Specializing in relaxed, old-school jazz and cozy classic songbook material, guitarist Guy Van Duser and clarinetist Billy Novick serve their crisply crackling chamber music Saturday, Jan. 12, at 8 p.m. for the Connecticut Guitar Society at Hartford's Asylum Hill Congregational Church.
For more than three decades, the duo has presented its wry, gingery mix of classic, syncopated Americana — everything from ancient jazz pieces to vintage Tin Pan Alley tunes — in concerts, clubs and festivals throughout North America and Europe.
While much of its vital, swing-oriented material is rooted in songs from the 1920s through the 1940s, the duo can make them all sound new and forever young with its fresh improvisations steeped in a lively sense of interplay.
Besides the nine recordings they've made as a duo, Van Duser and Novick have appeared together frequently on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" and been featured in a 30-minute interview on NPR's "All Things Considered." Van Duser's guitar playing, backed by Novick, has been regularly heard on PBS's "This Old House" and "Antiques Roadshow."
Keillor, a fan of the duo's wit and warmth, has called the pair "the two elegant gents of the swing music world."
Van Duser's fingerpick guitar style gives his instrument a piano-like capability, allowing him to play with an uncanny but seemingly effortless ability to play bass lines, chords and melodies all at the same time, creating a layered effect charged with rhythmic pizzazz.
Van Duser, a part-time professor in the guitar department at Berklee College of Music, explains on his faculty website how he teaches his students his dexterous, fingerpicking technique:
"I show them how to take melodies on the guitar — solo line melodies — and play those melodies while playing the chords at the same time. You're trying to get two layers going. You're using mostly your thumb just to play the lower notes of the chord while the fingers pick out the melody notes on the upper strings. The fingerpickers do that in such a way that the thumb is alternating back and forth on the string, being the rhythm as well. So I'm not just playing the chord under the note. I'm recreating a beat: boom-chick, boom-chick, boom-chick."
Of Van Duser's wizardry, JazzTimes has written that his "graceful (and swinging) fingerpicked style is closer to jazz piano than to guitar."
Perhaps one explanation of the pedigree of his piano-like guitar style is that Van Duser as a child first began studying not guitar but piano. In addition, his mother was a classically trained pianist who had studied at the Eastman School of Music.
Read More: http://www.courant.com/entertainment/music/hc-riffs-0110-20130110,0,6978959.story
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