REINDEER CAN REALLY FLY

jazz radio show
KUNM 89.9 FM
Albuquerque, New Mexico USA
also streaming on the web > KUNM.org
Thursday at Noon (Mountain Standard Time)
UTC/GMT current time offset: -6 hours
December 22, 2011
Host MARK WEBER

Live in-studio Christmas Duets with local maestros
Lewis Winn — guitar
Michael Olivola — bass

In New Mexico we have so many great guitar players that you can’t throw a Fender Twin-Reverb amp without hitting one. We easily have ten or twenty A-List Guitarists that I wouldn’t be scared of any of them making the scene in New York or Los Angeles. In fact, quite some of them are Expats from those scenes already. They just prefer New Mexico.

Michael Anthony, Pat Malone, Bill West, Stefan Dill, Dimi DiSanti, Tony Cesarano, Claudio Perez, etcetera, AND Lewis Winn.

Among that tribe Lewis Winn does it all. From an arsenal of Fenders and fatbody guitars and even on the bass when the phone rings his ideas always reap rewards to those that listen. I’m saying his note choices and intuition are deep into the mysteries of pure improvisation, always.

I always laugh when 6-string gunslingers arrive from the East or West Coast thinking they’re going to blow away all the locals. Half the time we yawn in their faces we’ve been so spoiled with guitarists around these parts. And after these hotshots get a sniff of our guitarists they change their tune, chagrined.

And Michael Olivola is a veteran of scenes in San Francisco and NYC, Santa Fe, and is, again one among many of the fine bassists we have in the state. I can’t wait for you to hear how he keeps Lewis on his toes.

And Christmas tunes? They are so thunder-laden with pathos and nostalgia and gravitas and great melodies that jazzers have plenty to grab onto. It’s like Cecil Taylor told me many years ago, and this has become one of my guiding maxims: (paraphrased) Try to get to where that artist lives and inhabit that world that they are expressing, and you’ll be just that much more enriched.



Michael Olivola — bass | Lewis Winn — guitar | July 25, 2008 Albuquerque @ Bumble Bee Bob’s Baja Grill on Central Avenue (Rt.66) | Photos by Mark Weber | click the images to enlarge…