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
MICHAEL JACKSON