In the realm of Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition, Joel Harrison could at least claim the status of nobility, maybe even minor royalty. But he’d undoubtedly reject that whole pompous conceit: in his life, his music, and his overall outlook, Harrison has consistently looked at history and culture “from below.” (Just consider the resonances of some of his album titles: Mother Stump, Free Country, Passing Train, Urban Myths, America at War, Anthem of Unity….)
When Harrison brought his “Spirit House” quintet to the Playhouse back in April 2013, it was part of a homecoming of sorts. A DC native, Harrison spent a decade in and around San Francisco—the 1990s, to be exact: a fertile, pre-tech-boom period when everyone from Charlie Hunter to Vijay Iyer to Humboldt’s own Jenny Scheinman was stalking the Bay Area, staking out new musical territory even as they stretched its bounds.
Then, towards the end of the millennium, he lit out for New York, where he plunged into an even deeper pool of talent in an even more turbulent music scene. Harrison had grown up a rocker, worshiping axe-men like Duane Allman, Jeff Beck, and Jimi Hendrix, even as he began training in classical guitar. In college he learned composition under Joan Tower; afterwards he studied with jazz-guitar legend Mick Goodrick (and later, in Marin, with Indian classical master Ali Akbar Khan). But in New York he could—and did—chase dozens of ideas and directions as he collaborated with an eclectic array of genre-mashing players.
Fast-forward a quarter-century and Harrison can look back on countless gigs and tours, armloads of awards and commissions, and thirty-plus albums for solo instruments (including cello and marimba) and for ensembles of all shapes and sizes (including string quartet, singer-songwriter groups, and jazz orchestra). He’s also become an impresario, an independent label owner, and a jazz writer & historian: his newest book, Pity the Genius: A Journey Through American Guitar Music in 33 Tracks—like his debut, Guitar Talk: Conversations with 27 Visionary Players—grew out of his work as founder and producer of one of the most vital musical meetings in the country, the annual Alternative Guitar Summit, which in its sixteen-year history has hosted every major jazz and jazz-adjacent guitar exponent you could name and many more you probably couldn’t.
But composing and playing are still the core of what Harrison does. His protean writing is rooted in jazz but veers regularly into rock, soul, blues, folk, country, film music, and modern classical; if there’s a common thread running through his sonic fabric, it’s something like “roots,” or maybe that hoary catch-all “Americana.” But ultimately, as longtime Bay Area jazz writer Andrew Gilbert put it on the occasion of Harrison’s last big tour of the West Coast: “Like many of jazz's most profound composers, Harrison writes for the individual voices in his band. While his music offers numerous opportunities for improvisation, he's more interested in designing stimulating situations for musicians to explore and interpret themes as an ensemble.”
That was certainly the idea behind his “reimagining” of Miles Davis’s pivotal 1969 album In a Silent Way, which Harrison first put together for the 2025 iteration of the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, assembling an octet that included two other guitarists, soprano sax, keys, bass, drums, and percussion, in a performance that was unplanned and unrehearsed, featuring musicians who had mostly never played together, channeling the album from memory. He re-ran the experiment this summer in the Catskills with a six-guitar lineup comprising Anthony Pirog, Oz Noy, Gilad Hekselman, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Matteo Mancuso, plus a rhythm section of Jerome Harris and RJA favorite Allison Miller.
The results were sheer mesmerizing genius. Loose, spontaneous, and exploratory, both performances captured the spirit and the technique that yielded Davis’s original—a project, as the Live at Big Ears album release page puts it, “shaped by improvisation, deep groove, collective listening, and risk-taking in real time.” Tonight’s outing, too, assembles “musicians spanning avant-garde jazz, experimental rock, improvised music, and contemporary composition” for a fresh envisioning of Miles’s “quietly revolutionary electric-era masterpiece”—and it reunites Harrison with three of his Bay Area contemporaries: bassoonist Paul Hanson (who also accompanied Harrison in Spirit House, and who has done for his instrument “what other innovators like guitarists Charlie Hunter and Stanley Jordan, banjoist Bela Fleck and bassist Jaco Pastorius have done with theirs,” writes Bill Milkowski in Jazz Times), virtuoso bassist Michael Manring (associated with everyone from “New Age” icon Michael Hedges to electro-pop pioneer Thomas Dolby to avant-improv guitar innovator Henry Kaiser to synthesizer innovator Suzanne Ciani, and a longtime member of Henry Kaiser & Wadada Leo Smith’s “Yo Miles!” tribute band), and Scott Amendola, the jazzy, funky, rockin’ bandleader-composer-force-of-nature who requires no introduction to RJA audiences, but who is surely the most sensitive, inventive, and versatile of drummers.
(with acknowledgements to Wayside Music)
The link above will take you to the website of Playhouse Arts, which is handling our online ticket sales.
(the first “reimagining” of In a Silent Way, with a different band of co-conspirators, at the Big Ears Festival, Knoxville TN, March 2025)
Thanks to Our Allies
We couldn’t present such world-class artists at such down-home prices without the steadfast support of dozens of RJA members & sponsors, not to mention the community spirit of Arcata’s dynamic arts agency, Playhouse Arts.
Special thanks to Bug Press, the most steadfast of jazz allies, for its abiding generosity.
Additional support for this show comes from Cafe Brio, Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate, John Helie & Monica Simms, Josh Meisel & Mary Virnoche, and North Coast Co-Op.