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KINGSLEY DURANT |
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Convertible spotlights Kingsley backed up by keyboardist Steve Hunt (who’s recorded with Allan Holdsworth and Chick Corea), bassist Roscoe Beck (who’s collaborated with the likes of Robben Ford and Leonard Cohen), drummer Tom Brechtlein (an alumnus of bands led by Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Al Di Meola and Jean-Luc Ponty) and percussionist Ricardo Monzón (a professor of percussion at Berklee College Of Music). Start to finish there are so many musical highpoints, and some astute listeners have pointed out the track “Akiko”, with its uniquely melodic romanticism, while the lead off title track is an absolute blast with its top-down, drive my car, instro-guitar sound. The funky, bluesy groove of “Cobblestones” makes a strong showing, while “Vivi’s Bounce” echoes a mix between the organ-friendly tones of Booker T. & the MG’s and the Texas swing-jazz groove of guitarist Freddie King, although Kingsley says that "Vivi's Bounce" is "probably more out of the Grant Green playbook." The track featuring Eric Johnson jamming away with Kingsley and Company, called “Funky Princess”, is another Convertible highlight, even as it eschews serious melodicism for serious fun. Twenty years after his 2023 solo album, Away From The Water, and his 2020 Point Of Reference album, 2023's CD release of Convertible is the finest album yet by fusion guitarist-composer Kingsley Durant.
mwe3.com presents an interview with
Kingsley Durant: I had been working on another acoustic guitar-focused record when we were called out to California as my son and his wife were having their third daughter and someone needed to watch the other two. My wife and I are the closest family, geographically speaking, as well as the ones who were willing to make the trek during the pandemic. That was in May 2020. I realized after we got back that I hadn’t played electric guitar in months. I picked one up and started playing with an idea from an iPhone video I’d done a while back. Unusually for me, I immediately put up some microphones and created a session in Logic Pro. By the next day I had a full demo of the track which was eventually named “Cobblestones.” Except for a couple of minor edits/additions, the guitar part on the record is what I recorded on the first take of the demo! Within about six weeks I had sketched out and recorded demos for a whole new record’s worth of tracks. They came from a variety of source material: some “just playing” videos I had posted on Facebook, some grooves that I’d saved in my looper pedal, and a couple of tunes I’d been working on for a while. Once I got going, everything came together astonishingly quickly, for me anyway. Of course, it was the pandemic so there wasn’t much else to do. That’s just my demos, though. Getting everyone else involved took a while. The main recording happened between February and August of 2022. Everyone did their parts at their home studios, what I call working “in the silo.” It was a pandemic project, for sure. mwe3: The album you released before Convertible was Point of Reference and that album came out just as the pandemic was kicking off and then the lockdowns started. In retrospect, was Point of Reference overlooked? Can you compare both albums? That must have been a big letdown for you to have the music scene shut down so fast and then have the album overlooked. I recall I couldn’t even get a DJ on the phone as many radio stations were closed too.
Once I finally figured out who I wanted to work with, we recorded it live in Steve Hunt’s studio with the whole band. I had done demos, but they were basically just sketches, so Vinny and Baron were free to come up with their parts at the session. Steve re-did all of his parts simply because he was engineering as well as playing. With his setup there, it wasn’t possible to play live on the piano or Hammond. He did everything live on a MIDI keyboard then went back and played everything on the “real” instruments. I had planned to do that as well, but as it turns out the vast majority of what I played at the session made the cut. Most of what I did post-hoc was to add some color. There were only a couple of tracks on which I ended up replacing the solos or the main melodic parts. At the time, I was absolutely shocked that I could play that well in real time. Now that I’ve done it the other way, I find it harder to play with the same feel when I’m alone and playing along to a recording. As for the nature of everyone recording in their own silo, as we did on Convertible, one benefit I observed was that the guys lived with the song for a little longer so they ended up knowing the tune at a deeper level and playing something that might have been a little more creative. I don’t think one way is necessarily better. It’s just different.
Kingsley Durant: I hadn’t actually recorded with Eric before; I simply covered one of his tunes, “When the Sun Meets the Sky,” on my first record. I first heard Eric on that wonderful solo he contributed to the last track of Christopher Cross’ eponymous record. I found out a little more about him when Guitar Player did a small feature on him in 1982, in the issue with a cover story on Allan Holdsworth. A few years later I heard a track playing on the house stereo in a record shop in Westminster, Massachusetts, and freaked out, telling the guy there, “I have to buy this record, now!” The track was “Soulful Terrain,” the opening cut on Tones. To this day that’s still my favorite of Eric’s records, mostly for its emotional resonance. And the sound of those lead guitar tracks, done in a great-sounding room. I met Eric in the mid-1990s in Cleveland, where I lived at the time. He was on the G3 tour with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. My friend Frank “Silk” Smith and I went downtown early to try to meet Eric. At the tour bus we were told that Eric and the band had gone to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for a private tour. Frank was one of the local musicians they had tapped to be part of an advisory panel, which was a last-minute effort to acknowledge the local musicians and musical scene, so he could walk into the RRHoF any time he wanted. Which we did. During the introductions, Frank let it slip that, among other credits, he had been Albert King’s rhythm guitar player on Albert’s last tour before he passed. All of a sudden the vibe of the encounter shifted from us wanting to hang out with them to them wanting to hang out with us! Upon returning to the tour bus, Roscoe Beck put on the video that had been playing. It was Albert King, on that tour, with Frank onstage playing rhythm guitar. Over the next few years, Frank and I saw and hung out with them a bunch of times, as Eric was touring quite regularly then. Eric and I just seemed to connect, and we’ve stayed in touch since that time. As for playing on “Funky Princess,” when Steve and I decided to recruit Tom Brechtlein and Roscoe Beck, I had to get Roscoe’s current contact info from Eric. During the conversation I also asked if, should I have a track on which he would fit, he’d be interested in contributing. He was hesitant at first, but Tom’s enthusiasm helped sell Eric on the idea. The track is a reimagining of the solo acoustic tune “Princess” from my first record. Eric had identified it as being one of his favorite tracks when that record came out. Musical ideas sometimes just pop into my head in the form of a question: “I wonder what it would sound like if Booker T. & the MGs played Princess?” I played a Steve Cropper-like rhythm into my looper, then played the melody over that. To my surprise it worked really well. I recorded it as an iPhone video so it would stay on my radar. It was an obvious candidate for the new record, so I recorded a demo. After Steve and I rebuilt the demo, I heard guitar parts in my head that suggested a conversation between Eric and me. I recorded those parts, including mimicking Eric’s actual sound and some of his stylistic trademarks, as well as I could manage anyway. That’s what Tom and Roscoe played to, along with an early version of Steve’s B-3 part. As a result, what Eric played was scripted to a degree that I think surprised him. Anyway, Eric did his parts, Steve tore it up with his B-3, and when I tried to step up with my parts… …what I’d done on the revised demo was just better, through the guitar solos anyway. The funny thing is that everyone knows what a tone monster and vintage amplifier freak Eric is, right? Well, everything I played up to the end of the guitar solos was done with a Strymon Iridium, a simple “amp in a box” pedal! mwe3: Is it challenging to blend serious melodicism with real fun, say tracks like “Akiko” and “Alice” compared with more upbeat tracks like the title track and say, the track you did with Eric Johnson? On Convertible, it sounds like you went for a more well-balanced set of tracks compared to staying in one groove.
I also think about the running order from very early on. Some people think that is the wrong way to go. But for me songs tend to tell me where they want to land. For example, I knew from when I first put it together that “Suz” was destined to be the closing track. I do tend to write a lot of ballads, although “Akiko” is the only one on Convertible. That tune was mostly finished when we did Point Of Reference, but there were already too many ballads in that set. “Akiko” was both the newest and the least finished, so I let it rest. mwe3: Some of the best tracks on Convertible are named after women, did you do that on purpose? lol I like “Akiko” and “Alice”. Are those ladies you know? To be fair “Sister Suz” and Vivi’s Bounce” also have ladies names in their titles too! Tell us how you approached the melodic inspiration on “Akiko”. Do you consider “Akiko” to have a serious melodic approach in a less-funky, less jazzy way? “Alice” is also the shortest song on Convertible so would you say it’s more of an interlude track? Kingsley Durant: With respect to female names, I didn’t do that on purpose. It just happened that way. “Marlowe’s Mood” and “Funky Princess” are named for women as well. “Akiko” is one of the three people at Jersey Girl Homemade Guitars, a boutique guitar company based in Hokkaido, Japan. I used one of their guitars on that track. While working on it, at one point the Instagram photos I’ve seen of Akiko at work – she does all the color and finish work, as well as the beautiful wood marquetry that is a signature detail of those guitars – came to mind as an example of intense focus and concentration on small details. That inspired me enough to want to name the tune after her. I reached out to Kaz, the front person for the company, to ask if Akiko would be comfortable with that. She was in fact honored, and I have a great photo of her opening the package I sent with the CD and realizing that I’m playing their guitar in the photo on the inside cover. The writing process for “Akiko” was that I played it “solo guitar” until I felt like it was finished. That is typical for my ballads, more so than for the up-tempo tunes. Because of how I play when I write them, the ballads usually have a “jazz ballad with brushes” feel until I get ready to record. When I brought “Akiko” to Jon, we agreed that it would work better as more of a straight-eighths rock ballad. The challenge for me was to do something that would stand up to some of Jeff Beck’s beautiful instrumental ballads. We also agreed that it would be more dramatic to create a different set of changes for the guitar solo. After a brief discussion of what those changes might be, we grabbed a couple of guitars and in maybe 15 minutes we had the chord changes and form for the guitar solo worked out.
“Alice” is actually the name of a guitar. The reference is to Alice from the Lewis Carroll books. Juha Ruokangas, a custom builder from Finland, made that one for me. Its signature feature is Juha’s Valvebucker pickup, an active pickup with a tube preamp that is housed in the guitar body. That gives the guitar a unique sound and presentation. For someone who has been playing electric guitars for fifty years, it requires a definite perspective shift. Like going through the looking glass! I used Alice for all the guitar tracks on “Cobblestones” as well. The track “Alice” was a late addition. Steve thought that, with the anticipated running time for the eight tracks we had done, it might be nice to have a solo piece in there. I had a bunch of things archived, but I also had the idea of doing a piece sort of like “The Final Peace” on Jeff Beck’s There and Back. I decided to use “Cobblestones” as a melodic and harmonic reference point and recorded an ambient guitar loop, then improvised over it for about five minutes. I made some edits to cut the track down to about 2½ minutes and sent it off to Steve along with several other ideas. He loved “Alice,” as did everyone else who heard it, including Jon and his wife, April. The funny thing is, I spent hours on getting the loop the way I wanted, but the solo guitar part was done in one take. Steve added a tiny bit of keyboard to the loop, just a little bit in the bass range to delineate the harmonic motion I’m implying in the melody. It’s definitely an interlude track; we had a lot of discussion as to where it wanted to land in the running order. “Vivi” (Vivienne) and “Marlowe” are two of my three granddaughters. They are a big part of my life now, and those two tunes just called them to mind as I was writing them. Their older sister, Noelle, was slightly miffed that she didn’t get a tune and told me that I had to write one called “Noelle’s Tune.” In fact I had already done so, but it’s one of those tunes that spends a long time in gestation. The basics are all there. I just haven’t yet figured out how it wants to be presented. It’s kinda vexing me, truth be told. Some tunes are like that. “Suz” is my sister-in-law, short for Susan or Suzie. Sally, my wife, thought that tune had a feel that reminded her of coming back to the harbor after a day on a sailboat. Well, “Sailing” is already taken, and the particular boat she had in mind is called “Moonshadow,” so I had to take another tack. We all grew up sailing, as my dad was a world-class sailor. My brother Bob and his wife Suz are the ones who have continued to own sailboats, so if Sally and I get to sail it has most often been with Bob and Suz. By that point the named-after-women thing was already happening, so “Suz” got in on the act. As for “Princess,” my current wife’s actual name is Sara, which means Princess. mwe3: Can you tell us somethings about growing up with 5 brothers in your generation of the Durant family? What are your brother’s names and ages and when did all those births happen? Also, no sisters? lol You said your mom’s side of the family was the musical side? Also can you tell us about your brother Jon Durant, who is one of the most respected fusion and experimental guitarists on the scene for many years. Were you and Jon close growing up when did you both develop a propensity to record albums? How much older are you than Jon? What is your favorite Jon Durant album? He’s made so many diverse albums that it’s mind boggling and then the albums with Inna Kovtun and the Ukrainian music thing and now look.
Her father was a church organist, choirmaster, and longtime music director at Groton School, a famous prep school in Massachusetts. He also played the carillon and in the summer would travel both in the USA and Europe giving concerts and helping with the installation and tweaking of pipe organs in churches and cathedrals. One of his older brothers was a concert violinist and conductor who had an amazing collection of books and records. I used to go to the Boston Symphony with my mom, and the week before we would go to his house and borrow records of what we were going to hear performed. It was a rare event when we couldn’t find multiple recordings of any piece we were going to hear. Then there’s my uncle Peter, my mom’s youngest brother. He is 13 years older than I am and lived with us off and on while he was in college in the mid-1960s. He was a rock and roll electric guitar player, and he listened to all the British Invasion stuff. He leaned more toward the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds side of that music, and he also had records by Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters. I spent untold hours listening to those records when I was in elementary school. Peter aspired to be a sports journalist and turned an internship at the Boston Globe into a career that ultimately put him in the Baseball Hall of Fame. As I did, he kept playing guitar all through those years and ended up starting an annual benefit concert called Hot Stove, Cool Music, that evolved into a large-scale fundraiser when Theo Epstein, the general manager who brought World Series championships to both the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, and his brother Paul got involved through their family foundation. A lot of famous rock and blues musicians have graced those stages over the years. I played with some of the Boston All-Stars at Peter’s 50th wedding anniversary, and shortly thereafter the guys told Peter that I should be in the band. That’s been a fun and gratifying experience. I get shivers standing onstage next to the guy who turned me on to that music and taught me my first few chords and licks all those years ago. Suffice it to say, between my mom, her father, my uncle, and the fact that four of the five brothers all played at least one instrument, there was a lot of music around the Durant house when I was growing up. In addition, our hometown had a particularly strong music program in the schools. We all played in the band from elementary school on, alongside some really good musicians.
We’ve played together in a couple of bands, but whereas we get along extremely well outside of that context, put a guitar in each of our hands and we tend to end up shouting, musically, anyway, at each other. It takes a lot of work for us to figure out how to cooperate with each other in a band setting. I think Jon developed a voice and concept on electric guitar a long time before I did. Even when he was in high school, he had a sound. He seemed destined from early on to make records of his own original music. Whereas I was more like a studio player who could do lots of different things but without a truly original approach. I definitely had some ideas about what I wanted to do with electric guitar, but until about 2004 those never developed to the extent where I could think about playing them in a band setting, much less making a record. From Jon’s recorded output, which obviously dwarfs my own, a handful of faves include the Burnt Belief records he did with Colin Edwin and Vinny Sabatino, Parting Is, and his duo record with Stephan Thelen. Their Fractal Sextet project is really something as well. Also, the new EP he did with Inna Kovtun is wonderful. I got to hear them live when they did the release party in Portland last month, and wow. She is a force of nature. I really enjoy hearing Jon apply himself to being more of an accompanist in that setting. He’s even playing acoustic guitar! mwe3: Can you compare writing and recording Convertible with your earlier albums, Point Of Reference from 2020 and Away From The Water from 2003. Away From The Water seems like a long time ago, tell us about your life between 2003 and 2020, you were busy with your teaching career? Tell us about your teaching career. Also Convertible was released on the Zen Diagram label. Is that your label and what does the name mean? Kingsley Durant: Not only is Away From The Water a long time ago - although I happily see regular monthly payments for royalties on the two solo acoustic tracks, “The Boy Who Loved Trucks” and “Princess” thanks to them being staples on New Age radio - with the exception of “Princess” and the Eric Johnson tune, all that music dates back to the early 1980s, if not before. For various reasons I played a lot of acoustic guitar back then. Unlike with electric guitar, I seemed to have a voice on acoustic and a knack for writing pieces in that style. Once guys like Alex DeGrassi and Michael Hedges came along I simultaneously thought “OK, this is a viable thing,” and “Those guys are so much better at this than I am, why even bother?” Besides, I was teaching school and had young kids, so it seemed wildly impractical to think about pursuing that avenue. I just kept playing for myself and family and friends, though, and several of those tunes kinda stuck around. Eventually Michael Whalen and my brother Jon poked me hard enough that I made the record for Jon’s Alchemy label. I dug into my archives… I had a bunch of stuff that I had recorded on one of those early Tascam 4-track cassette machines and came up with about a dozen pieces with which to build a record. Jon and I went down to our dad’s house on Cape Cod, which had a great-sounding kitchen for recording acoustic guitar. We knocked out the basic acoustic tracks all in one weekend.
My friend Tom Kesel suggested “that young guy from Nashville” as a bassist. I knew right away that he meant Viktor Krauss, whose playing and sound I was crazy about. Jon and I had met Viktor as we were all involved with Klein Electric Guitars at the time, and while it took a while due to Viktor’s busy touring schedule, we eventually made it down to Nashville where Viktor played on five tracks for us. It was a great fit, as Viktor seemed to relate very well to the music I had presented. His own solo record came out shortly thereafter, and it’s easy to hear that we have a certain degree of musical sympatico. After the record was released, I did some performing on acoustic as a solo act around the Seacoast area of New Hampshire, where I lived at the time. Harvey Reid, a seasoned and well-known acoustic guitar troubadour, took a shine to me and my music. Through him I did some stuff with his Seacoast Guitar Society, including a couple of showcase gigs, a performance on New Hampshire Public Radio, and a Valentine’s Day gig opening for Alex DeGrassi. At that same time, I had separated from my first wife after 20 years of marriage. In the upheaval from that, while living alone, the first handful of tunes that became Point of Reference took shape. I had been playing at a Tuesday night jazz jam at the famous Press Room in Portsmouth, which inspired me to get a little more serious about playing jazz and learning that repertoire. That led to some gigs, and it informed my writing as well. By 2008 I had formed my first jazz trio with drummer José Duque and bassist Nate Therrien. About 75% of our repertoire on any given night was my original tunes. As is typical with a local jazz group, a few different drummers and bassists played with me over the next few years, but José was a mainstay, as was bassist John Hunter. That all came to an abrupt halt in 2011 when I was downsized out of the day gig I had been doing for 13 years. I was a mathematics curriculum specialist for a company that did large-scale assessment, i.e., the tests that they give to students at public schools for the states to figure out how the schools are doing. I set up shop as an independent consultant doing that same work, but it didn’t make sense to keep my condo in New Hampshire when Sally and I had a much nicer, and bigger house in Louisville, Kentucky, which is where she was born and raised. That meant trying to assimilate into a new music scene. I had a harder time with that here than I had in New Hampshire, in particular with the jazz community, where I didn’t seem to fit in very well. I did put together a proper recording studio and rehearsal space in the basement of the Louisville house. I used the rehearsal space with various rock, blues and funk bands with whom I played gigs around Louisville. That enabled me to work on demos of the tunes I’d been playing with my trio in a format more like what they ended up as on the last two records. At one point I was up in Rhinebeck, New York visiting my friend Craig Snyder, a longtime Philadelphia and NYC studio guitarist who had retired to move upstate and open a boutique guitar shop. I was noodling around with my tune “First To Go On” and Craig asked me, “What’s that you’re playing? Teach it to me so we can play it together!” Which I did, and we jammed on it for the better part of an hour. That really opened my eyes to what my music could sound like with that level of musician involved. As for Craig, it opened his eyes to what I had to offer as a writer and as a player. When he realized I had a whole book of tunes, he offered to produce a record, using some of his NYC studio cats. That sounded great to me, so we worked up a list of tracks to cut, then got the players and the studio booked. Not long before the session, I received a tax bill that wiped out all the cash I had set aside to cover the expenses. Although Craig and I kept the idea on the table for a few years, eventually I decided I wasn’t sure that was the right path. By 2018 I was ready to give up entirely. But one day the name Steve Hunt popped into my head. Jon and I had met Steve when he played in the Randy Roos Band in the early 1980s, when Jon was studying with Randy. Steve later spent 20 years or so recording and touring with Allan Holdsworth, who Jon and I also knew. So, although we weren’t exactly friends with Steve at that point, we had been around him enough that he knew who we were. And, of course, we were friends on Facebook. Moreover, that answered the question of who would play bass. Baron Browne had played with Steve in the Randy Roos Band. In addition to his above-the-radar gigs touring and recording with the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty and, drummer, Steve Smith, Baron had also been playing 100 to 150 gigs a year for almost 20 years with Vinny Sabatino in a high-end wedding band. I sent out emails to the three of them. It took about a day for everyone to agree to participate. The recording session happened in March 2019 at Steve’s studio in Massachusetts. The record was finished and mastered within about six months. There was no particular advantage to releasing it on Alchemy since the whole distribution situation had completely changed by then. I had set up a publishing company back when I did Away From The Water, so I used that name, Zen Diagram, as the name for my label as well. It’s a play on the mathematical concept of a Venn Diagram. Although I taught mathematics, and computers, and have a Ph.D. in mathematics education, and about 6 hours short of a masters’ degree in straight mathematics, as an undergraduate I majored in Religion.
Kingsley Durant: I mentioned who Suz is earlier. I think the NYC vibe is accurate. The tune developed out of pair of chord progression/groove loops I had saved in my looper. Both had the kind of gospel vibe that you hear the cats from the band Stuff, who played on everyone’s records back in the day. I put the two loops together as an ABAC structure then did the grunt work of writing a melody. It ended up being a little more of a “guitar lick” kind of melody than I normally write, but that seemed to suit the vibe of the piece. At one point I played the in-progress track for my friend, guitarist Steve Kimock. He suggested that, when I went in to redo the guitar solo, that I not play the changes: “The piano and bass are creating so much harmonically that you should make the solo as simple as you can. Just play the blues. Channel your inner Freddie King!” Which ended up being surprisingly hard. I can see it as urban party music, although more for the late, wind-down stretch than the heat of the action. That was the first tune that Jon heard when I sent him the final mixes. His comment was, “You sure found the right bass player for this record!” As for NYC in general, maybe part of that vibe, other than your missing the place, is that Roscoe and Tom grew up in Poughkeepsie and Long Island, respectively, although both now reside in Austin. Regarding Akiko, they live in Hokkaido, the far northern island of Japan, on a farm where they grow all their own produce in addition to building works of art that masquerade as electric guitars. Not exactly NYC! mwe3: Tell us about the band you have backing you on Convertible. You’ve known Steve Hunt for a while as he is also on Point Of Reference as well. Tell us what Steve brought to the table as both producer and keyboardist. I did notice that Jon Durant is not on your new album and can you mention the other players in your recording lineup? Jon was integral to your first two albums as they were both on his Alchemy label but he’s been quite busy lately! Kingsley Durant: After I first reached out to Steve in the fall of 2018, I went up to his studio on Super Bowl Sunday of 2019. We went through all my demos for Point Of Reference, which I had done a couple of months earlier with Jon as well. We also just talked and got to know each other. It has turned out to be a great fit on both a personal and a musical/artistic level. Because of his long association with Randy Roos and Allan Holdsworth, a lot of people think of Steve as this heavy, heady fusion musician. But Steve loves all the funky older jazz fusion, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, Tower of Power, and all that stuff. The fact that he gets to play lots of Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and especially Hammond B-3 on my records seems to scratch an itch for him. We share a love for those earthy vintage sounds. On Point Of Reference, as I mentioned, Steve had a dual role as keyboardist and engineer. I generally prefer when everyone on a project has one well-defined role, which is part of why I have little interest in producing my own records. We had asked Randy Roos to come down to do the engineering, but at the time his wife was having major health issues. Randy assured me that Steve could easily wear both hats, and it worked out fine.
I expected that, at some point, things would eventually clear up to the point where we could all play together at Steve’s again, so I wasn’t concerned with making the demos clean enough to form the basis for in-the-silo recording. In early 2021 I went out to Jon’s place in Portland to go through the demos and tweak some of the arrangements. At that point he suggested having Colin Edwin play upright bass on the record. We sent Colin and Vinny a few tracks to play on, which they did, then we sent everything off to Steve, who didn’t respond for two or three months. When I finally called, he apologized profusely for not getting back to me, but then said he thought the tracks were a bit of a mess and hard to work with. We talked through everything. It became clear that Steve thought enough of me, and of the underlying music, that he wanted to work on the project, but he wanted to take a more active role. I thought that was a good idea, as Jon had so much on his plate that he wasn’t as fully invested in the project as he had been on the previous ones. It was also pretty obvious that a full-band in-person recording session wasn’t going to happen. I made plans to go up to Steve’s for a few days to rebuild the demos, and from there Jon and Steve would co-produce. We met in February 2022, just in time for me to get caught in a full-on New England blizzard, something I hadn’t experienced in a quite a few years! As for the band, in the course of discussing Steve’s issues with the music as it sat, he asked if I would consider getting a different drummer and bassist. His first suggestion was Tom Brechtlein, who had contributed to Steve’s latest record. I had met Tom years before on a tour he did with Eric Johnson. That made the choice of bass player easy: Roscoe Beck. Both were in fact preparing to go out on the road with Eric at the time we contacted them, but that tour was cancelled due to the pandemic. The guys were quite happy to get a paying session that they could do at home. As Tom started working on the tracks, it became obvious that having Jon, Steve, and me all giving him feedback wasn’t a workable scenario. I think Jon realized that Steve and I had a clear sense of where we wanted the music to go, so there wasn’t any great reason for him to be involved at all. And, as you noted, he had a lot going on; the war in Ukraine had begun by then and he was very occupied with trying to help Inna and her daughter find a safe place to land.
Tom and Roscoe played with Robben Ford in the Blue Line for years and have done many tours with Eric Johnson as well. For a guitar-centric instrumental record in my style, it’s hard to imagine a drummer-bassist combination that would be better suited to the gig. Both of them seemed to enjoy the project, and both clearly brought their full effort and creativity to bear. I also think the work Steve and I had done to professionalize the basic tracks from my demos really paid off. mwe3: You must own quite a number of guitars so what guitar(s) are featured on Convertible and do you shift guitars around to fit a certain sound you want on a certain track? Do you use a range of pedals and effects or do you tend to play it pretty straight and clean and how about amps, what are some of your favorite amps? And also even though Convertible is an electric fusion album, say something about your current favorite acoustic guitar as you’ve done quite a bit of acoustic work, most notably on your 2003 album Away From The Water. Kingsley Durant: Umm… …yeah, I do own a lot of guitars… although: by whose standard?!? LOL! In some ways I’m probably better known as a guitar owner than as a guitar player, although that’s finally starting to change. Anyway, for my gearhead fans, I post a track-by-track list of the gear used on the record page on my website, so anyone who wants the full track-by-track report can visit www.kingsleydurant.com and check it out while streaming the tracks. That said, I’ll give an overview here. When I did the original demos, I had a couple of new guitars and used them for almost everything. Those are Alice, which I mentioned earlier, and Seneca, which is the name of the Jersey Girl guitar I used on “Akiko”, and for the second guitar solo on “Stanky”. Only after Steve and I started reworking the tracks did I start thinking about using other guitars. You described it perfectly, with “shifting guitars around to fit a certain sound on a certain track.” In some cases, I would try two or three different guitars on a track, send them all off to Steve, and then we’d decide which sound we liked best.
Each of the guitars I used on Point Of Reference reappeared somewhere on Convertible: the spruce top Artinger Double Convertible which I used for a lot of the tracks on PoR is on “Convertible.” Lily, the Artinger Hollow Sport with P-90s that I used on “Never The ‘Twain” is on “Marlowe” and “Funky Princess.” The orange Koll Duo-Glide that graced the cover of PoR and three of the tunes therein, is also on “Funky Princess,” from Steve’s solo to the end. Matt Artinger’s version of a Sakashta NouPaul, which was on “Bloomfield” from PoR, is on “Stanky.” For amps, I mainly used a combination of a K&M Kimock prototype - K&M is now known as Two Rock - and either a ’63 Fender Vibrolux or a Fryette Aether. I put mics on each and mixed them to taste. In general, the Aether ended up being more prominent on most of the main guitar tracks. The “ringy dingy” guitar melody on “Convertible” is the Vibrolux with the tremolo on. I love that sound! I mentioned the Strymon Iridium which is on the first half of “Funky Princess.” “Marlowe’s Mood” features a similar virtual amp on the solo and from the bass solo to the end. I bought a Universal Audio Dream ’65, which is UA’s amp-in-a-pedal that models an idealized blackface Fender amp, with various circuit and speaker model options. The day it arrived, I didn’t get it plugged in and set up until after dinner. It goes through my whole recording rig - its main raison d’etre - so I had that up and running. I pulled up “Marlowe” as I hadn’t played on that tune myself since the original demo. As soon as I started playing, I thought, “Whoa!!! This sounds and feels as good or better than playing through my own amps!” I had completely lost track of how to play the melody, but I ripped off a solo in one take that ended up being the one on the record. I never was able to get the feel of that melody right, so we used the take from the original demo. Which had survived being tempo-shifted in Logic! The other notable exception is “Akiko.” When the third section of the melody comes in, the point at which everything gets a little bigger, I changed amps to a lovely ’68 Marshall Plexi that I’ve owned for quite a while. I couldn’t make that work through my own 412 cabinet, so I plugged the amp into my Universal Audio OX and used one of their cabinet models. That was a much better sound than I could get in the room with a microphone, so I ran with it. The amp is on about 6, with the channels jumped. The guitar was plugged straight into the amp. On the record, most of the reverbs and delays were done with studio gear rather than pedals, but a Strymon Volante delay pedal did see some use, most obviously on “Akiko” and “Alice.” I have an Analog Man Astro Tone that is technically a “fuzz” pedal but the way I set it, it’s somewhere between fuzz and overdrive. I use that a lot for a “lead” sound with any normal Fender amplifier type setup. But the only places it appears on Convertible are on “Alice”, the first part of the melody on “Akiko”, and the solo on the tag of “Suz.” I used a Budda Bud-Wah on “Cobblestones,” and a Tru-Tron 3x (the modern version of Mike Beigel’s old Mu-Tron III) on the last melody of “Stanky.” I do have a pedalboard with a full range of effects, but more and more I just want to hear the guitar with just some echo and reverb. Okay, maybe a LOT of echo and reverb!... must be all that time I spent in church as a kid. Even though I am careful about cabling and AC power, the fact is, the less of that stuff I go through, even when it’s off, the better the guitar sounds. Especially for recording, my principle is to only put the guitar through something if I’m going to use it.
Matt Artinger has built me a couple of Martin-style acoustics, smaller than the D series. One is an OM style with a Brazilian rosewood back and sides that I got for my 50th birthday. The other is a mahogany body 00-18 style, which I used on a song that Jon’s Ukrainian friend Dilya Prystupa did a year ago. That track can be found on YouTube or on my artist pages on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. I have a couple of 12-strings, a Martin and a Taylor, and an unusual round-back guitar with sympathetic strings that Thierry André built. Oh, and I own a Klein M-43 acoustic that used to belong to Bill Frisell, who also got me going with Klein Electric Guitars about thirty years ago by handing me his guitar to check out. I used the Klein acoustic quite a bit for the demos of my unfinished next acoustic record. It sounds great on tape, especially in a “group” setting with other guitars and bass. mwe3: “Stanky” has some serious fretboard work on it. How did that one get recorded? Are there double stops in that track or octave picking? Also the key changes are staggering. Where did you get that name “Stanky” from? lol Kingsley Durant: Thanks! “Stanky” started out as a simple C9 groove in my looper, with the bass line that you hear in the tune. There was no melodic content; it was just something for me to jam over. I thought a tune with that groove would fit nicely on the record, so I put on my composer hat and worked out a song form. The obvious move was to go to the IV chord (F9); from there I went to some less obvious places, with two different movements. Every chord has the same form, though; they are all dominant 9th chords. From where each section ended up, I needed a way to get back home to C9. The device I used is something you might hear in a Coltrane or Joe Henderson tune. It’s also in Jeff Beck’s “Scatterbrain.” When I finished, I’d managed to have all but one of the twelve 9th chords make an appearance somewhere. As for the melody and harmony guitar parts – and it is harmony; I played two separate guitar parts, with different guitars – the melody I came up with just seemed to want that. Like everyone I know, I listened to Duane Allman and Dickey Betts a lot back in the day, although a more direct inspiration for what I did on this track is Happy The Man’s track “I Forgot To Push It,” on which guitarist Stanley Whitaker did a great extended harmony guitar line over the form of the tune. I spent a lot of time on both the melody and the harmony line and am pleased that it grabbed your attention! I should also mention that I used a different amp on “Stanky,” a Carol-Ann OD-3r. I’ve known and worked with Alan Phillips, the sole proprietor of Carol-Ann, for quite a number of years. It was nice to finally find a place for one of his amps on a record. Aside from the Tru-Tron 3x which is on one of the guitar parts on the last chorus and tag, it’s all amp, with the guitars plugged straight in. There may be a little extra “stank” at the recording console stage, though! That would be Steve’s doing, as he kept asking me for “more stank!” The title is an extension of “Slanky” from the last record, which was Baron Browne’s version of “Slinky,” the original title of that tune. Slinky > Slanky; Stinky > Stanky. Right? Now that I have mentioned Stanley Whitaker, though, one could morph his name into “Stanky” easily enough. mwe3: Tell us something about your guitar technique. You are classically trained right? How does your musical experience impact your compositional styles? Do you use a pick or use right hand fingers? Do you practice scales and techniques to keep your hands in shape or do you spend most time writing music? How are the two connected?
With respect to guitar, that mainly means I have raw materials to draw on when I hit a point where I need to figure out some things. Or when I’m trying to write a song. It also means I can listen to music and figure out what’s going on, for the most part anyway. I’ve always had a good ear, which helps a lot. I use a pick-and-fingers approach most of the time. From my time playing piano, and from the music I listen to, I figured out early on that P+F seemed like the best way to facilitate playing chords the way I wanted to hear them, while still having the pick for articulating a melody in a more guitar-istic manner. I play fingerstyle sometimes when that’s what the music seems to want, or to get a certain sound. I don’t have a very strong or consistent technique for that, but I muddle through as best I can. I don’t have a consistent practice routine. I mostly just play until something calls attention to itself, either the germ of a new tune, or an old standard, or a technical thing that needs to be addressed. I have a number warm-up exercises and scale things that I do. Those are as much for working on my concentration when playing, which is often a struggle for me, as for keeping my hands in some kind of playing shape. I also work on harmonic ideas, getting from one place to another via chords and voice leading. I should write that stuff down – I might learn a little more and remember more that way. That work often happens in the context of a song I already know, whether my own or some standard pop tune. I find I can always get a little deeper into any song that I like well enough and find some new places to explore. In recent years I’ve started to spend more time paying attention to my right hand, especially the picking and strumming part. I think that comes from hanging out with Steve Kimock, playing with him and seeing a lot of his gigs. Steve’s technique overall is admirable, but his right hand, especially his control of picking dynamics and expression, has really captured my attention. A lot of excellent players figure out one way of doing it and just do that way really really well. Steve seems to be able to do whatever the music calls for, with full attention and clarity of execution. Amazing. At this point, I’m just trying to get out of autopilot mode with my right hand. It’s hard! mwe3: How about the Convertible cover art? It’s truly amazing. It looks like a throwback to the 1950s, early ‘60s album art styles. With a title like Convertible, I half expected you to be on the cover cruising down the highway in a convertible corvette!
Tom has done all my CD covers. He also does occasional logos – he did a couple Artinger logos that Matt Artinger used on my guitars, and he created a cool “KD” logo that is the fretboard inlay on a guitar I just got from Juha Ruokangas earlier this year. This cover took much longer than the other two did, at least in part because Tom is always resistant to using the most obvious imagery. BTW: I do drive a convertible, but it’s a BMW M440i. It took me a while to agree to the tree thing, but at some point I realized, what do you see more of when you have the top down?!? It is a really interesting tree that Tom chose to photograph and use. And, it does have that “vintage jazz album” vibe, which in my opinion is a good thing. The other aspect is that, if I have a main or default guitar, it’s Matt Artinger’s “Convertible” model. The spruce one, which really was the main guitar on PoR and is featured on the title track of Convertible, but also Matt’s original prototype for the model, and a new one he finished up this past January which has taken over as ‘My Favorite Guitar’. The name, btw, refers to the fact that the guitars have ports on the edges for which Matt builds removable covers. The ports can be open or closed for different sounds/response characteristics. The effect is subtle but I find it useful. mwe3: I forgot to ask you about how you ended up in Kentucky? You were born in New England right? I guess it’s a big, big country. I have one musician associate that lives in Montana! I have to sadly confess I haven’t been to most of our United States. Kingsley Durant: I was born and raised on the South Shore of the Boston area in Massachusetts. For high school, I went off to a boarding school in Delaware - the school at which Dead Poets Society was filmed, which entailed an Amtrak ride of anywhere from 8 to 11 hours. I spent two years at Colby College in Maine then transferred to Boston University for my last two. Taught at a boarding school, Cushing Academy, in central Massachusetts, followed by graduate school at the University of Virginia, then taught at a private day school outside of Cleveland. After a few years there I decided to switch gears and got a job at the academic assessment company I mentioned earlier, which was based in Dover, New Hampshire. One of my colleagues there, who worked out of the company’s office in Louisville, is now my wife. She was born and raised here, has lived in or near Louisville her whole life, and I was already pretty used to pulling up stakes. That’s how I ended up in Kentucky. Happily ever after, as far as I can tell. I’ve been to 49 of the 50 states. Only Alaska is left…
Kingsley Durant: I definitely need to get to work and finish the (mostly) acoustic record. It is fully demoed and ready for the next stage of production. I’ve been traveling a lot this summer, though. Between that and the fact that I ended up with a handful of new electric guitars earlier this year, when at home I’ve mostly been trying to get my bearings and get acquainted with the new guitars. Once we get into fall and winter, it should be a good time to turn the red light back on and get to work on that new record…
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With its upbeat, groove constant moods, Convertible is the 2023 release by Kentucky-based jazz fusion guitarist Kingsley Durant. Released on the Zen Diagram imprint, the 9-track, 49 minute CD features a wealth of guitar-based instrumental tracks that balance skill and style filled with up-tempo jazzy, funky tracks that evokes the urban landscape layered with an Americana groove. Kingsley’s electric guitar work is in fine form throughout and the all-original album also includes an appearance by guest guitarist Eric Johnson.
mwe3: When did you write the music that turned into what became Convertible and what tracks came first, can you give a chronology approximately when the songs were written and then recorded? I guess in between your 2020 album and Convertible is going to be remembered as the Pandemic era in music history.
mwe3: You’ve recorded with Eric Johnson before. How and when did you meet Eric Johnson and what was it like recording the Convertible track “Funky Princess” with Eric and what is your favorite Eric Johnson album? 
Kingsley Durant: I definitely think in terms of a whole album versus just a collection of whatever songs I happen to have available when I work on a record. Getting a balance that feels right is important to me. Happily, the tunes I write seem to naturally span a range of emotional and musical vibes. The overall balance seems to work out without me giving that aspect much conscious thought or effort. 
That’s one of the great things about working with Jon. As much as his own music isn’t generally based on traditional pop song structures, he understands how those structures work and has a great sense for what might contribute to a more interesting and dramatic presentation. The normal jazz thing, of course, is to just solo over the song form because it’s the song. But that isn’t always the best option from an artistic perspective. 
Kingsley Durant: I’m the oldest of the five brothers. Jon is the youngest. There are 5½ years between me and Jon. In order, it’s me, Pete, Bob, Ted, and Jon. We are late boomers, born between 1958 and 1964. No sisters, although we have a stepsister, Martha, who is a few years younger than Jon. Our mom was a classically-trained singer and pianist, although she didn’t finish school (Boston Conservatory of Music) and chose instead to get married and have children. 
Brother Jon, what can I say? He’s forged a long and interesting musical path. He’s enough younger that he didn’t connect to those rock and blues records the way I did, but by the time he was 7 or 8 years old, he was listening to basically all the same stuff that fired me up at the time: YES, King Crimson, Frank Zappa, Procol Harum, etc., etc., etc. Oh, and Alice Cooper! Considering the extent to which we listened to the same records throughout the 1970s, it’s surprising how differently we approach guitar and our own music. 
A few of the pieces already had electric guitar parts, so over the next few months I would go down to Jon’s house in Cohasset, Massachusetts when I could in order to record. We orchestrated those and a few others with either my electric guitar, or lap steel, or Jon’s cloud guitar, or some combination thereof. And, of course, I saw fit to sing on a couple of tunes. 
mwe3: Someone commented on the album closer “Sister Suz” and how there’s a great NYC kind of vibe on the track. Is it “Sister Suz” as in Suzy? It’s also the longest track on Convertible. Is “Sister Suz” a kind of urban sounding party-inducing anthem of sorts? Is there a New York kind of vibe in the track? I also noticed that NYC kind of vibe on “Akiko” too. I don’t know, I guess I miss the place a bit! 
By the time I was building the demos that became Convertible, sadly, Baron Browne had passed away. At first, I assumed Steve and Vinny would still be involved. On the original demos I played everything myself, except for the drums, for which I used loops from Logic Pro. On a few tracks I also had my friend Tom Kesel’s son Evan, who had just graduated from Berklee as a drum performance major, record live drums in the studio he had set up in his home, since at that point, mid-pandemic, there were neither gigs nor recording sessions to be had. 
Regarding Tom and Roscoe, I think of the music I’ve written for the past couple of records as band music. I don’t have a working band and haven’t for a long time, so I have to put a virtual band together in order to make a record. Aside from finding someone like Steve who can help orchestrate my ideas and bring them to life - my model for that being Max Middleton’s role in Jeff Beck’s music in the early to mid 1970s - it’s important to me that the bassist and drummer be connected in a way that only happens after playing many, many gigs together. 
On “Convertible”, it seems like I tried to record that with almost every guitar I own. Other times it seemed obvious which guitar the track wanted. “Vivi” is an example of that. I have a 1958 Gibson ES-175D that is a very special guitar to me, as Steve Howe infected me early on with a love for that model. Pat Metheny, as well. It’s the perfect guitar for that old-school organ trio kind of track. On “Suz” I used another new guitar, a Collings I-35LC with an ebony fretboard, because it has a great B.B. King kind of sound. 
Acoustic guitars: I still have the one I used on Away From The Water. It’s a 1972 Martin D-35 that’s had some work done on it over the years and is a great guitar considering that it’s from an era that most Martin fans avoid. I got to know Ken Parker back in the late ‘90s and ended up commissioning one of his Archtop guitars, named Verdi, which Ken delivered in 2012. That’s an amazing guitar, easily the best guitar I’ve ever played or owned. It will certainly be featured on the new acoustic record. I recorded a few solo pieces with it that you can find on the Ken Parker Archtops website. A couple more are done and ready to put on a record. 
Kingsley Durant: I’m almost completely self-taught on guitar. Whatever lessons I took, and they were few, didn’t get me much of anywhere. I did take piano lessons, as well as trumpet and French horn, and I’ve been able to read music since my grandfather taught me when I was five years old. I’ve never consistently done enough sight-reading on guitar to get good at it, but I can read and write charts or lead sheets. I took music theory and composition courses throughout high school and my first couple of years in college, up until I couldn’t pass a piano proficiency exam to keep going.  copy.jpeg)
Kingsley Durant: I was always a big record cover fan back in the day. I even have some of those coffee table books of record covers! That’s still important to me. It seems like a lot of people have given up trying to present their music in an interesting, well-conceived and executed package. My friend Tom Kesel, who is an accomplished guitarist and bassist, is a graphic designer by trade.