contributed article HristoVitchev: VIRTUOSO GUITARIST, MASTER COMPOSER

by George Donaldson

I’ve always thought it interesting that the community that plays host to the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival—the longest continuously-running festival of its type in the world—has so few options of venues to hear live jazz the other 51 weekends of the year. Luckily, just such a venue is located a short drive away. Kuumbwa Jazz Center in downtown Santa Cruz is an intimate, warm and inviting space where world-class jazz can be heard several times a week. Long-established, big-name artists are featured as well as up-and- comers who will soon be household names. One such Young Turk is Hristo Vitchev, a Bay-area guitarist who brings his quartet to the Kuumbwa stage Thursday, July 7. Hristo came to jazz in an unlikely manner. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria during the Soviet era, his engineer father moved the family to Caracas, Venezuela when he was sent there for a two-year consulting Better catch the Hristo Vitchev Quartet in this intimate setting assignment. “While we were in Venezuela, the Iron Curtain collapsed,” while you still can. “We will be heading back to Asia in August for an Hristo says, “and that two years turned into eleven.” As do many extensive 14 cities tour of Japan in support of the new album as well young men, Hristo fell under the spell of the guitar, especially heavy as a tour of China, Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong and Europe,” he says. metal guitar. “I played in metal bands throughout South America,” he recalls. “I was listening to [Deep Purple guitarist] Ritchie Blackmore, For more information, visit www.hristovitchev.com. For tickets to the Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen. But my biggest Kuumba show: www.kuumbwajazz.org. influence back them was definitely Metallica.” In 1996 the firm his father worked for was purchased by a Menlo Park-based company and the family moved to Silicon Valley. During his high school years, Hristo became more serious about the guitar and music in general. A short stint at Boston’s storied Berklee College of Music taught him how much he didn’t know, and he returned home, enrolling in a community college, taking general courses, putting his music on the back burner. That changed when one evening at another Northern California jazz hot spot, Yoshi’s in Oakland. “A friend took me to see trumpeter Wallace Roney there,” Hristo says. “That night was an eye opener…I’d never been exposed to that music and it had a deep emotional connection to me. Now I was actively inspired to practice and start over from zero.” Determined to expand his knowledge, “I enrolled at San Jose State, the closest school that offered the kind of music education I was looking for,” he recalls. “I practiced many hours and gradually learned. Looking back, that’s how my jazz journey started.” The young guitarist became interested in writing his own compositions and began studying classical composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Beethoven and Wagner. “These guys wrote long-form compositions with many layers, not like the typical short-form, 12, 16, 32 bar forms of traditional jazz.” Interestingly, though it is not his main instrument, Hristo composes almost exclusively on the piano. “I play ‘arranger’s piano,’ not ‘performance piano,’” he jokes. But that approach means that sometimes he composes something that are playable on a piano but don’t translate to the guitar. That quirk has resulted in a unique style of composition. And that style is highly evident on Hristo’s latest CD release—his eighth—titled “In Search of Wonders.” Performed by his quartet: pianist Jasnam Daya Singh (Weber Iago); bassist Dan Robbins and drummer Mike Shannon—all of whom have Monterey-Bay-area roots—the beautifully performed double CD set shows the composer as a mature jazz artist with a wide range of colors available on his palette.

JULY 2016 9