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Kurt Rosenwinkel: Latitude
John Kelman
With the realization that there will always be more music coming at him than he can keep up with, John wonders why anyone would think that jazz is dead or dying.Rosenwinkel's next two releases, '01's The Next Step and '03's Heartcore, couldn't have been more different, although both garnered increasing critical and popular acclaim. "While with Enemies and Under It All, the core of those records was my quartet," says Rosenwinkel, "which was a working band, they were very compositionally-motivated records. The Next Step was a record where I really wanted to capture the sound of the band live, and so we're playing original tunes, and that's an important part of it; but the real thing of it is the live interaction of the band. In the beginning I had to fight a little bit more to get the go-ahead from Verve for The Next Step; they wanted me to do a different record. But I was totally resolved that that was going to be the record I made—I just knew it was the record I had to make, and so we kind of had a little bit of a battle over that and then I think that after the record came out and it got a lot of critical acclaim, I think that from that point on they kind of trusted my instincts."
Heartcore, on the other hand, is a complete antithesis—while there was participation by other players including Turner, Street and Ballard, as well as production assistance by hip-hop artist Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest—it was essentially a solo record, made at home on studio gear that Rosenwinkel financed with the advance money for the record. "Heartcore was a huge thing for me," Rosenwinkel explains, "it was the biggest project that I've ever done, and for me it was a total success, just on a personal level.
"It took a long time," Rosenwinkel continues, "and it was really challenging, but it was something I had to do, it was like my solo record, totally just a solo record. It was like making a huge sculpture; I was sculpting every single moment of the record, and I ran the whole spectrum of emotions every day, from bliss and excitement, listening to what I had come up with, to absolute total dejected depression, like, 'Holy shit, how am I ever going to finish this?' There were all kinds of technical problems, all kinds of creative obstacles and challenges, and it was a huge effort. And so for me, I did it and it's exactly how it should be. That was my operating principle—I said, 'I'm not going to finish until I can have somebody come over, play them the entire record from start to finish, and not have one thought in my head that something should be different.'"
Heartcore literally took Rosenwinkel thousands of hours to record and mix over a two-and-a-half year period. "That was what I thought was the advantage of doing it myself," Rosenwinkel says, "and being in control of everything, not having any time constraints. I thought, 'If that's going to be the scenario, then that's going to be my goal,' and that's why it took two-and-a-half years. But I got it—there were some technical aspects that could have been better. I was using limited equipment, and now my studio is much better. If I made it now the quality would be better, but it's just fine — although we really had to work so hard to get it sounding like that. So it was a real adventure into the imagination, pure musical imagination; raw creativity, that's what that record is for me."
Rosenwinkel's specific approach has, of course, been gradually evolving from his earliest days with Gary Burton. But throughout his recorded work for Verve, it's become absolutely distinctive—a combination of specific desires for tone and texture, as well as a personal conception for linear playing that is instantly recognizable. "There are qualities that I want to achieve, sound-wise, from the guitar," explains Rosenwinkel. "First of all there's strength of tone, in terms of the density of the notes. When you play a note it should sound full and not thin, and that's a very difficult thing to achieve on the guitar, especially without a big acoustic type hollowbody; my sound is in the semi hollowbody area, it's a mid-range sort of sound. So there's a balance I try to strike between woodiness and density. You can get a very woody sound but then again it might also sound hollow. And I want to get almost a solid body kind of density to the sound but also an organic nature so that it doesn't sound like a solid body. I want that organic quality but I also want that density to the notes themselves, and that drives my search for all the equipment I use — that's why I use Polytone amplifiers in particular.
"We go to great lengths to try to make sure that there's going to be Polytone amp on gigs," Rosenwinkel continues, "but even if there is a Polytone there, they have such a variety of different types. So I always bring a Boss EQ—the two pedal one, one of the newer ones. It's sometimes difficult to use amplifiers for tone, because you only have whatever frequencies the knobs are shelved at, so the low might be 100 or 200 or 60. And the mid might be shelved at any frequency, and sometimes those aren't the frequencies that you want to get more or less of, so the EQ enables me to get in there a little bit more and try to get the sound I need.
"Another element of my sound," continues Rosenwinkel, "is a kind of legato playing—a very strong left hand that can provide legato lines; that's really important to me, a big element of how I hear the guitar. You can get that legato feeling from a distortion pedal — you play a note and it's just going to sustain, like Allan Holdsworth does, but I want to get that same legato feeling with a clean tone, and that's difficult. It's much easier to get a kind of a sound where you play a note and the attack is strong and then the note just dies right after it. That's very easy to get—that's usually what you're going to get if you just pick up any guitar and plug it in to any amp. So that quest for sound has driven the development of my technique and my equipment.
"I work on that all the time," concludes Rosenwinkel. "With the right hand there's a kind of rhythmic fluidity that I strive for, that I'm just recently making some really good progress with. Kind of like a weighted hand feeling, like if you play the piano there's a kind of weighted attack, instead of non-weighted. The difference between a weighted attack and a non-weighted attack is huge on the sound and rhythmic flow. And so I strive for that with my right hand. Just the coordination between the two hands is really important, that they're working totally in unison so as not to waste movement or waste time to play a note."
Rosenwinkel also uses a fairly rigid practice regimen to attain his characteristic fluidity on the guitar. "I do a lot of scale exercises just to get warmed up physically," Rosenwinkel explains, "and I do things like going through the cycle of fifths, starting on the lowest note possible in the scale. If I start in the key of C I start with the low E, and continue, four notes on a string, all the way up to the highest note on the guitar in that scale. So I'll play a C scale from low E to high D on the high E string, and go from low to high and back, and when I get back, I'll get the E and that will be the seventh degree of F, and then I'll continue to do the same thing in F, and then I'll come back and stay on F instead of going to E because F is the lowest not in Bb, so then I'll go up and I'll go through the cycle of fifths like that all the way up and down the neck. Then I'll do different variations of that. Maybe I'll go all the way up and down two strings or one string, and go across all the strings. So I do a lot of very thorough scale exercises for technique and I'll go through different scales like harmonic minor, for example. And then I'll do some arpeggiation stuff and work on the chord scales, always going through the cycle of fifths. And then I'll start singing what I'm playing to give my body the feeling of the internal resonance of the notes, so I kind of graft my voice onto the neck and sing what I'm playing."
Singing what he plays is, in fact, another key aspect of Rosenwinkel's sound. While other guitarists have used this as more of an novel effect, with Rosenwinkel it's a natural and integrated concept. "It's something that's always come naturally to me," Rosenwinkel says, "I've never worked on it; it was never a concept that I wanted to get to and worked on, it just always came naturally to me; I was always able to sing anything I played. It's like I'll have an impulse to sing something, and then my fingers will just be coordinated with that impulse. And then sometimes, vice versa; if I have a visual idea, I'll know how that will feel to sing it as well, so whether the melody comes from the voice or whether the melody comes from some visual idea, I can always play what I want to sing, and sing what I want to play.
"I've recently figured out the best way to do it," continues Rosenwinkel, "which is that I have this little Levalier microphone clipped on to my shirt, so it's out of the way and nobody really notices it, and I plug that into either the effects loop in my amp or into another little amp. I sing quite loudly, so even before I discovered that microphone it had become part of my sound. That's the way I discovered that the voice was part of my guitar sound, in fact. People would come up after shows and say, 'What kind of effect are you using?' I'd say I was using a delay and a reverb, and they'd say, 'No, there's some kind of chorus effect or harmonizer,' and I didn't realize what they were talking about. Then I realized that what they were talking about was the voice and that's how I discovered that it was a part of my sound."
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