Lee Ritenour Smoke N Mirrors Rare

'Jazz Monthly Feature Interview' Lee RitenourJazzMonthly: Our next guest is one of the monster guitarists, whose music seems to always have a very cool twist and his latest project is no exception. It’s called Smoke n’ Mirrors and that’s got to grade you real tight. Please welcome the amazing and talented Mr.

• Lee Ritenour Amazon

Lee Ritenour Amazon

Lee Ritenour. Lee, how are you doing?Lee Ritenour (LR): Just fine. Glad to be speaking with you.JazzMonthly: Now, this is such an international record. I mean, you’ve got such a groove here and some wonderful players. This is 14 great tracks from start to finish. I love this record.LR: Thanks.

It was definitely a labor of love. I’ve done a lot of albums and I kinda know when I’m onto something that was inspirational for me to record and create, and this was one of those projects where I really enjoyed making the album.JazzMonthly: This is somewhat of a journey because you were inspired to do this record while you were on tour. Talk a little bit about that whole initial inspiration to do this record.LR: Well, Smoke n’ Mirrors has very much a world music flavor and it doesn’t park itself in one country. It borrows heavily from the Brazilian angle, which is dear to my heart, and I recorded several albums with that flavor. Probably even more so than the Brazilian flavor, there’s an African, South African and West African influence and on a couple of other tracks there’s some Latin flavor and there’s some Indian tables on one track, all centered around my jazz guitar and acoustic guitars, and very much a Lee Ritenour sound. But last year I traveled quite a bit.

I guess I did around 75 shows, which is a little more than I normally do, and I traveled to some interesting places, including Johannesburg and Capetown and was in Europe for about a month, all over Western Europe, and Japan is a usual stop and The States. So I played for a lot of different kinds of fans and just these flavors that I kept hearing and being inspired by from around the world helped sort of inspire the record.JazzMonthly: And you could just feel that whole world flair in there. From the beginning, with the title track, a great track, and I must say I really enjoyed Richard Bona’s bass playing in there.LR: Oh yes. He’s just an amazing bassist and singer as well. I don’t really use him too much on the vocal aspect, although he does some vocalizing on a bass solo towards the end of the album, but he’s just this very magical bassist from Cameroon, West Africa.JazzMonthly: Now, talk about some of the special moments because you had to have had some special moments in all of these various countries, and just talk a little bit how the music was received.LR: Well, I’ve been to Europe, but I’ve been to Japan maybe 80 times.

That’s a huge market for me and I have a lot of great friends from that area. But the first time, it was last year when I appeared in South Africa, and I had gotten quite a bit of fan mail saying “Why don’t you come? Why don’t you come?” And I had never been able to make it down and finally I did come to do about four or five shows in Capetown and Johannesburg, and what was amazing about it was when we’d start to play.because I didn’t carry a vocalist with me on that trip, it was an instrumental group.but all the fans were singing these melodies from my tunes and that’s how well they knew the songs and it’s such a musical fan base down there. They just love music, they know music, and they just wouldn’t sit still and it was very inspirational for me.JazzMonthly: Wow, don’t you just love that.

That’s gotta be a sweet feeling, man, when you travel that far and they know your songs, you know?LR: Absolutely, I’ve never been there before, so it was just great.because you never know what to expect when you go to a new country.JazzMonthly: Yeah. Oh, how sweet is that? JazzMonthly: Let me just roll off a few of the artists on this project because this is quite impressive.

Featuring a bevy of world music guests, guitarist 's is a stylish, joyous, and laid-back multicultural affair. Among the guests are Brazilian vocalist and keyboardist, South African vocalist Zamajobe and guitarist Erik Pilani Paliani, West African bassist, as well as such well-known contemporary jazz icons as pianist, bassist, percussionist, and others. Judiciously, has made room for a wide musical palette including funky jams, melodic soul vocal tracks, inspired rhythmic passages, and of course straight-ahead jazz improvisation. While this is an impeccably crafted effort in the tradition of past albums, it never comes off as anything less than organically heartfelt.