THE BEST TEACHERS don’t seek to produce a battalion of mini-me’s who parrot their own ideas back to them. Rather, inspiring educators facilitate independent thinking, allowing students to better follow their own paths. Judging by the two prodigious players who join Rick Vandivier at the Guitar Fest 2011 concert at Redwood City’s Club Fox on April 28, he’s a mentor of the highest order.
A mainstay on the Bay Area jazz scene for more than three decades, the Palo Alto-based guitarist is best known for his long-running partnership with supremely soulful vocalist Nate Pruitt in the ensemble Primary Colors. But Vandivier is also a dedicated teacher who’s played a key role in maintaining the sterling reputation of San Jose State University’s jazz program.
That’s the setting where he encountered Hristo Vitchev and Neil Kelly about a decade ago, and it’s no coincidence that they’ve emerged as two of the most inventive and entrepreneurial guitarists on the Northern California jazz scene, though Vandivier isn’t taking any credit for their success.
“I have only a tangential connection to the way that they’ve progressed, which is so much about who they are and how hard they work,” says Vandivier, who also performs with his trio at Arya in Cupertino on April 29, May 6 and May 13. “They’re part of this generation of emerging artists who understand the importance of networking and promoting themselves. It helps that they’ve got incredible music to present.”
Thursday’s showcase features the three guitarists each playing a trio set accompanied by the ace bassist Dan Robbins and deservedly ubiquitous drummer Jason Lewis, with an all-hands-on-deck grand finale. It’s the event’s third incarnation, building from last year’s tremendously exciting showcase with Vandivier, Vitchev and Terrence Brewer. This season’s intriguing subtext is that Vitchev and Kelly both describe Vandivier as a seminal influence.
“Rick really opened me up to the art of solo guitar playing, covering the bass and middle and melody simultaneously,” says Kelly, who performs Wednesdays at B Street & Vine in San Mateo. “He has a knack for creating full textures. Watching him play duets with Nate Pruitt widened my vision of what you can do on the guitar.”
Born and raised in Lima, Ohio, a small industrial city known as the hometown of the late tenor-sax great Joe Henderson, Vandivier studied at Berklee, where he was among Pat Metheny’s first students. He moved to the Bay Area in 1979, where he quickly established himself as one of the most versatile players on the scene, a consummate sideman with a silken tone. Among the many things he passed on to Vitchev and Kelly is a sense of the guitar’s infinite possibilities.
While they collaborated as students, performing widely as a guitar duo around the South Bay, Vitchev and Kelly are a study in contrasts. Vitchev has honed a cool, crystalline tone and expansive harmonic vocabulary that would sound right at home on the German label ECM, complete with strategically employed silences. He’s drawn to odd meters and long, intricate forms. Kelly possesses a light, clean, hollow-body jazz guitar sound, and he has a gift for writing sinuous melodic lines. He swings with unaffected grace.
After completing their undergraduate degrees, Vitchev and Kelly fell out of touch for a few years as each pursued his own musical projects. Kelly returned to SJSU for a master’s degree, while Vitchev launched his own label, First Orbit Sounds Music, and started documenting his working band with the extraordinary Brazilian pianist Weber Iago, bassist Dan Robbins and drummer Joe DeRose.
They reconnected as Kelly worked on his debut album, a gorgeous session featuring his quartet playing his lyrical original compositions. On Saturday (April 23), he celebrates the release of Rivers Converge (First Orbit Sounds) at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz.
“I’d describe his sound as Jim Hall meets Joe Pass, with a little Kurt Rosenwinkel, and all the modern hard-bop players,” Vitchev says. “Neil has a fat jazz tone, and his improvisations flow from that classic jazz guitar sound.”
Born in Bulgaria and raised in Venezuela, Vitchev moved to the Bay Area with his parents in 1998 when they were hired as engineers in Silicon Valley. He first got interested in the guitar through rock, and describes his introduction to jazz as slow and halting.
He still harbored rock-star ambitions when he won a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, but attending the prestigious school proved to be too expensive, so he returned home and enrolled at SJSU. On the second day of class, he encountered the charismatic music professor Frank Sumares, who has nurtured several generations of talented musicians.
When some friends took him to hear John Scofield at Yoshi’s in 2002, the bluesy guitarist provided an ideal bridge from rock to jazz. Vitchev started absorbing the music of Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery and particularly Pat Metheny, while studying with Vandivier and the great Portland-based guitarist John Stowell. But it was pianists Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett who caught his ear as his compositional voice developed.
“I do all the writing on the piano,” Vitchev says. “For me composing is more fascinating than playing. It involves the same elements as improvising, but you can stop time. You can look back and change what happened.”
Since finishing his degree at SJSU in 2006, Vitchev has become a mover and shaker on the South Bay scene, helping organize a Wednesday-night jam session at Temple Bar (now hosted by the De Anza Hotel’s Hedley Club). His latest project expands his quartet with Iago by adding vibraphonist Christian Tamburr, an ensemble featured on his recent album The Perperikon Suite.
After years of absorbing the watercolor cadences of Gary Burton’s classic ECM recordings with Pat Metheny, Vitchev longed to collaborate with a vibraphonist. The night that Tamburr arrived at the Hedley Club jam with his vibes in tow, having just moved to Morgan Hill, turned into a watershed moment for the guitarist.
“After the first three notes it was unbelievable,” Vitchev says. “The tone was so inspiring to me. A light went off. I started writing material for us and now I have enough for another three albums.”
A profusion of ideas is what led to launching Guitar Fest. The funny thing about guitarists is that they needn’t be birds of a feather to flock together. It’s a cliche grounded in truth that guitarists love to seek each other out and talk shop, comparing strings, gear, axes, amps and all the other accoutrements of the trade.
Always looking to create new opportunities for himself and his colleagues, Vitchev approached his former professor about creating a guitarcentric concert series. The response so far has proven the idea has legs, and they have big plans for the future.
“We had a lot of ideas after the last one, even taking it unplugged, just the three guitars,” Vitchev says. “We’d like to explore more traditional repertoire, maybe the Gypsy jazz thing. We’re hoping to invite a heavyweight next year, someone who can tie everything together like Bruce Forman, Julian Lage or Bill Frisell.”
Guitar Fest with Rick Vandivier, Hristo Vitchev and Neil Kelly
Thursday, April 28, 8pm
Club Fox, Redwood City
$14-$16
