"It's five guitars, piano, bass and drums," Randy Napoleon tells Cara Lieurance about the octet he's bringing to Kalamazoo to perform on Thursday, May 14 at 7 and 9 pm for the Jazz in the Crawlspace series. "So if you love guitar, I think you'll really love this. And if you don't love guitar... come on, everybody loves guitar!" The ensemble is touring in advance of a second recording as a group.
A veteran recording and touring artist, Napoleon talks about making the first album with this unusual configuration, Waking Dream: The Music of Gregg Hill and Randy Napoleon. Co-composer Gregg Hill is a longtime friend whose melodic sketches Napoleon treats as creative prompts. "It turns into something where I'm not sure where Greg starts and ends and where I begin. It's really, really cool," he says.
The five guitarists include internationally recognized Juno Award-winner Jocelyn Gould, Ben Turner of a top military ensemble, and New York-based players Luke Sittard and Chris Minami — all former Napoleon students. Rounding out the group are pianist Rick Roe, a longtime mentor figure Napoleon first heard at Ann Arbor's Bird of Paradise jazz club as a teenager; drummer Quincy Davis, who now heads the jazz drum department at the University of North Texas; and MSU student bassist Langston Kitchen.
Napoleon, who spent 13 years performing with the late Freddy Cole and three with Michael Bublé, says those experiences as a sideman shaped how he approaches his instrument. "I'm trying to make the guitar speak like a voice," he explains. "When you think about how great singers deliver melodies, it's not notatable."
For this outing, Napoleon says he has refined the ensemble writing by pulling back from using all five guitars simultaneously — applying the same logic as musical dynamics. "If you play loud all the time, it's not interesting," he says. "It's the contrast that creates dynamics." The result, he promises, is something audiences will not have encountered before.
For tickets and more information, visit kzoojazz.com.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
