Jack West & Curvature

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 new 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 Oakland-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, 33, 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 girlfriend 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.

And this obsession with rhythm is what originally attracted West to curves. He notes that, "all of the interesting things in life are curved: earth, fruit, the human form, and of course rhythm. If a particular rhythmic pattern did not repeat and curve back on itself, it wouldn't be a rhythm at all. The nature of any groove is always curved."

To help develop and perform his unusually curved musical ideas, West has focused heavily over the last 5 years on his ever-evolving quartet Curvature. The band's latest incarnation is something of a Bay Area super group: drummer Scott Amendola (of Charlie Hunter's band), cellist Mark Summer (of Turtle Island String Quartet), and marimbist Joel Davel (of the Paul Dresher Ensemble). Other recent Curvature alumni include: Mike Marshall, Calder Spanier (of the Charlie Hunter Quartet), Jon Evans (of Tori Amos' band), George Brooks (of Zakir Hussein's Rhythm Experience), Jenny Scheinman, and many others.

A prolific composer, West has just completed his fifth release for the small Oakland based label Ahead Behind Music. Three of these recordings have received national recognition for their exceptional quality as independently produced CD's. As We Know It was recently chosen over thousands of entries as winner of the Acoustic Guitar Magazine Self-Released CD Award for its "superb quality and originality."

West's innovative yet accessible compositions combined with Curvature's dynamic concert performances--which feature West¹s radical guitar work in the unusual context of cello, marimba, & drums--are rapidly creating a buzz on the west coast. Though he may be an artist with big ideas, there¹s nothing academic about Curvature's sound. His music is as emotionally vibrant and pulsing with life as any being created today. And his rapidly growing fan base in the jazz, acoustic, and jam communities is a testament to the timeless appeal of the curved musical reflections of this honest and talented rising star.