Honoring Pat Martino, Vol. 1 Alternative Guitar Summit

• 1 Inside Out 06:43
• 2 Black Glass 04:13
• 3 Line Games 06:36
• 4 Willow 07:00
• 5 Noshufuru 07:19
• 6 Lament 05:30
• 7 On the Stairs 06:35
• 8 Joyous Lake 09:22
• 9 Country Road 05:49
• Total Runtime 59:07

Info zu Honoring Pat Martino, Vol. 1

There are a mere handful of guitarists that have changed the way we think about the guitar over the past five or six decades. Pat Martino is perhaps one of the greatest and best-known of those icons. The term “genius” is overused today, but Pat Martino was definitely one. His life story was the very definition of the word. Before Martino's passing in November of 2021, the Alternative Guitar Summit honored him and his enormous contribution to jazz in this set of studio recordings by 14 jazz guitarists playing selections from his imaginative and varied catalog of compositions. Producer Joel Harrison is thrilled to have brought together this crew of great musicians to show their love for him while HighNote Records is proud to present this first volume of their recordings.

"Eight months before legendary guitarist Pat Martino died in November 2021, the Alternative Guitar Summit, an annual conference organized by Joel Harrison, paid tribute to him with a series of live-in-the-studio performances, nine of which are preserved here. The program is split between solos and duos, four of the former and five of the latter, and the tunes come both from Martino’s early releases and the records he made after undergoing brain surgery and being forced to re-learn the guitar from scratch.

Some of the arrangements are similarly wholesale rebuilds, like Fareed Haque’s take on “Line Games,” which, by playing a highly electric line on acoustic and adding tabla, transforms a rockin’ late-’70s fusion track into something vivid and sparkling.

Dave Stryker and Paul Bollenback dive headlong into “On The Stairs” from 1974’s Consciousness, and it’s a fascinating contrast of not-that-different styles. Both men are coming out of Grant Green, but Stryker’s playing has more bite. Bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Allan Mednard drive them hard; Mednard takes a machine-gun solo to end the piece.

What makes Martino’s music memorable — and what these performers recognize — is that he wrote extraordinarily strong tunes that blossom in almost any arrangement." (Philip Freeman, DownBeat)

Rez Abbasi, guitar
Sheryl Bailey, guitar
Peter Bernstein, guitar
Paul Bollenback, guitar
Ed Cherry, guitar
Nir Felder, guitar
Fareed Haque, guitar
Joel Harrison, guitar
Russell Malone, guitar
Jeff Miles, guitar
Oz Noy, guitar
Adam Rogers, guitar
Kurt Rosenwinkel, guitar
Dave Stryker, guitar
Dezron Douglas, bass
Allan Mednard, drums (tracks 1, 4, 5 & 7)
Kevin Kozol, keyboards
Alex Austin, bass
Greg Fundis, drums
Richard Christian, tablas (track 3
Chulo Gatewood, bass
Tobias Ralph, drums (track 8)

The Alternative Guitar Summit
founded in 2010 by guitarist/ composer Joel Harrison, is a yearly summit of daring, inventive players who emphasize new and unusual approaches to the guitar. The music we present celebrates the guitar’s enormous range, beyond style or genre. The AGS seeks to commission new work, whether improvised, notated, or both, and is devoted to promoting new music through education and performance in the New York City metropolitan area and beyond. We commission new work and provide opportunities for lesser known, non-commercial musicians. Lifeforce Arts Inc., a new 501 c3 started by Joel Harrison in 2013, is the fiscal sponsor for the Alternative Guitar Summit.

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