Music Preview: Jazz guitarist to take center stage at Bacchus' Kitchen

By Kirk Silsbee

May 21, 2016 9:19 PM PT

There’s nothing novel about jazz musicians collaborating with pop musicians. After all, the Los Angeles jazz players who fared best in rock-dominated 1960s Hollywood were those who had the versatility to play on the entire spectrum of recording dates. For guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson, his connection to non-jazz music is far deeper than that of a hired gun.

Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Leon Russell and Aaron Neville have featured him on recordings. Wilson is also a regular in singer-pianist Diana Krall’s small band, where his low-volume guitar and tasty harmonics are valued. Krall, the biggest-selling jazz artist of our era, deftly adjusts her music to maintain her appeal and add new demographics to her audience.

It would be tempting to ascribe Wilson’s interest in song forms to his Krall tenure, but it’s not so. “Apart from the music,” the 38-year-old Wilson points out, “my sensibilities are quite focused on storytelling. Overly-long improvisations for their own sake don’t interest me as much as songs with shorter solos do.”

Those concerns are front-and-center on his new album, “Frogtown” (Goat Hill), where Wilson makes his latter-day singing debut (he began by singing in student choral groups). That music will be performed with his trio of keyboardist Larry Goldings and drummer Matt Chamberlain this Sunday at Bacchus’ Kitchen in Pasadena.

“The music has a wider perimeter than jazz,” Wilson says. “I like songs that present forms and stories but stay on point. I’ve been listening to a lot of country songwriters, Nick Drake, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Dan Penn — he wrote ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,’ ‘Dark End of The Street’ and ‘Sweet Inspiration.’ What makes those songs so great is that they’re about shared experience.”

Joni Mitchell is one of Wilson’s favorite musicians. “I think she’s one of the great art song composers,” he declares. “Her melodies are perfectly married to the phrasing, and the harmonies are so evocative.”

Wilson has carved himself an enviable reputation for composition and arrangement: he won the Thelonious Monk Institute’s composition competition in 1995. He’s written most of the pieces on his own albums as well as orchestral pieces. Barbra Streisand sang his arrangement of Ivan Lins’ “Love Dance” for her Grammy-nominated “Love Is The Answer” album (2009).

Wilson’s father, the late bandleader Gerald Wilson (1918-2014), led L.A.’s longest-running jazz orchestra for an astonishing 70 years. Aside from Wilson the Elder’s immense canon of compositions and arrangements, the band featured virtually every important L.A. jazz musician at one time or another. (The much-heralded tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington was the last young star to emerge from the Gerald Wilson Orchestra.) One of the surprise hits of last year’s Playboy Jazz Festival was Anthony leading a reconstitution of his father’s swinging band.

Tenor saxophone sage Charles Lloyd guests on Wilson’s “Your Footprints” on “Frogtown” and it represents the closing of a historic circle of sorts. While studying at USC in the late ‘50s, Lloyd sat in the reed section of the Gerald Wilson Orchestra. “Charles talked a lot about that experience,” Anthony offers. “He said it was so important for him and Ornette Coleman to be able to be part of that band — next to the great, established players like Teddy Edwards and Harold Land. He said, ‘I’ll always remember your father and what he let us become through his music.’ My dad believed in musicians and he guided them to take it to another place.”

Whenever the Gerald Wilson Orchestra convened, it drew the most enthusiastic of the L.A. jazz audience and showcased favorites like “Blues For Yna Yna” and “Viva Tirado.” Anthony cherishes the legacy and ties it to his own music. “What we’re talking about,” the guitarist holds, “is an emotional connection to the audience through the music. And that’s more important to me than the notes.”

What: Anthony Wilson Trio

Where: Bacchus’ Kitchen, 1384 E. Washington Blvd., Pasadena.

When: Sunday, May 22, 9 p.m.

More information: (626) 594-6377

KIRK SILSBEE writes about jazz and culture for Marquee.

Music Preview: Jazz guitarist to take center stage at Bacchus’ Kitchen