David Fiuczynski

David " Fuze " Fiuczynski ( born March 5, 1964 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American jazz fusion guitarist and musicologist, whose music often influences from various genres and cultures mixed together. Besides his work as a studio and live guitarist for various artists, he is also solo and as a member of several bands, such as the Screaming Headless Torsos and Hasidic New Wave, become known. In addition, he has worked since the 1990s as a lecturer in guitar at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. His teaching and research activities are, inter alia, musical improvisation and creativity techniques, microtonal music, and playing with the fretless guitar.

Fiuczynskis style of guitar playing is characterized by the use of double neck guitars, which are usually equipped with a conventional and a fretless six - or twelve-string neck. Latter he often uses to play quarter tones and other micro-intervals. He also experimented with pentatonic scales and tonal systems and studied to, inter alia, Arab, Iranian, Indian, African and Eastern European music. An important impetus for his guitar playing he calls inter alia, Jimi Hendrix, James Blood Ulmer and Sonny Sharrock.

Biography

Childhood and youth

David Fiuczynski, 1964 the son of a German father and an African-American mother in Newark, New Jersey, initially grew in neighboring Somerset, but then spent most of his youth, from the eighth to the nineteenth year, in Neuss and later in Mönchengladbach. Fiuczynski, who often tried in his music to overcome musical style boundaries, this results in part to the different influences in his youth, where he next to the American culture and the German painting and music, such as Nina Hagen, power plant and the New German wave, met. Other important influences were the record collections of his parents; In addition to the classical records of his father, especially his mother's jazz records have influenced him. After Fiuczynski had begun at the age of seven years playing the piano, he moved a few years later for electric guitar and took lessons at the Düsseldorf Markus Wienstroer. At this time interested Fiuczynski itself. Especially for the guitar playing of John McLaughlin and Allan Holdsworth, but also for punk rock and bands like Van Halen

1983-1997

In 1983 he returned to the U.S. to take up studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. After he is in the first three semesters exclusively music courses, he decided to switch to a music studies to the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he was taught by Mick Goodrick and George Russell and his studies in 1989 with a bachelor's degree completed ( in 2008 he got his master's degree after ). He also toured with Russell's band and worked at that time also with Bernie Worrell, Bob Moses, Muhal Richard Abrams and Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society.

In the same year he moved to New York City, where he founded the experimental fusion rock band Screaming Headless Torsos. In parallel he worked at that time with the music of India and still pursued various other projects. In 1992 he traveled to Marrakech, where he played with local Berber music groups he also accompanied to the World Exhibition in Seville in 1992. In 1993, he worked as a guitarist with on Meshell Ndegeocellos first solo album Plantation Lullabies. With his former fellow students, keyboardist John Medeski, who had become at that time already known to the jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood, 1994 Fiuczynski took his first, estimated by critics plate Lunar crush on. The ten original compositions on the album are characterized by a musical mix of funk, hip -hop, jazz and rock. Also involved Fima Ephron (bass) and Jojo Mayer (drums), former members or so - with Gene Lake ( also drums) - a future member of the Screaming Headless Torsos.

The following year played Fiuczynski with Reggie Washington, Marlon Browden and saxophonist Avram Fefer on free radio ensemble The Tone Poets. In addition Fiuczynski continued his musical crossover approach and established more projects like Black Cherry Acid Lab and KiF, with whom he later released records. Screaming Headless Torsos in the music - the debut album of his band of the same name - the same year reminded David R. Adler from All Music Guide partly to a " more furious version of Living Colour, with infinitely more radio ". Around the same time he came into contact with Frank London and Greg Wall, who won it for their avant-garde jazz group Hasidic New Wave, with whom he recorded five albums between 1997 and 2001. The band was part of the scene around John Zorn and the New York Knitting Factory.

David Fiuczynski was involved, especially in the 1990s, in the Black Rock Coalition, a non-profit organization for the promotion of black rock musicians, founded in 1985 by Living Colour- member Vernon Reid, the music journalist Greg Tate and music producer Konda Mason been.

1998 to today

In October 1998 Fiuczynski was nominated for his musical work for a CalArts / Alpert Award in the Arts Genius.

In the same year he founded, from dissatisfaction with the publication policy of his former record company, his own record label FuzeLicious Morsels, under which he has since published his own works. Finally, he even bought back the rights to the first two panels of the Screaming Headless Torsos to re-release it on his label. During operation of the labels, he was supported by his wife, the jazz singer Lian Amber.

On his solo album Jazz Punk from 2000 interpreted Fiuczynski - composed by Billy Hart, Santi Debriano, the cellist Rufus Cappadocia - E and the torso members Gene Lake and Daniel Sadownick - among others works by Chopin, Jimi Hendrix, Chick Corea, John Philip Sousa and Duke Ellington.

On his albums KiF and KiF Express (2003 or 2008), he combined, now mostly in their own compositions, rock and funk music with elements of Klezmer, the music of North Africa and the music of the Middle and Far East. On KiF worked again with Lake, Sadownick and Cappadocia. The latter, who else plays in Matt Darriaus Paradox Trio, participated in several compositions of the album. Guest musicians were involved Fiuczynskis wife Lian Amber, which also functioned as producer, Matt Darriau. In return Fiuczynski jumped at live concerts several times for the guitarist of the Paradox Trio, Brad Shepik, a.

Fiuczynski graduated from appearances at various jazz festivals ( Montreux, Newport, North Sea Jazz Festival, Montreal, and others) and toured several times through Europe, North and South America, Japan and South Africa; partly with his own projects, but also with artists such as Stewart Copeland, Cuong Vu, Victor Bailey Jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara and the ( inter alia Glastonbury 2007). In 2011, he toured with Jack DeJohnette, inter alia, Rudresh Mahanthappa and. On 8 April 2011, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his contribution in the field of music composition.

Discography (selection)

David Fiuczynski has worked as a guitarist on nearly 100 plates of famous artists, such as with Muhal Richard Abrams, Freak Power, Scritti Politti, Cindy Blackman, Charles & Eddie, Franz Koglmann, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Steve Coleman, Jazz Passengers, Jack Walrath, Frank London, Billy Hart, Don Pullen, Gongzilla, Bernie Worrell, with his colleague, Terri Lyne Carrington Berklee, on the soundtrack of Batman & Robin, and on the first two albums by Meshell Ndegeocello grammynominierten.

When David Fiuczynski

• Lunar Crush ( 1994 Gramavision ), with John Medeski
• Jazz Punk (2000)
• Black Cherry Acid Lab ( 2002), recordings of the band project of the same name ( and Others with Ahmed Best and Mark Shim ) from the years 1996-98
• KiF (2003)
• Boston T Party (2006 ), along with Dennis Chambers, Jeff Berlin and T Lavitz
• KiF Express ( 2008)

With the Screaming Headless Torsos

• Screaming Headless Torsos (1995, Warner / Discovery, 2002 as a 1995 re-release )
• Live! (1996 Video Arts Music, re-released 2001 )
• Amandala (2001), purely instrumental record (as David 's Headless Torsos Fiuczynki )
• 2005 (2005, FuzeLicious Morsels )
• Choice Cuts (2006, FuzeLicious Morsels )

With Hasidic New Wave

• Jews and the Abstract Truth (1997, Knitting Factory Works 192)
• Psycho - Semitic (1998, Knitting Factory Records 203)
• Live in Krakow (1998, Not Two Records) recorded at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow 1998
• Kabalogy (1999, Knitting Factory Records / JAM 239)
• From the Belly of Abraham (2001, Knitting Factory Records 294 ), in cooperation with Alioune Faye and the Senegalese percussion group Yakar Rhythms