Pritesh Walia | Hopetown

Jazz guitarist extraordinaire Pritesh Walia has been bubbling under the surface of wider public awareness and acclaim for several years. His nimble technical skills and deep sense of musicality has been making its mark in performances as a leader and as sideman, while his strides in education—after graduating from Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory–have helped to spread his message in that capacity.

But with the release of Walia’s impressive debut album Hopetown, featuring his guitar trio with bassist Chris Worden and drummer Gen Yoshimura, Walia is poised to go public in a more game-changing way. His long-awaited recording debut, a fresh and deep excursion into the neo-mainstream, clean-toned jazz guitar trio tradition, boldly initiates the discography portion of his career, with yet three other varied albums soon to follow. Earlier this year, he released the self-titled album with his organ trio PSA, and coming soon are albums by his big band and a special strings project.

Clearly, the New Delhi-born and currently Los Angeles-based Walia’s musical life is taking flight with a new fervor and higher profile. Hopetown makes for an auspicious introduction to Walia’s musical voice. Its ripe collection of original compositions—plus a venturesome new arrangement of The Beatles classic “Blackbird”—weave a narrative about the inner and outer life of the artist thus far.

Probably the most disarming and pleasant surprise on the album is Walia’s original, and slightly subversive, reading of “Blackbird,” which takes its place alongside a recent move in jazz to find expressive fodder in The Beatles songbook. Among the key Beatle-maniacal jazz proponents is Brad Mehldau, a strong influence on Walia who helped the guitarist look at The Beatles in jazz context. (He also points to the influence of mentors Miguel Zenon, Jerry Bergonzi, Jason Moran, Ethan Iverson and Donny McCaslin, with whom Walia has performed).

“The Beatles are like the Bach for rock and roll,” Walia comments. “A lot of their tunes almost feel like they have a form of a jazz standard.”

Walia remembers calling out “Blackbird” at a weekly jam session he led with his trio in the Boston club called The Bebop (an ongoing tradition, with Walia’s name still attached). The song “started to get solidified into something new, something that was coming up. I kept reharmonizing it, finding hits and things that I could deconstruct and reconstruct It’s pretty radically revised. I feel either people are going to like it or really hate it,” he laughs.

When it came time to record Hopetown, Walia was insistent that it be in a live way, together in a studio with sight lines between his highly empathetic bandmates. Jazz, he asserts, is “communicative music. I want to have a line of sight to cue a lot of things. Also, there’s something about visually being able to see each other that helps us improvise. There are so many moments in the music where it feels like we’re all on the same page, in the same stream of consciousness.”

Hopetown’s title tune itself stems from a vulnerable transition moment in the young Walia’s life, an epiphany on a bus trip from his work sites in Boston and New York City, passing by an idyllic small town along the route. “It seemed very calm,” he recalls, “like the place I wanted to be at. I had just finished my graduate studies and being a musician in general is tough. But then you add the fact that I’m from India and my parents have no clue about what it means to be a musician—let alone trying to be a musician in jazz. I remember singing pretty much the full melody on my phone.”

The sweet and infectious tune quickly became popular in Walia’s expanding circles, and an NEC ally Henry Godfrey created a big band version of it. “He wants to put it out and I hadn’t even put out the original,” Walia laughs.

Other songs on the album come equipped with back stories or ulterior motives, beyond their musical forms. “Thankful” expresses gratitude in a suitably gospel-hued palette. “Colors” pays musical tribute to his respect for NEC teacher Ben Schwendener, dealing with the post-George Russell’s Lydian concept developed into his book, Organic Music Theory. In the song, Walia explains, “each chord used in the song for this doesn’t have a relationship to each other. It has its own color–each vertical structure in the song. That’s what led me into writing the song.”

A Brazilian undertow tugs at the mischievous “Low Talks,” opening with a bass melody and a skittering, chattering guitar-bass melody in the body of the tune. Walia further explains that “’Low Talks’ is what I would call talking smack about anyone else. In music school and art school, you hear that quite a lot about people. It troubled me so much that as much of a community that jazz is, there’s also enough people trying to battle each other and compete. It’s a terrible position because I feel the only thing we have left is the communal aspect of this music.”

The album’s bittersweet balladic closing tune, aptly entitled “Finishing Up” makes emotional reference to the end of his 10-15 years of education and pondering “where my direction was. That was a song of hope I wrote for myself.”

Hopetown showcases the fact that Walia was very culturally versed. “My parents both being from north and south of India,” he says, “we had different influences of music and culture that I was thrown into and was exposed to. But I think by 15, I was kind of musically exhausted by Indian classical music. You can’t escape it if you live in it. For me, I was like ‘wow, what is this band called ACDC? This is really happening.

“I would start learning these tunes and I only had dial-up internet. I used to just download a Led Zeppelin song and play it, then show up to my Indian classical class and play that riff on the low two strings of the instrument. And my Indian classical teacher would say ‘ouch.’”

Fast forward to extensive jazz studies in Boston and establishing himself as a strong guitarist force, alongside expanding work in music education and the “gear” side of music, and a move to Los Angeles. His initial entry point to jazz, per se, came through guitarists blending tougher rock tones and blues airs with jazz sophistication–especially the Indian music-centric John McLaughlin, as well as John Scofield, Pat Metheny and Al DiMeola.

Consider Hopetown phase one in a musical career teeming with promise for the future. Bringing this music out into the world is also, for the creative restless and forward-leaning Walia, a necessity.

“All the songs in this record have a story, and they are a reflection of my past 15 years or so, in some shape or form. This is a good start.”