By VIC GARBARINI
Published: July 1999

Richard Leo Johnson is an Arkansas native whose dazzling major-label debut album. Fingertip Ship (Metro Blue), may establish him as the most innovative guitarist since Jimi Hendrix. Johnson is a one-man guitar orchestra. He conjures an entire universe of tones, rhythms andlightning-fast runs on an unaccompanied 12-string acoustic. Fingertip Ship is full of roiling celestial chimes, mercurial single-line runs, and a menagerie of pops, taps and slurs. At times you'd swear that 12-string master Leo Kottke, frenetic jazzman John McLaughlin and Jaco Pastorius have morphed into one person. In fact, Johnson was influenced by a friend's unmarked tape of Kottke and McLaughlin tunes. (He thought it was just one guitarist playing everything.) But Johnson's music is about much more than flashy technique. His multilayered folk-jazz compositions have real depth and bite.