Even by a touring musician’s footloose standards guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel has lived the life of a rolling stone.
Long before he emerged as a 20-year-old phenomenon in the band of vibraphone master and guitar-centric talent scout Gary Burton, taking over a chair that launched future guitar greats Larry Coryell, Mick Goodrick, and Pat Metheny, Rosenwinkel kept his suitcase packed.
Throughout his grade school years his parents’ joint custody agreement bounced Rosenwinkel and his brothers back and forth between Philadelphia-area houses. In college touring gigs often interrupted his five-semester stint at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Living in Berlin since 2007, he experienced a particularly potent strain of the stay-at-home disorientation sparked by the March 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns.
“I hadn’t been off the road forever, really,” said Rosenwinkel, 52. “It was literally the first time I spent more than three months in one place since I was 6 years old. I wrote a lot of music and in that experience it became more clear how much we need musicians and artists to keep us feeling human.”
Back in the Bay Area for performances Oct. 9 at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage and Oct. 10 at Santa Cruz’s Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Rosenwinkel is focusing on some of that new music he wrote during the pandemic. His all-star quartet just finished a week-long run in New York City, where they recorded a live album at the Village Vanguard, jazz’s most revered venue.
With bassist Eric Revis and drummer Gregory Hutchinson, the band is powered by a superlative rhythm section tandem. Rosenwinkel’s first-call collaborator for more than a decade, the bassist “is one of the greatest musicians I’ve played with, period,” Rosenwinkel said. “Eric’s sound his so huge. His beat is so big. I just love playing with him.”
While best known for his ongoing quarter-century tenure with Branford Marsalis, Revis is also an esteemed composer and bandleader in his own right who describes Rosenwinkel’s extended melodies as deceptively tricky.
“You tend to concentrate on the ‘song’ rather than just straight improvising through,” Revis said. “The compositions demand you play in a melodic fashion. He definitely writes pieces where there are these little twists.”
Rosenwinkel and Hutchinson worked together as rising young musicians on the 1990s scene that centered on the West Village jazz spot Smalls. They renewed their collaboration in recent years after Hutchinson relocated to Rome, and the drummer played on Rosenwinkel’s standards-based 2020 trio album on his label Heartcore Records, “Angels Around.” But with the new project based exclusively on the guitarist’s compositions, “I’m really excited for him to be playing my original music and hear how he’s tearing it up,” Rosenwinkel said.
Rosenwinkel’s longtime pianist Aaron Parks recorded with him at the Vanguard, but he’s bringing Menlo Park-reared Taylor Eigsti out for the West Coast gigs. Like the multiple Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Terence Blanchard and vocalist Lisa Fischer, with whom Eigsti has recently performed in the Bay Area, Rosenwinkel treasures a keyboard touch that he describes as “like no other pianist’s sound.”
“It’s really incredible how clear and coherent the overtones are when he plays,” Rosenwinkel said. “It’s a real natural gift he has to activate a celestial resonance with the piano.” Eigsti returns to the Bay Area Nov. 26 for a solo recital at Oakland’s Piedmont Piano Company.
In many ways Eigsti is an ideal interlocutor for Rosenwinkel, who’s become one of his generation’s most influential figures as an improviser and composer with gift for crafting ethereal melodies. It’s no coincidence that Rosenwinkel describes his tunes as songs, as “each has their own story, not lyrically, but I do think of each one as a song, or a room in the house, or different stars in a constellation, or an internal travelogue capturing specific moments and feelings.”
The new material reflects a different kind of journey. Instead of touring the world, he was hunkered down in Berlin with his wife, getting a glimpse into the stationary lifestyle. He’s quick to express empathy for the countless losses inflicted by COVID, but adds paradoxically “my personal experience was quite healthy in a lot of ways. We organized our house, and really did a lot of homemaking stuff. It was a great opportunity to break some habits, and initiate some healthier habits.”
He honed his production skills, developing a series of video master classes and worked to expand his label Heartcore Records, which has released albums introducing impressive young players like American guitarist Cecil Alexander and Estonian pianist/composer Britta Virves. Recording his own album on piano and documenting his jazz quartet project focusing on Chopin, Rosenwinkel seemed to expand in confinement. Back on the road, he’s got new songs to sing.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
KURT ROSENWINKEL QUARTET
When and where: 7 p.m. Oct. 9 at Freight & Salvage, 2020 Addison St., Berkeley; $30-$34, www.thefreight.org; 7 p.m. Oct. 10 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar St., Santa Cruz; $42-$47.25, www.kuumbwajazz.org
Source: www.mercurynews.com