went to Madagascar for two weeks in 1991 and recorded six albums of indigenous Malagasy music, which proved to have a major impact on the world music scene, both for the quality of the GRAMMY-nominated music recorded and the fair and ethical way the Malagasy musicians were dealt with. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Lindley has been one of Hollywood’s most in-demand session musicians, lending his skills to the recorded works of Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby and Nash, Warren Zevon, and many others.
In 1990, a chance meeting between Lindley and Jordanian-born percussionist Hani Naser led to an impromptu jam session and an instant decision to “take this on the road.” Lindley and Naser toured the world for the next six years. The duo recorded two self-released Official Bootleg compact discs: Live in Tokyo Playing Real Good and Live All Over the Place Playing Even Better under Lindley’s own Pleemhead audio company. At his expansive and eclectic live performances, David Lindley consistently gives one of the most unique concert experiences available to adventuresome music listeners.
“David Lindley is a musical chameleon. With his dazzling proficiency on an array of stringed instruments, Lindley can be anybody he wants to be.”—News & Record (Greensboro, NC)
“David Lindley—four parts imp and five parts virtuoso—is a certified monster on every stringed instrument you have never heard of.”—Santa Barbara Independent