Lee Ritenour – Thursday March 15

Lee Ritenour
Thursday March 15, 2012 – 8pm
Tickets $150.00 

LEE RITENOUR’S 6 STRING THEORY

It’s hard to believe that 2010 marks 50 years since Lee Ritenour starting playing the guitar, setting in motion a career that legends are made of. A career that has earned him 19 GRAMMY® nominations, a GRAMMY

Award, numerous #1 spots on guitar polls, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian SJ Awards and the prestigious Alumnus of the Year award from USC. He has recorded over 40 albums, with 35 chart songs, and was a founding member of the group Fourplay, considered the most successful band in contemporary jazz,. As a young guitarist, his diverse musical style became the foundation of over 3,000 sessions covering a broad spectrum of artists ranging from his first session at 16 with the Mamas and Papas, to Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Simon & Garfunkel and Frank Sinatra. Not to forget the dazzling array of talent appearing on his solo works and collaborations; from his legendary work with Dave Grusin, to Phil Collins, Brazilian greats Ivan Lins, Caetano Veloso, and Djavan, to opera great Renee Fleming. On his latest endeavor, 6 STRING THEORY, Ritenour celebrates the instrument that has allowed him this blessing, the guitar; —by producing and assembling a star-studded tribute with 20 (including himself) of the greatest and soon- to- be greatest guitarists of our time. Incorporating all of his history, from jazz and classical to rock and blues, from acoustic to electric, Lee Ritenour’s 6 String Theory promises to be one of the greatest guitar recordings ever made!

The liner notes by Jude Gold…..

“Is this a Lee Ritenour record? No. Is this a Lee Ritenour record? Yes.”—Lee Ritenour

Picture yourself in Henson Recording, once known as A&M Studios, the hallowed Hollywood tracking room in which Lee Ritenour is recording songs for the album you now hold in your hands. It’s mid-session, the red light is on, and British rock/fusion phenomenon Guthrie Govan is performing his odd meter tour de force, “Fives.” With the tubes in his amp scorching hot, and his fingers even hotter, the young guitar hero is melding every progressive shred guitar approach you can name—pick sweeping, string tapping, pinch harmonics, and more—into unified sheets of sound that magically seem to channel Coltrane, Paganini, and Zappa all at once. Ritenour looks pleased. Meanwhile, another person has just entered the control room, and he, too, is watching Govan’s guitar pyrotechnics: American blues/rock wunderkind Joe Bonamassa. Fresh off his most successful year yet—a year that found him headlining and selling out London’s Royal Albert Hall, no less—Bonamassa is up next to record for Ritenour. “Man,” he jokes when he meets Govan a few minutes later, “I didn’t play that many notes all last year.” “Yeah,” replies Govan, “but you played the right ones.”

Few things encapsulate the spirit of 6 String Theory more succinctly than this friendly little exchange—two immensely successful but utterly disparate musicians checking their egos at the door to take part in a world-class celebration of the guitar; a celebration put on by one of the most versatile and successful performers, composers, session players, producers, and solo artists the instrument has ever known. If guitarists sometimes live up to any reputation they may have for being a competitive, high-maintenance, even back-stabbing bunch, they certainly didn’t do so on the Six String sessions. The camaraderie throughout was genuine, and it arose in large part from one thing: the immense respect every corner of the music industry pays Lee Ritenour.

One obvious measure of this respect is the album’s astonishingly high headcount of world-famous guest guitarists—a whopping 20 of them—and the wide range of genres they represent. After all, it’s not just any artist who can reel in everyone from B.B. King to Jonny Lang, George Benson to Slash, John Scofield to Taj Mahal, Keb Mo to Neal Schon, Steve Lukather to Vince Gill, Mike Stern to Pat Martino, plus many other iconic guitarists, and get them all to guest on his record.

“One day, I just had this vision,” says Ritenour of the motivation behind the project. “Maybe it was inspired by YouTube, the way you can spend an hour on there and see clips of every amazing guitar player under the sun. Or maybe it was inspired by the fact that I love so many different styles of guitar, and have since I was a kid, and have played most of them throughout my career. But it just occurred to me how great