But as much as his work with bigger names has helped his profile, it's been Guarna's recorded work with other artistssimilarly under-appreciated from a popular perspective but whose value is made similarly clear through the high profile company they keepthat has continued to fill in even more of the blanks.
Lonnie Smith.even garnering a Grammy nomination for his participation in saxophonist-turned-pianist Manuel Valera's New Cuban Express. Guarna's work with White is still just one aspect of a guitarist's who has performed with higher profile artists like Corea, Wallace Roney, Stanley Clarke, Randy Brecker and Dr. The Wishing Stones opens that window even further. His first release as a leader for the Brooklyn Jazz Underground label, 2014's Rush, provided the largest window yet into Guarna's chameleon-like ability to adapt to any context, all while never losing sight of his own inimitable musical personality. Still, as fine as those recordings are, they reveal but a portion of what this keenly talented guitarist is about, especially since he began touring North America and Europe with his own bands a few years back, on the heels of playing on Lenny White's groove-laden Anomaly (Abstract Logix, 2010) and hitting the road with the fusion drummer's band, including a scorching New Universe Music Festival set that same year. His first five albums as a leader for the Danish Steeplechase imprint weredespite plenty of original material to balance out the jazz and Great American Songbook standardslargely mainstream dates, ranging from organ trios and Latin-tinged quartet outings to more freewheeling and revelatory sessions.
#Oter the wishing stone bondage full#
Even for those in the know, it's not easy to figure out Tom Guarna's full breadth. Even in North America, given the vast distances that have become increasingly untenable with transportation costs, only those on one coast or the other, for example, might get the chance to catch a particular lineup and repertoire. And even those tours, for those fortunate enough to experience them, are often limited-run engagementsperhaps a few weeks in Europe here, a short tour of Japan there. Recordings only tell part of the story, since artists often tour with groups that are never documented. I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.An unfortunate reality for too many musicianseven those who are well-knownis that most of their audiences are aware of but a portion of their true work.their fullest capabilities. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church-in fact, of our church-and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid-afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.
What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked-at first avid, then groaning-on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of an eye, unutterably different and fantastically present. Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth. Matters were not helped by the fact that these holy girls seemed rather to enjoy my terrified lapses, our grim, guilty, tormented experiments, which were at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fires of Hell. Yet there was something deeper than these changes, and less definable, that frightened me. It was real in both the boys and the girls, but it was, somehow, more vivid in the boys. In the case of the girls, one watched them turning into matrons before they had become women.
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