IF YOU want to know where to find Scott Amendola, the best bet is to look for the most interesting guitarist in the vicinity.
Since moving to the Bay Area in 1994, the groovaholic drummer has forged a series of creatively combustible partnerships with iconoclastic guitarists, players who have radically expanded the instrument’s sonic frontiers, including Wilco’s Nels Cline, Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and seven-string guitar wizard Charlie Hunter.
Amendola first gained widespread attention through his work with Hunter’s trio, the group that turned a national spotlight on the Bay Area acid-jazz scene. But his passion for the instrument started much earlier at the feet of his grandfather Tony Gottuso, a highly respected guitarist who split his time between New York City studio sessions and gigs with jazz legends such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Nat “King” Cole.
“I always loved the guitar,” says Amendola, 41, who reunites with Hunter for a rare South Bay gig Sunday at Mountain View’s Dana Street Coffee Roasting Company. “I heard my grandfather playing from when I was really young. The instrument is really important to me, but it’s really about the player. Look down the line, and the guys I’ve worked with are all really interesting voices.”
The Dana Street date came about because Amendola and Hunter are performing Friday with visionary clarinetist/composer Ben Goldberg’s Go Home at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum as part of SFJAZZ’s Spring Season. The drummer and guitarist played together briefly back in 2003 for a reunion of Grammy-nominated avant funk and jazz combo T.J. Kirk (the guitar-centric quartet that also featured John Schott and Will Bernard). But Go Home reignited their musical relationship, leading to a series of duo gigs in Europe next week.
“It’s always been amazing whenever we play, but it keeps growing, getting more intuitive,” Amendola says. “What Charlie does is so uncanny. He didn’t set out to create something out of some kind of marketing tool. Ultimately, it’s what he heard. When you watch him play, it’s like a brain tease. It’s hard to understand what he’s doing, but when you close your eyes, it’s so beautiful and deep and compelling.”
While Amendola doesn’t share quite as much history with Nels Cline, the renegade L.A. guitarist has been his most significant musical partner over the past decade. Before Wilco recruited him in 2004, Cline was a member of the Scott Amendola Band, a hair-raising quintet that featured a roster of rising stars, including bassist/composer Todd Sickafoose and violinist Jenny Scheinman, now a double threat on the New York jazz scene and the alt-country range. The band’s 2003 album, Cry (Cryptogramophone), earned critical raves, but Cline’s rock & roll commitments meant he was increasingly unavailable for gigs.
The guitarist did have time to maintain his own band, the Nels Cline Singers, featuring Amendola and bassist Devin Hoff (recently replaced by Trevor Dunn), an instrumental trio that has recorded a series of dense, invigorating albums for Cryptogramophone. Cline encouraged Amendola’s investigation of electronics, and the drummer began incorporating buzzy textures into his own music.
“The first time I heard Scott I was really blown away,” Cline says. “There aren’t too many drummers on the West Coast who had his wide ranging ability. Scott’s got some funk in him, a looser, sexy thing going on, and the flexibility to play free and different styles. He plays behind singer/songwriters, and he rocks too.”
These days, Amendola is also getting symphonic. In 2009, he received a prestigious commission from Oakland East Bay Symphony’s Irvine Foundation-funded New Visions/New Vistas project. The result is “Fade to Orange,” his most ambitious composition yet, an extended work for jazz trio and the OEBS that premieres at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre on April 15. He wrote the piece with specific players in mind, and he will be joined by Cline and New York-based bassist Trevor Dunn, who gained notoriety for his work in the experimental Bay Area band Mr. Bungle.
“It’s about 20 minutes long, and there are four sections but no real divisions or movements,” Amendola says. “The three of us get featured in different ways, and there are parts where we’re barely playing. With Nels and Trevor, there’s going to be a significant amount of improvising.
Nels has the least written for him, but he’s going to be featured a lot. I’ll do some electronics, too.”
Electronics feature prominently in Amendola’s main working band, a trio with ace San Jose bassist John Shifflett and guitarist Jeff Parker, an essential player on Chicago’s vital scene, touring and recording widely with the post-rock combo Tortoise and drummer Brian Blade’s gospel-steeped Fellowship. He documented the trio on last year’s Lift, an album featuring Amendola’s seductive melodies, transparent textures and hazy, almost subliminal effects.
What makes the trio such a fascinating combo is the way that Shifflett maintains the center of gravity. Amendola and Parker have sojourned far from the straight-ahead jazz path, and they draw upon all their disparate rock, new music and avant-garde experience, while Shifflett finds his own way to navigate through what he calls “the Amendola continent.”
“My instinct is to go that traditional route, but that would be wrong for this music, and that’s the fun challenge,” says Shifflett, who teaches jazz at San Jose State University. “I can essentially play any note in any rhythm and time and Scott’s going to make it sound right.”
The Scott Amendola Trio with Charlie Hunter
Sunday, 7pm; $20
Dana Street Roasting Company, 744 W. Dana St., Mountain View
650.390.9638
