NEW GUITAR SUMMIT: SHIVERS

In the summer of 2007, I published an essay, “My Coeval Archtop,” in The Massachusetts Review: part personal narrative, part cultural history, it focused on my beloved vintage jazz guitar—a 1956 Gibson ES-125. As I relate in the essay, that love of my life landed in my lap thanks in no small part to a true conversion experience I had in July of 2001 when my wife and I (on her birthday, no less) went to see the New Guitar Summit, a jazz guitar trio backed by bass and drums, play at The Rendezvous, a seedy roadhouse in Waltham, Massachusetts. Here’s how I remembered that experience:

Of the three guitarists, only Gerry Beaudoin had marquee jazz credentials. The other two came to the idiom through the back alley—Duke Robillard as multi-time winner of the W. C. Handy Award for best blues guitarist and Jay Geils as co-leader of the top-forty blues-rockers The J. Geils Band. But each of them was more than able for the sort of music they played together—straight-ahead swing in the tradition of Charlie Christian, who had introduced the electric guitar to jazz during a celebrated stint with legendary clarinetist Benny Goodman from 1939 to 1941. Taking to the bandstand without fanfare, the New Guitar Summit opened with a neat arrangement of “Broadway,” a number associated with the Count Basie Orchestra. By the end of that first tune, I could feel the tectonic plates of my world shifting beneath my seat. How wonderfully happy those three men—those three middle-aged men (all in their 50s)—seemed as they took turns improvising multiple choruses over the chord changes. Their “jazz boxes”—their curvaceous archtops—snug beneath their right arms, their left hands running up and down the sveltely-tapered necks, their fingers stringing notes from the fretboards like strands of pearls hung in décolletage, they strummed and plucked with unabashed abandon, with unabashed joy. And so it went, tune after tune after tune—“Seven Come Eleven,” “Flying Home,” “Glide On,” “Jim Jam.” By the end of the evening, I was a seismically changed man. Driving home around midnight, I turned to my wife at a red light and said, “That’s what I want to do with my life.”

In the meantime, I’ve managed to catch Duke Robillard live-and-in-person several more times, including at Johnny D’s in Somerville where we had a moment to chat about guitars and such. I even attended a guitar workshop with him in Rhode Island, and of course I’ve managed to keep pretty much up-to-date with his recording output, including his most recent release, A Swinging Session. With tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton on board and Bruce Katz holding forth on the Hammond B-3 organ, it’s closer in spirit to my all-time favorite of Duke’s albums, the heavily jazz-inflected Swing, than to a more straight-ahead blues album like Duke’s Blues. Like all of Robillard’s albums, though, it’s a great mix of guitar-centered instrumentals and finely-turned vocals (the latter including some jukebox novelties from the 1940s). I’ve had A Swinging Session in my iPod mix for about two months now, and it still sounds fresh.

In the additional meantime, the New Guitar Summit—Robillard, Beaudoin, and Geils—also have a new release, Shivers. Anyone who has followed NGS from the start will realize quickly that three of the tunes included here—“Broadway,” “Flying Home” and “Jim Jam”—are exact reissues from their earliest CD sampler, Retrospective. (They also have a fine CD titled simply New Guitar Summit. They have a great DVD too, Live at the Stoneham Theatre, which I reviewed very positively a few years ago in the glossy quarterly magazine Just Jazz Guitar.) But the eight new tunes on Shivers complement those previously-released numbers very nicely indeed, as NGS more or less repeats the winning formula of playing either standards from the jazz repertoire (“Shivers,” “Honey Suckle Rose”) or standard-like originals (“Blue Sunset,” “Wellspring Blues”) while also adding a twist or two. In this case, the most interesting twist involves the guest vocalist—surprisingly, Canadian rocker Randy Bachman of The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive fame. He takes care of business (as it were) in fine fashion, showing off his bluesy vocal chops on “Your Mind Is On Vacation” and “Everybody’s Crying Mercy,” a couple of tunes penned by jazz pianist and vocalist Mose Allison. From start to finish on Shivers the arrangements are tight and the extended solos uplifting. It too will get its fair share of iPod playing time.