Jazz guitarist is master of musical contrasts
Hristo Vitchev and quartet set two dates at Cafe Pink House
It’s a good thing that Hristo Vitchev’s talent can keep pace with his ambition.
Over the past decade, the San Jose jazz guitarist has steadily expanded his creative purview, documenting his evolution as a composer drawn to shimmering harmonies and ethereal textures. He’s released a new album almost every year since his 2009 debut on his First Orbit Sounds Music label, most recently a yin-yang pair of projects that reflects his ongoing exploration of contrasting musical impulses.
The primary album is “Of Light and Shadows,” featuring his longrunning quartet with Santa Cruz bassist Dan Robbins, Pacific Grove drummer Mike Shannon and Brazilian-born, Portland, Oregon-based pianist Jasnam Daya Singh (formerly known both as Weber Iago and Weber Drummond). While still leaving plenty of space for improvisation, Vitchev has moved toward more detailed notation in order to fully exploit the band’s dynamic possibilities, creating a diaphanous chamber jazz sound that never edges toward unleavened sweetness.
“I spent the last year writing and arranging the music to really showcase the contrasts, loud and soft, consonant and dissonant, soft and hard textures, all the tonal possibilities that this group of people can achieve after 10 years of playing together,” says Vitchev, who performs Friday and Saturday at Saratoga’s Cafe Pink House with his quartet. The band also plays the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Garden Stage Sept. 21, kicking off the event with the first set on the fairgrounds.
He created another layer of contrast with a companion album, “Behind the Shadows.” Borrowing snippets of thematic material
from “Of Light and Shadows” as points of departure, the band created a series of impromptu pieces in the studio, four of which Vitchev released on the album.
Contrary to a mistaken notion of what free improvisation entails, successfully creating new music on the spot requires a lot more practice and discipline than merely picking up instruments and starting to play. With hundreds of hours of shared musical experience, the quartet had a strong foundation of familiarity
and trust and felt little pressure over wasting expensive studio time, given the knowledge they’d already recorded the album they intended.
“We all aspire to break away from all the rules,” Vitchev says. “We have quite a ways to go before we get there, but I thought, let’s try to achieve something free. If it doesn’t work out, no one needs to know about it.”
One reason Vitchev’s quartet creates such striking music whether it’s following a tightly scripted score or none at all is the
exceptional bass work of Robbins, who embraces his role as a tether during the ensemble’s most abstract flights, which often lack a tonal center. Amid the cinematic sweep of Vitchev’s arrangements, Robbins often supplies the mechanics of the plot.
“The band’s rhythmic feel is often what people call the ECM feel,” says Robbins, referring to a spacious, floaty, straight eighthnote pulse associated with artists who recorded for the German record label in the late 1960s and ’70s. “We have one song that
might overtly swing. Everything else is textures with some kind of groove.”
For Robbins, a professor of bass at San Jose State and Santa Clara University, that means his role is to maintain order. “I’m the biggest anchor in the band,” he says. “Mike is floating around the drums. Hristo and Weber are interacting. My role is to play those harmonic roots with taste and time.”
While Vitchev is best known as a bandleader and composer, he’s gaining recognition as an accompanist whose presence on the bandstand serves as a creative wild card. He just concluded a run of Bay Area gigs with New York Hammond B-3 organ expert Pat Bianchi, and on Oct. 23 he returns to Cafe Pink House with the captivating British-born New York jazz vocalist Tessa Souter.
They met when she hired him for a gig at San Jose Jazz’s 2016 Summer Fest, and they immediately bonded on the bandstand. Souter called him again last fall when she played the SFJazz Center’s Joe Henderson Lab, and the Pink House gig serves as a warmup for a 10-day duo tour in Japan that may yield a live album.
“From the very first note we played together, there was this chemistry,” Vitchev says. “She does a lot of classical repertoire that she writes lyrics for, a very chamber-oriented project that goes with some of my ideas as a composer. We feel the same way about music, and this has become a larger project.”
With Vitchev, projects have a way of expanding, and he always seems to find the creative resources to justify the scale.