Guitar dream team spans musical styles and borders

One of the highlights of last year's jazz season was a trio of bassists: Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten. The trio of jazz guitarists coming to town next week can't match that kind of star power. However, Wolfgang Muthspiel (electric guitar), Slava Grigoryan (classical and baritone guitar) and Ralph Towner (12-string and classical guitar) are all outstanding musicians. And, as a trio, they create their own unique approach to jazz, recalling explorations of modern classical music.

Towner was in Prague just six weeks ago, playing with his seminal acoustic jazz group Oregon. For that legendary band, which was founded almost 40 years ago, Towner is the lead composer, guitarist and keyboardist. Since 1972, he has also been recording for the minimalist jazz label ECM, both as a soloist and collaborator with modern jazz stars such as Gary Burton, Larry Coryell, Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jan Garbarek.

Towner has the distinct honor of having had Apollo astronauts carry his music on cassette to the moon, and officially naming two moon craters after his compositions - "Icarus" and "Ghost Beads." His peers recognize his brilliance, as well. As Guitar Player magazine puts it, "Ralph Towner is a guitarist's dream, one of the most brilliant lights in the finger style universe."

As it happens, From a Dream is also the title of MGT's recording on Material Records. Material is Muthspiel's Vienna-based label, and its roster includes high-profile jazz artists like Brian Blade and Marc Johnson, as well as Wolfgang's brother, the jazz trombonist, pianist and composer Christian Muthspiel. In some ways, the MGT recording session, which was done in Melbourne, Australia, in 2007, was a dream event for Wolfgang, a young virtuoso guitarist and composer born in 1965 in a small town in Austria. As he explains, "Slava [Grigoryan] is from there, and we were invited to the Adelaide Festival as solo artists. Since we were all there, we decided to record there."

Muthspiel got his formal training in the United States, studying at the New England Conservatory and Berklee College of Music. At Berklee, he was a student of Gary Burton's, and he made such a strong early impression that he was soon invited to join the Gary Burton Quartet, filling a vacancy created by the departure of Pat Metheny 12 years earlier. This led to several albums for PolyGram with Muthspiel as leader: The Promise (1990), with John Patitucci and Peter Erskine; Black & Blue (1992), with Don Alias, Tom Harrell and Larry Grenadier; and In and Out (1994), recorded live at Sweet Basil in New York City with a quintet that included Harrell and Grenadier. In his New York period, Muthspiel also played and recorded with Paul Motian and Marc Johnson (for Amadeo/PolyGram), and he played in a trio with David Liebman.

In 2002, Muthspiel returned to Austria. "I had lived in the States for 15 years and wanted to enjoy Europe again," he said. Since then, he has also returned to his modern classical roots, composing for contemporary classical ensembles, including commissions from the Ensemble for New Music (Zurich), Klangforum (Vienna) and the Boston ensemble Marimolin.

Muthspiel's recent compositions show him to be influenced as much by Glenn Gould, Olivier Messiaen, Bach's lute works, Renaissance choral music and Austrian folk music as much as Miles Davis, Prince and Bill Evans. This diversity has been one of the signatures of his distinctive guitar work since the start of his career. As The London Times described him, "Muthspiel is in many ways a quintessential 1990s musician, combining flawless technique honed by classical training with a restless musical imagination as likely to derive inspiration from Bach as from the blues or the Beatles."

The last member of the trio, Slava Grigoryan, was born in 1976 in Kazakhstan. His family emigrated to Australia in 1981, and he grew up in Melbourne. These days, he is considered an extraordinary classical guitarist, performing solo or in duos with his younger brother Leonard. He also performs in chamber and symphony orchestras, and is a member of Saffire, a well-regarded Australian guitar quartet.

All together, this trio promises a unique, world-class presentation of jazz and sheer musicianship that should definitely not be missed.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at
features@praguepost.com