Photo by Jimmy Katz

For most of my life, music has been an important, almost all-encompassing thing. Having grown up in a small Midwestern town, I was able to have access to music in an odd, kind of unfiltered way. I never really understood the ideas of style or genre and was able to largely sidestep all the socio-cultural baggage that I later found out played such a part in what people listened to and why.

I have often heard people say that jazz is a difficult form – that one must gather an appreciation for over time. My experience was just the opposite. Upon listening to the first 10 seconds of a Miles Davis record that my brother Mike brought home (I was 11), I was hooked for life. But I didn’t really know it was jazz. It just went on the same pile for me with The Beatles, Henry Mancini, James Brown and John Phillip Sousa – records that were already there.

As time went on, that pile grew to include Ornette Coleman and Schoenburg, as well as Dolly Parton and Bill Monroe and The Yardbirds and the Stones, and everything else I could get my hands on. As my musical skills developed and improvisation became my preferred form of expression, I did go through a three- or four-year jazz snob period that would have shamed even the most neo-conservative Wynton Marsalis. I look back on that brief interlude as one of necessary focus to achieve a needed fluency, as much as a period of immaturity that often reveals itself in adolescence – just that in my case, instead of taking the form of worship for Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, it was Miles Davis, Albert Ayler, Wes Montgomery and the Gary Burton Quartet.

For me, there were no subgroups in anything other than the most basic terms – music was one big thing.

And for the most part, that has remained the case for most of my life as a musician. While there has always been a certain push and pull here and there from record companies, critics, (occasional) audiences – wondering why I didn’t do more of this and less of that – I have been able to just go ahead with the idea that the fan of music that lives inside of me is the only true compass that I have.

I have been very lucky to play with many of the greatest musicians on the planet, and, of course, each setting requires a different response with a different dialect or musical syntax at work. Part of the fun of it all for me has been the research and work required to be able to make sense of a score by Steve Reich as well as being able to improvise with Herbie Hancock or Mike Brecker on complex chord structures. But I also never lost the joy of just playing simple chords over simple grooves that come from the kinds of things that the guitar has been doing on the front lines of rock and pop music over the past 40 years.

I have never seen anything as incompatible as these things.

Yet, I am restless. I can’t seem to sleep at night unless I am dreaming up some new way of looking at things, either stylistically, harmonically, melodically, improvisationally – which takes us to what I am doing now.

At age nine, through my grandfather, I was introduced to the world of mechanical musical instruments – specifically a player piano. As we have lived through the musical instrument revolution of the past four decades (Amps! Reverb! Bigger amps! Synths! MIDI! Computers!), the impact and fascination of what those early mechanical instruments were and why they were almost totally abandoned at the onset of recorded sound always fascinated me. I have been living deep in the world of electricity, but the power of acoustic instruments is first and foremost with me. But why did those player pianos and orchestrions of the early 1900s have to play that kind of music? Couldn’t they play some hip chords? Couldn’t they groove?

The record Orchestrion came out in January ²⁰¹⁰ with these questions and more in mind. It turns out that there were some truly exciting discoveries to be made in that world.