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K U R T R O S E N W I N K E L
MAKING
MAGIC By Ted Panken
Late one afternoon last September, Kurt
Rosenwinkel sat on a sofa in his New
York hotel suite, D’Angelico guitar by
his side, his feet surrounded by various electronic
boxes, guitar strings and sheet music. Clad in
a pullover sweater, black jeans and blue worker’s
cap, Rosenwinkel was awaiting a phone call
from his stepfather, who he hoped could state a
correct jacket size to give the wardrobe department
of The Jimmy Fallon Show. The guitarist
was preparing for an appearance the following
evening with the show’s house band in response
to a request from bandleader Ahmir “Questlove”
Thompson, his classmate and jamming partner
at Philadelphia’s High School for Creative and
Performing Arts during the mid-1980s.
Thompson had spontaneously offered the invitation
the night before after hearing the first set of
Rosenwinkel’s weeklong run at the Village
Vanguard in support of his new CD release,
Standards Trio: Reflections (Womusic).
Something about the moment made it impossible
to avoid the kind of question the 39-yearold
guitarist might face on a show like Fallon’s.
Which is to say, how does Rosenwinkel deal
with the quasi guitar-god stature he commands
among post-Generation X jazz devotees, who
regard him as a kind of bridge between such
Baby Boomer icons as Pat Metheny, John
Scofield and Bill Frisell and increasingly visible
just-thirties like Mike Moreno and Lage Lund?
Rosenwinkel responded with an anecdote. A
few weeks earlier, off the road after a summer of
touring, he went to a bar in Berlin, where he
teaches guitar and improvisation as a tenured
professor at the Jazz Institut, and was engaging
in convivial discussion with a fellow patron. At
a certain point, his new acquaintance said,
“Yeah, so what’s your name?”
“Kurt.”
“What’s your last name?”
32 DOWNBEAT April 2010
“Kurt Rosenwinkel.”
“Get out of here! Don’t bullshit me!”
“I said, ‘Well, I am.’ He was like, ‘No way.
Kurt Rosenwinkel doesn’t talk like that!’”
Rosenwinkel laughed. “I don’t know how I
was talking. I had to show him my credit card,
just to shut him up, because he was a pain in
the ass.
“People acknowledge me, and it’s cool,” he
continued, directly addressing the matter.
“When I first started to hear guitarists I’d influenced,
I felt bad inside. I said to myself, ‘If this
is what people think I sound like, then I’d better
practice—if I’m influencing people, I’d better at
least be better.’ It motivates me, because I see it
as a responsibility, in a way. Not a big responsibility.
I’m just doing what I’m doing.”
What Rosenwinkel has done on Reflections,
on which he navigates eight ballads culled from
various nooks and crannies of jazz and the Great
American Songbook, is a point of departure
from his musical production of recent years,
documented on such widely pored-over albums
as The Remedy (ArtistShare) and such prior
Verve releases as Deep Song, Heartcore, The
Next Step and The Enemies Of Energy. On these
ensemble offerings, comprising predominantly
Rosenwinkel’s original music, the guitarist
sculpts a pan-stylistic world of his own, deploying
grooves and lines drawn from rock and
urban vernaculars and a distinctive harmonic
language informed by the canons of classical
music and hardcore jazz. He elaborates his
vision with ecstatic, cathartic solos, sculpting the
raw materials with high melodic sensibility, executing
them with immaculate chops and individualizing
them with an instantly recognizable
tone defined by his ability to weave both electronic
effects and his signifying voice seamlessly
into the flow.
During the week at the Vanguard, spurred by
bassist Eric Revis’ melodic, resonant lines and
drummer Rodney Green’s crisply stroked,
dynamics-attentive swing patterns, Rosenwinkel
followed and expanded the template of
Reflections. The previous evening, he began the
second set with “Backup,” a smoldering, medium-groove
inner-city blues that debuted on the
1964 Larry Young recording Inta Somethin’!
There followed a rubato-to-brisk reading of
Thelonious Monk’s “Reflections” and a tour de
force treatment of “Invitation” on which
Rosenwinkel stated the melody over a crisp 5/4
vamp before launching into an ascendent declamation.
Despite the furious tempo, he allowed
each note to ring out clearly, executing multiple,
independent lines, phrased unpredictably, as
though he and Green were conducting an ongoing
rhythmic chess match.
On a rubato intro to “More Than You
Know,” Rosenwinkel exploited his ravishing
tone, allowing the silence to speak, then stated
the melody with a Spanish feel. He initiated an
improvised dialogue with Revis before morphing
into a double-time solo notable for an abundant
stream of melodic variation within the line.
His solo on John Lewis’ bebop-era “Milestones”
was surging and idiomatic, while on “When
Sunny Gets Blue” he followed another long,
abstract intro with a soulful, cut-to-the-chase
declamation. He ended the set with Charlie
Parker’s “Chasin’ The Bird,” again transforming
his guitar into a de facto lap keyboard on which
to carve out the contrapuntal phrases necessary
to render the song.
In point of fact, over the three-day recording
session in Brooklyn Studio last June that resulted
in Reflections, Rosenwinkel had played similarly
diverse repertoire, arriving at the ballads
format in the manner of a film director creating
a final cut in the editing room.
“It was a big surprise to realize that we had