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Jack West

Make no mistake, Jack West is on the path less taken. It's not only that he plays the eight-string acoustic guitar, a unique instrument that he had specially constructed while searching for the sounds he had been hearing in his mind. West is a musician dedicated to exploring uncharted territory, mapping stunning, minutely detailed soundscapes that feel uncannily familiar and yet completely fresh. If the title of his record, Big Ideas, suggests that this is heady music, there is a rigorous sense of structure to many of West's tunes. But in the fine-grained textures he creates with his quartet, there's also an intuitive sense of interplay and generosity of spirit found in the finest jazz ensembles. "My main goal as a writer has always been to try and create music that sounds like something I haven't heard," says the Bay Area-based guitarist. "For me, song writing is usually a process of following. I never sit down to intentionally write a tune—I just start to play, then as new ideas happen, I try to follow the ones that surprise me...the ones that don't sound like anything I've ever heard before."

Deeper still, West says that these musical ideas are directly related to his personal experiences. "All of my tunes are about something that's going on in my life. The music for me is my way of processing and interpreting the world around me. Everything that goes in, comes back out in my music— either in the form of a fixed composition or just an improvised solo."

A mostly self-taught musician, West grew up in Savannah, Georgia and moved to Northern California to attend Humboldt State University. After 7 years playing mostly original rock, blues, and Afropop, he decided to work in an acoustic vein. Even before he hired Santa Cruz guitar-maker Jeff Traugott to build his eight-string instrument, West had developed a highly personal sound using unusual tunings and a dazzling combination of bluesy slide work, finger-picking, and unorthodox percussive techniques. The extra strings, a low A and a high A, have enabled West to further expand his bag of tricks, for instance slapping a percussive line on the extra bass string while simultaneously playing slide or creating screaming-high octave slide runs with his first and third strings.

In many ways, rhythm is the key to West's music. No one who hears his emotionally nuanced tune "Smile," a love song for his wife Christina, could mistake him for a musician averse to lyricism, but it's the sense of movement in his music that makes the first and deepest impression. "For me music is a rhythmic phenomenon, much more than it is a harmonic phenomenon," West says.

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Album Review

Jack West & Curvature: Big Ideas

Read "Big Ideas" reviewed by Glenn Astarita


8-string acoustic guitarist Jack West melds organically induced homespun themes with blues and jazz overtones on his fifth release, titled Big Ideas. Here, “Jack West and Curvature” renders subtle intimacy along with pumping beats and atmospheric propositions as the guitarist makes every note count whether pursuing bluesy bottleneck slide choruses or jazzy lines amid enticing harmonic relationships with cellist Mark Summer and marimba performer Joel Davel. Drummer Scott Amendola, primarily known for his ongoing affiliation with guitarist Charlie Hunter, rounds ...

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"[Big Ideas is] a remarkable outing of cool curves, gently sloping musical parabolas, and wondorous bends in compositional structure. With rhythm at the fore West offers unusual sound colors, fluid slide work, and percussive attack" - Down Beat

"Stunning...one of the more interesting releases of the new year" - JazzWest

"Jack West is not only a fine musician, but he has an original approach and sounds like no one else. To my mind, that is one of the most important qualities that a musician can possess." - Lee Townsend

“brilliant original compositions” (Contra Costa Times)

“sounds like something never heard before” (Oakland Tribune)

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Around About Now

Ahead Behind Music
2003

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Big Ideas

Ahead Behind Music
2001

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Big Ideas

Ahead Behind Music
2000

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As We Know It

Ahead Behind Music
1999

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Big Comet Headed for...

Ahead Behind Music
1998

buy

Continuum

Ahead Behind Music
1996

buy

Big Ideas

From: Big Ideas
By Jack West

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