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On edge
Kurt Rosenwinkel’s Heartcore
BY JOHN GARELICK

The 32-year-old guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel (who is at the Regattabar this week) has been a member of the "ones-to-watch" club practically since his student days at Berklee College of Music circa 1989-91. After leaving Berklee, he was immediately recruited for Gary Burton’s quartet, where he stayed for a couple of years before joining Paul Motian’s twin-guitar Electric Bebop Band.

"So many guitar players are clearly derivative of Pat Metheny or John Scofield or the leading players of the day," says Burton, who’s also a longtime Berklee teacher and administrator, and now an executive vice-president at the school. "That’s often the way it is with younger players on any instrument. . . . With Kurt, while he sounded like a modern guitarist, it would have been difficult to pinpoint who his heroes were. And in fact, his heroes tended to be not other guitar players, I noticed, but horn players on the cutting edge. He loved going to the Knitting Factory in New York."

The edge is where Rosenwinkel has stayed. After a couple of solo albums on independent labels, he began recording for the Universal Music-owned Verve. His soloing was brainy and as distinctive as Burton remembers — he had a blues-like feel for irregular phrasing, and a restless harmonic imagination, as well as the guitar hero’s requisite quick fingers. What’s more, his original compositions exuded pop-like tunefulness and unabashed romanticism. Listen to the waltz-time "Zhivago," from his second Verve CD, The Next Step, for a sense of his knack for combining complex harmonies and shifting meters with a catchy melody line. In fact, for that album, in order to escape the trap of his own virtuosity, Rosenwinkel detuned his guitar, so that his fingers and brain wouldn’t fall into ready-made patterns, forcing him to create new pieces by ear.

Since Rosenwinkel moved to New York in the early ’90s, his working band has included bassist Ben Street, drummer Jeff Ballard, and the influential young tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. Using the club Smalls as a workshop, they developed ideas for both Rosenwinkel’s and Turner’s albums. But while touring behind The Next Step, Rosenwinkel had a revelation.

"We were playing in festivals, and we were playing this music that had developed in the context of a small club," he tells me on the phone from New York. "And I started to realize that music has a lot to do with the space it’s made in. And I started to feel that there were aspects about these larger spaces that couldn’t be addressed musically with what we were doing." Rosenwinkel began to conceive a music "that would be more able to sort of fill these spaces."

The solution wasn’t necessarily greater volume, but a different kind of detail — "orchestration, composition, textural layers, and ambience. Ambient not meaning reverb, but quality of sound, the use of samples and these tasty audio dishes."

The result on the new Heartcore is not clutter, but a rich transparency. Rosenwinkel’s and Turner’s solos are as dense and exploratory as ever, and each piece has a distinctive flavor. The opening title track begins with a hard four-on-the-floor beat inflected by cymbal and snare syncopations and a fetching melody line that grows increasingly complex. As the layering of percussion, melody, and keyboard backgrounds intensifies, though, the beat remains constant and the overall harmonic structure relatively simple.

The idea, says Rosenwinkel, was to think in broader strokes, both rhythmically and harmonically, resisting the jazz brainiac’s natural impulse to stuff every measure with chords. "I wanted to hook the listener up, just hook ’em up on every level, so that the pieces had an immediacy to them that would just allow for more experimentation. If rhythmically it just feels good from the very beginning, then that gives you more freedom to take more adventurous directions in, say, the harmony or the melody."

Heartcore creates that rarely achieved combination of pop accessibility and jazz density. The use of samples and rock and hip-hop- derived beats (Rosenwinkel co-produced with Q-Tip) and the longer harmonic arcs provide bold, legible outlines, but there’s always more textural detail, whether it’s mellotron-like keyboard washes, string harmonies, rhythm guitar figures, Rosenwinkel’s wordless vocals and horn-like guitar tone, or Andrew D’Angelo’s bass clarinet, burbling from the depths of an Eastern-flavored piece like "Your Vision," with its loping clip-clop beat. The album as a whole has a dreamy feeling that never cloys and stays fresh on the ear after repeated listenings. In fact, despite all the production gee-gaws, Heartcore could be Rosenwinkel’s warmest, most personal statement yet.

Kurt Rosenwinkel plays the Regattabar October 2 and 3 with Mark Turner, keyboardist Barney McAll, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Jonathan Blake. Call (617) 876-7777.


Issue Date: October 3 - 9, 2003
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