Another string, another thing

The stars are dotted across the night sky in a grand, continuous scroll, but if you look closer, you see that each dot burns with its own chemistry and life story.

Peter Bernstein, one of the world’s greatest jazz guitarists and headliner of the Summer Solstice Jazz Festival, plays with a bright, spacious sound and a twinkling, panoramic flow. But if you listen more closely, you can hear him shape each note according to the rhythm, chemistry and emotion of the moment.

Am I flying too high? In a phone interview last week, Bernstein gently reminded me of a tune he wrote called “Useless Metaphor.”

“It’s about all the ways we talk about music,” he said. “Music is music. All these metaphors really don’t help you get to anything that improves it.”

Clearly, this man isn’t going to blow his own horn. (He doesn’t even have a horn.) Fortunately, Summer Solstice Jazz Festival artistic director Randy Napoleon filled the gap.

“I truly believe he is one of the all-time greats,” Napoleon declared. “I put him in the same category as Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt. He’s the most influential guitarist on the scene today. He doesn’t want to hear that, but it’s real. He’s in a league of his own.”

Bernstein isn’t a shredder or a show-off.

“There’s no way to flow if you’re constantly filling up all the space,” Bernstein said. “If everything is foreground, there’s no background. You can’t have that joyous feeling, that groovy feeling, without the ebb and flow, tension and release.”

When it comes to flow, the guitar, like the piano, has one key advantage.

“The great thing is you don’t have to stop to breathe,” he said. “You can always keep going, keep picking. There’s another string, another thing to play.”

But that advantage can also be a trap. Like the greatest jazz pianists (Bill Charlap comes to mind), Bernstein resists the temptation to overplay and maintains an inner breath.

“My favorite musicians deal with space,” he said. “Miles Davis was confident enough not to play something. How he framed the phrase was just as important as how he played it.”

The guitar may be the most geek-attracting instrument around, but Bernstein doesn’t make a fetish out of it. Some guitarists have a closet full of axes, but Bernstein has been playing the same guitar since 1998, a 1981 “archtop with a floating humbucker.”

He loves to play with singers, most recently performing with singer-songwriter Sasha Dobson and on “Lady of the Lavender Mist” with 21-year-old Anaïs Reno.

“I try not to have a guitar-centric approach to music,” he said. “When I take a solo, I’m thinking about singers and horn players as well as guitar players. Everyone has their own fingerprint, their own personality.”

His many interests and influences extend to non-musical creators as well. The 13th-century Persian poet Rumi was the inspiration for a soulful tune called “Dance in Your Blood.”

“I love the feeling of his writing,” Bernstein said. “It’s very musical to me. They’re kind of like meandering thoughts, but each one is really about something specific, which I dig.”

“Ditty for Dewey,” a track from Bernstein’s latest album, “Better Angels,” glows with a warm, noble simplicity that’s fitting for a tune dedicated to his 11-year-old son.

“The melody is simple,” he said. “I don’t like to write note-y and dense melodies. You use the melody to improvise around.”

Bernstein has loved music from a young age and got his first guitar at 11. He was originally attracted to rock and blues, but then he got a taste of jazz from his dad’s record collection.

He met the great jazz guitarist Jim Hall while studying at The New School in New York. Present-day guitar legends like Pat Metheny, John Scofield and John Abercrombie were all in Hall’s orbit, and Hall invited Bernstein to jump in, despite his “little baby” Polytone amp.

Since then, Bernstein has made many finely crafted recordings, both as a leader and a sideman, with like-minded musicians such as keyboardist Larry Goldings, organist Melvin Rhyne and “Kind of Blue” drum legend Jimmy Cobb. In the early ‘90s, he recorded a string of albums with legendary jazz saxophonist Lou Donaldson.

On a break during a recording session, Rhyne once confronted him with an intriguing question: Which is more important, melody or rhythm?

Bernstein diplomatically replied that they’re both equally important “to keep the conversation going,” but Rhyne wasn’t buying.

“He said rhythm is more important,” Bernstein recalled. “You can tap out a rhythm on a table, a four-bar phrase, and it sounds like music, not just something falling on a table. A melody has to exist in time.”

Grounded in rhythm, Bernstein has pared his art over the years to maximum expressiveness.

“I don’t know if I’m moving toward simplicity, but I’m trying to play more when I want to play more and less when I want to play less,” he said.

Based in his hometown of New York City, Bernstein doesn’t make it to Michigan often, aside from appearances at the Detroit Jazz Festival and a visit to MSU a decade ago. He’s bringing a stellar quartet to the Summer Solstice festival, featuring Aaron Goldberg on piano.

The group’s secret weapon, Goldberg is a philosopher, and not just on the piano. He was the first person to receive a degree in mind, brain and behavior at Harvard University and got his master’s in analytic philosophy at Tufts University, with no less a figure than Daniel Dennett as his adviser. Goldberg’s passion for Brazilian music will likely put a subequatorial spin on the quartet’s set.

“Aaron is a great musician,” Bernstein said. “He’s got his own thing, but he can absorb anything, and he’s great to have on any gig.”

Vicente Archer will play bass, with Billy Drummond on drums.

“Billy is one of my New York favorites,” Bernstein said. “He’s super modern and has a beautiful feel, a distinct personality. He was in New York when I started going around there, going back to the early ‘90s.”

A fuzzy 1992 camcorder video of Bernstein and Drummond with vibraphonist Joe Locke, another frequent collaborator, popped up recently on YouTube.

“Billy and Larry had a lot of hair back then,” Bernstein said with a laugh. “We were really young.”

Goldberg and Drummond are both longtime collaborators.
Archer is a more recent addition to Bernstein’s circle of collaborators and appears on “Better Angels.”

“I’ve played with him for five or six years,” Bernstein said. “He’s a great bass player, rooted yet searching and very abstract when he wants to be. He can do anything on the bass.”

Each member of the band shares Bernstein’s capacity to listen and respond from both mind and heart, staying in the moment.

“All these guys have a very distinct personality,” Bernstein said. “That’s what I like about them, but they’re generous musicians, willing to play for the good of the team. We’ll play a couple of tunes from the new album and some familiar things, things that we can stretch out on.”