Featuring
John Beasley, Dave Grusin, Patrice Rushen, Ernie Watts, Melvin Lee Davis,
Michael Thompson, Wah Wah Watson, David T. Walker, Makoto Ozone, Tom Kennedy,
Dave Weckl, Paulinho Da Costa, Ronald Bruner Jr., Chris Coleman, Bob Sheppard
and Rashawn Ross
“The concept
for A Twist of Rit combines new material and tunes selected from earlier
albums. We twisted, flipped and reconstructed those songs with a twelve-piece
band. Several of the songs are from my very first album, First Course, recorded
in 1975 and the Rit album in 1980.” - Lee
Ritenour
GRAMMY-winning,
guitarist Lee Ritenour, AKA Captain Fingers, has a wide-ranging array of
material to revive, as evidenced by A Twist of Rit. 2015 commemorates 40 years
since his debut recording, First Course, on Epic Records. A Twist of Rit, set for release on August 21,
2015 via Concord Records, is a magnificent follow-up to his critically
acclaimed 2012 album Rhythm Sessions.
A Twist of
Rit spotlights Ritenour with several long-time musical cohorts, including
keyboardists John Beasley, Dave Grusin and Patrice Rushen; saxophonist Ernie
Watts; bassists Melvin Lee Davis, Tom Kennedy and Dave Weckl; and percussionist
Paulinho Da Costa. That core group is augmented by drummers Ronald Bruner Jr.
and Chris Coleman, along with Bob Sheppard on saxophone and Rashawn Ross
playing flugelhorn. Joining Ritenour for the first time are guitarists Michael
Thompson, Wah Wah Watson and David T. Walker, plus Japanese pianist Makoto
Ozone.
A Twist of
Rit features Ritenour’s soaring guitar lines with 12 of his compositions
ranging from the funky fusion and sophisticated jazz that he has become so well
known for. All of the material was captured by his longtime GRAMMY
Award-winning engineer Don Murray and the tracks were recorded with everyone
performing together, old-school, but with modern, state-of-the-art recording
techniques. Another album highlight will be the debut of Hungarian guitarist
Tony Pusztai, Grand Prize Winner of Ritenour’s biennial, 2014 Six String Theory
Competition. Pusztai was selected from over 500 entries and 72 participating
countries.
“People like
Ernie, Patrice, Dave and John Beasley, who worked closely on [my album] Wes
Bound – along with Melvin Davis and percussionist Paulinho Da Costa, go back
with me to the very beginning,” Ritenour says. “Ernie had been on so many of my
projects. And, of course, I couldn’t do this without Dave Grusin, who is my
best buddy, and who has been involved in almost all of my recordings. All of
these people are very close friends of mine. We’ve had this musical mafia for
twenty, thirty, forty years.”
With his
formidable fellow travelers, Ritenour revisits several selections from his
iconic albums including First Course (1976), Friendship (1978) – an LP
consisting of the Ritenour-led super-group that included Ernie Watts, Don
Grusin, drummer Alex Acuna, percussionist Steve Forman, and bassist Abraham
Laboriel – Rit, Vol.1 (1981), Earth Run (1986), Stolen Moments (1990) and This
Is Love (1998).
Save for
“Pearl,” a heartfelt, Latin-tinged tribute to Ritenour’s mother, as well as the
mid-tempo, bouncy title track and the surging, organ-filled “W.O.R.K.n’ It”
(Weckl, Ozone, Ritenour, Kennedy) – another version, “More W.O.R.K,” will be
released on an upcoming 5-LP retrospective box set – the rest of the album features the
new-and-improved vintage Ritenour tracks. “When I first proposed this record to
Concord, I didn’t want it to be perceived as a ‘best of’ rehash of my old
tunes,” Ritenour says. “I love to write new material. So there is new material
on the record. But I wanted to take a look at my earlier tunes – not
necessarily the major radio hits – but in general, I wanted to take material
that could have a fresh look today, that we could ‘twist,’ or flip. This is the
first record where all of the tunes are mine. It was really fun to look back at
my catalog, which stretches back forty years, and pick certain tunes to take a
fresh start.”
From the LP
First Course, “Wild Rice” and “Fatback” swing with some grooving, mid- and
up-tempo Muscle Shoals-meets-Malibu horn lines, originally arranged by Tom
Scott and re-arranged by Ritenour and Beasley that ring with the spirit of the
late B.B. King and Steely Dan. Two more selections from First Course include
the Crusaders-coded, Michael Omartian-arranged “A Little Bit of This and A
Little Bit of That” and the funky, 9/4-time, Head Hunters-inspired “Sweet
Syncopation.” The spry, festive “Bullet Train” from Friendship bounces with the
air of a Brazilian love affair, and “Soaring,” from Earth Run, is rhythmically
laced with a Latin lilt.
“Ooh Yeah,”
from This Is Love, is reincarnated as a laid back, Quiet Storm selection,
topped by Ritenour’s luscious, Wes Montgomery-esque chords. “Waltz for Carmen”
from Stolen Moments, written for Ritenour’s wife, is an intricate duo featuring
Tony Pusztai. “Tony, who is an insane classical guitarist from Hungary, has got
some incredible jazz chops, too,” Ritenour proudly says. The zenith of the
release is Ritenour’s re-imagination of “Countdown” from Rit, Vol 1., a
surging, anthemic contemporary jazz classic of the highest order. “I did some
sampling of my original recordings,” he says. “I was able to hunt down the
original tracks and have them transferred to digital. We used a sample of the
original “Countdown” vocoder [track]. As we were playing live, we were
triggering the sample and playing along with it.”
Ritenour is
able to draw upon a diverse body of work that reflects his polyglot musical
upbringing. Born on January 11, 1952 in Los Angeles, Ritenour grew up listening
to a wide variety of music. His father was an amateur pianist who exposed him
to Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Nancy Wilson, Erroll Garner and Stan Kenton while he
took his first guitar lessons at eight. Ritenour experienced his first jazz
“eureka!” moment three years later when his father took him to the record
store.
“We bought
three records by Howard Roberts, Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass. I was influenced
heavily by all three guys,” Ritenour says. “A lot of people don’t know Howard,
but he was an incredible studio player. And, of course, everybody knows Joe. My
dad called Joe on the phone, and said, ‘I’ve got this fourteen year-old. Will
you give him a lesson?’ So I went to Joe’s house a couple of times and we became
friends. And I was also influenced by Wes’ rhythmic and melodic approach and
his tone.”
Along with
his love of R&B, rock and fusion, Ritenour started his career early. He
played in a band that featured Patrice Rushen and Dave Grusin at the L.A. club The
Baked Potato, while making a name for himself working with The Mamas & the
Papas and Tony Bennett. Ritenour’s work with Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Dizzy
Gillespie, Simon & Garfunkel, Herbie Hancock and Frank Sinatra, to name a
select few, made him the most ubiquitous guitarist of his generation. In 1986,
he received a GRAMMY Award for his collaboration with Dave Grusin on his
recording Harlequin, and has been a perennial chart-topper in numerous critics
polls. In the 1990s, he was a founding member of the contemporary jazz
supergroup Fourplay, with Bob James, Harvey Mason and Nathan East.
A Twist of
Rit aurally illustrates Ritenour’s delicate balance of maintaining his
individuality while working with an array of diverse artists. “Even though I
was a studio player, I was trying to establish my own identity,” he says. “The
live thing is just as important as the studio thing. And when I did my first
album, where a lot of the songs [on this album] are from, in 1975, I didn’t
think I had a ‘Lee Ritenour sound.’ But then, a few years later, I listened to
the record, and I realized that wow, I did have my own sound then.”
Along with A
Twist of Rit, Concord Records will release a five LP vinyl box set of some of
Ritenour’s classic records, including Wes Bound, Festival, Color Rit, Portrait
and Earth Run. Ritenour will be touring and promoting these projects throughout
2015/16.
