JGT contributor Joe Barth talks to Brooklyn-based guitarist Tim Watson.
Brooklyn-based guitarist Tim Watson has his eye on the future. Not only because he is twenty-six and has a lot of life still ahead of him, but also because he has a curious commitment to exploring the new, especially rhythmic territories music may be heading toward. Steeped in traditional jazz language, he also looks to South Indian artists to see how their music may influence his. You can find him at some of New York’s best music venues, and he stays active with many of the city’s younger, forward-thinking musicians.
JB: What inspired you to play jazz guitar?
TW: I was lucky to go to a high school that had a very strong jazz program at the time. I grew up playing rock and metal guitar and producing electronic music, but when I started meeting other kids who were playing jazz at a really high level at my school, I became obsessed with getting better at my instrument. We played tons of Mingus and Ellington music in the school’s big band, which was unbelievably exciting, but I couldn’t imagine myself contributing anything in the jazz world until I saw a concert with Ben Monder and Tim Miller playing double guitar. That night completely changed my life and made me realize you could incorporate effects and huge, expansive sounds in jazz, which has been more or less my thing throughout my career. Early encounters with Jim Hall, Wes Montgomery, and Pat Martino were really important for me too.
JB: Did you study music in college, and what did you musically appreciate about that era of your life?
TW: I studied jazz for my undergraduate degree and classical composition for my master’s at the University of Miami. My favorite part was listening to Coltrane with my friends for hours, and how we all inspired each other to work harder. I was a very feisty young student, so I was oftentimes raging against whatever the teachers were showing us, but a lot of the time they were right.
JB: To you, in shaping your sound and approach, what are three of the most influential jazz guitar albums and why?
TW: Bill Frisell – Small Town. I had this one on vinyl and would listen to it front to back every Friday before school in college. It’s almost too tender of a record for me to describe, but it made me realize how much you can do with simpler harmonies and got me out of this habit of making everything complex just for the sake of complexity. There’s also transcendent, deeply musical FX work, and Thomas Morgan’s playing continues to blow my mind in every context.
Ralph Towner – Solstice. The writing and the texture of this band just knocked me out. I’m not sure if I ever properly integrated anything that goes on in this album, but it’s some of the most colorful guitar playing and writing ever.
Excavation – Ben Monder. I was beyond obsessed with Ben in high school. His harmonic sensibilities and macro compositional thinking really stuck with me.
But for some reason I’ve been pretty stubborn about mostly trying to integrate ideas from other instruments and from electronic music, rather than getting ideas from other guitarists. Some of the records that have probably made the biggest impression are Mutant (Arca), Fort Yawuh (Keith Jarret), Alban Berg Op. 1 and violin concerto, Product (Sophie), and At Plugged Nickel (Miles Davis).
JB: What do you find most rewarding and challenging about blending classical South Indian music and jazz as you sometimes do?
TW: Just a quick disclaimer: I really only deal with South Indian rhythmic concepts, and I know basically nothing about how the melodic systems work in Indian music. My former teachers, Anantha R. Krishnan and Shree Sundarkumar, showed me a lot of traditional rhythmic compositions called Korvais, which have unbelievably clever mathematical structures, and that opened me up to a wide variety of ways of organizing rhythms that are essentially unheard of in Western music! I’ve written some pieces that use these sorts of structures, but for the most part I’m inspired by my teacher’s playing and the rhythmic tradition they come from. It’s very, very beautiful stuff.
JB: Tell me about one of your most memorable performance experiences.
TW: If I had to choose, maybe performing one night at the Village Vanguard with Marcus Gilmore’s group. I was subbing for Burniss Travis. It was my first time playing with them and my only time ever playing at the Vanguard. Marcus was my biggest hero in jazz in high school, and I never imagined I’d get to do something like that. There was no rehearsal, and I had maybe 4 days to prepare, so it was very intense, but I got through it and have worked on and off with that band since then. I was positioned onstage right behind Marcus, so getting to watch him take drum solos up close was unbelievable. I’m really grateful to those guys (David, Emmanuel, Rashaan, Morgan, Marcus) for welcoming me into the group and being some of the most brilliant and lovely cats alive.
JB: What do you appreciate most about the guitars that you use?
TW: I don’t know too much about guitars! I just hope the ones I play can handle a wide dynamic range, stay in tune, and produce enough high and low frequencies to manipulate in interesting ways. For now my Stratocaster does that for me, but I hope down the line I can find something a little more individual. But when you mangle the sound of the guitar as much as I do it doesn’t make too much sense to play some sort of unreal vintage axe. It’d be like buying an A5 Wagyu steak and then putting it in a stew.
JB: New York is home to scores of good guitarists. You’ve been in Brooklyn for several years. What’s the best piece of advice you’d give another younger guitarist for building a career in music?
TW: Maybe I’d advise them to think about the different types of very successful musicians that already exist. That’s one gripe I have with music schools: they focus too much on being generally “good” and don’t seem to know what’s working in the music industry right now. When I think of the busiest musicians in my life, there are a couple of rough skill sets they fall into:
- Singular virtuoso types who have developed a new way of playing on their instrument. They’re essential to the world of music because nobody else can play like them. Unfortunately, you also have to be a bit of a genius, and if the style you developed only works within a narrow range of music, it may not result in a particularly illustrious career.
- Extremely professional, put-together folks who are amazing at contributing to an arrangement, have incredible rhythm and touch, and deep knowledge of popular music. If you ask them to lay down the fundamental layer of a song (like a riff, a fingerpicking pattern, etc.), they will knock it out of the park every time. Same thing for more auxiliary parts. When they play, they have a strong awareness of what’s already happening in each register (high/mid/low) in the band and are careful not to clutter the arrangement. These people will always have work as long as live music still exists.
- Multi-instrumentalists who play a weird combination of instruments, maybe like horns and stringed instruments and drums; instruments across different categories. You become indispensable because who else can even play all those instruments?
- Folks who are good with textures and keep extremely up to date on various developments and trends in sound. This is becoming more and more important as technology and guitar are becoming intertwined. You can get away with not being a virtuoso, but you’re still essential because you add a layer of texture to other people’s music that makes them sound truly contemporary. This, of course, goes beyond using whatever effects are in vogue and requires the confidence to make bizarre choices that still blend across a variety of musical situations. (Sometimes it has more to do with going directly against what’s in vogue and trying to imagine what will come next). You have to have an affinity for music technology, love experimenting with strange and terrible timbres, and be always critical of whether the results of your exploration are actually musical or not.
Of course, everybody has a combination of all of these skill sets. People who have 2 or 3 of these categories and are good people, fun, and easy to work with will be wildly successful, even in this difficult industry.
