(Now such hybrids are taken for granted in the music of Norah Jones or Grizzly Bear.)
One of the most idiosyncratic British innovators, the 60-year-old Scottish guitarist, singer and songwriter John Martyn, made his first New York appearance in more than a decade with a brief yet heartening set at Joes Pub on Thursday night. He was accompanied by a frequent collaborator: Danny Thompson, the bassist best known as a member of Pentangle.
Mr. Martyns style, which has lately been revived by the college-radio favorite Jos Gonzlez, mingles the modes of traditional Celtic songs, jazz chords, rural-blues fingerpicking, the otherworldly singing of Billie Holiday and the bluesman Skip James, a fondness for electronics like the Echoplex and, from the 1970s on, a touch of reggae. In his music, steady, precise, tightly wound yet eccentric guitar vamps with chords and single notes ricocheting from off-beats support waywardly improvisational vocals that are crooned with honeyed introspection or burred with a rasp.
Mr. Martyns own songs, among them May You Never (which Eric Clapton also recorded), juxtapose benevolent wishes with an awareness of darkness. Although he has made albums since 1967, releasing his most recent studio effort in 2004, Mr. Martyns Solid Air, from 1973, was his indelible moment in British rock: meditative and earthy, pensive and luminous. Mr. Thompson also played on that album, which supplied most of the sets songs.
Mr. Martyn performed in a wheelchair. Infection from an injury led to the amputation of his right leg below the knee in 2004, and one reason he was visiting New York was to get a new prosthesis. He joked, gruffly, that he is now a living leg end, and at times he seemed to be in pain.
But when he played, his music was intact. He picked taut, spiraling triplets in The Easy Blues, stretched and teased the vocal phrases of May You Never and Solid Air toward abstraction, and played hide-and-seek with the beat amid the Echoplexed layers of Big Muff.
