Background
JACK DeSALVO, born in New York City, developed his extraordinary guitar style from a deep immersion into modern jazz, classical guitar and his own prolific compositional output. He has been compared to artists as diverse as Ralph Towner and John McLaughlin and has studied guitar with Bill Connors and Leonid Bolotine, composition with Ariada Mikéshina (herself a student of Richard Strauss) and at Berklee College of Music as well as with composer and theorist George Russell. DeSalvo performs mainly with his own trio and quartet and the group Quintrepid, which includes Jack on guitar, Matt Lambiase on flugelhorn, Chris Forbes on piano, double-bassist Dmitry Ishenko and drummer Tom Cabrera. All About Jazz calls Quintrepid “ a swinging collective with a fresh sound”.
His duet album Lumens with German/Swiss saxophonist Nicole Johänntgen received praise on both sides of the Atlantic, “I have been completely bowled over by this album since it arrived for review a few weeks ago.” – Nick Lea, Jazz Views, “Nicole Johänntgen and Jack DeSalvo pulled out all the stops at the recording session for “Lumens”. Guitar and saxophone play almost hands-free with the themes and find the perfect balance in terms of sound.” – Georg Wassmuth, SWR2, “(DeSalvo’s) conception is pure jazz, comping, accenting and prodding Johänntgen’s watery lines on alto and soprano.” – Downbeat
Hailed in THE WIRE magazine as “masterful”, Jack DeSalvo has performed on over 100 albums with over 30 under his name. He is featured on numerous classic jazz albums, including Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Red Warrior, Spontaneous Combustion by the group D3, Transparencies with Karl Berger, and Anthony Cox, and Liquide Stones in duo with Arthur Lipner. He has performed worldwide, including at jazz festivals and clubs in Europe.
“When you listen to Jack DeSalvo, it’s immediately apparent that he has an enormous musical vocabulary. Renaissance classical, garage rock, straight-ahead jazz, downtown skronk and traditional mandolin melodies are all part of his musical DNA. But when you hear DeSalvo improvise on classical guitar, you’re hearing the music of that precise moment. He has many influences (and there are as many poets, philosophers, and thinkers as there are musicians)…” – Mitch Goldman, WKCR
Jack DeSalvo is a founder of, and producer for Unseen Rain Records and also a multi-instrumentalist playing (besides classical, steel-string, 12-string and electric guitars) cello, mandolin, banjo, keyboards, etc.
Education
Jack DeSalvo studied guitar with Bill Connors and Leonid Bolotine, composition with Ariada Mikéshina (herself a student of Richard Strauss) and at Berklee College of Music as well as with composer and theorist George Russell.
Career
Throughout DeSalvo’s early NYC experience he played numerous gigs with bass player Tony DeCicco whom he had known at Berklee. At one performance in a gallery on the Lower East Side they played in an ensemble that included saxophonist and composer Trish Burgess, who introduced them to her husband Bruce Ditmas. Tony and Jack knew who Ditmas was – a veteran of the Gil Evans Orchestra and The Paul Bley Quartet. A session was set up. Not a word was said and the playing commenced. It became obvious that the trio could improvise full pieces with a shared sense of compositional structure and yet with a feeling of total abandon. The result was such that they immediately became a band which was known from then on as D3.
D3 hit the downtown scene with their powerful interplay, performing regularly at the Knitting Factory and First on First. A recording was made at Joe Pedoto’s Omni-Mix Studio. Bassist Melvin Gibbs, who knew that Ronald Shannon Jackson was looking for a guitar player for his band The Decoding Society, played the recording for Jackson who then hired DeSalvo.
Several European and American tours with Ronald Shannon Jackson followed with what was to be the horn-less version of the Decoding Society, a band that included bassists Ramon Pooser and Conrad Mathieu and guitarists DeSalvo and the late Jef Lee Johnson. While in Europe DeSalvo met and played with many European and American musicians including Peter Brötzmann in Wuppertal and with Miles’ then current band at Club Rémont in Warsaw.
DeSalvo is featured on Jackson’s legendary recording Red Warrior (Knit Classics KCR-3032/orig. Axiom) with Jack playing electric and slide guitar as well as playing mandolin on the bonus track Harmolodic Christmas.
Soon after came Transparencies (Bellaphon CDLR-45057) with Karl Berger on vibes, piano and balafon, Jack on electric, 12-string and classical guitars, Anthony Cox on double-bass and Tom Tedesco on drums and percussion.
The first album from D3, Spontaneous Combustion (Enja/Tutu CD-888126), with Jack on electric guitar, Tony DeCicco on double-bass and Bruce Ditmas on drums, now a classic, was the very first recording at the then barely completed Tedesco Studio, engineered by David Baker and produced by Peter Wiessmüller.
Arthur Lipner and DeSalvo’s duo performances featuring Arthur’s vibes and marimba and Jack’s classical and electric guitars led to the recording Liquide Stones (Enja/Tutu CD-888132), which received enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Atlantic: “Using both acoustic and electric instruments, DeSalvo demonstrates technique, intelligence and imagination with a broad streak of lyricism and passion in what amounts to one of the better guitar voices to be heard in improvised music these days.” – Cadence “Guitar and vibraphones in a thrilling duo recital with timeless, inflammable ideas. Thus warm ballads burgeon beside provoking, avant-garde sound plasma, forming their own integrated musical system of co-ordination.” -Rainer Guerich, CD Tips, Germany.
Arthur recorded DeSalvo’s composition Pramantha on his own album In Any Language that included Vic Juris on guitar.
DeSalvo performed with various ensembles at the Knitting Factory and elsewhere, including Pat Hall’s Quintet and his own groups including a trio with bassist Jeff Carney and Bruce Ditmas and a quartet with saxophonist Chris Kelsey, bassist Peter Herbert and Ditmas. This quartet eventually recorded DeSalvo’s album Sudden Moves (UR9989).
The album Stutches (UR9996), with Jack on banjo, mandolin and various guitars, Chris Kelsey on soprano saxophone and Tom Tedesco on tabla, percussion and drums was recorded at Tedesco Studio by engineer Jon Rosenberg.
Not long after, the long-time duo of DeSalvo and percussionist Tom Cabrera recorded their first album Tales of Coming Home (UR9986) with Cabrera on frame drums and percussion and DeSalvo on steel-string acoustic six and 12-string and slide guitars and mandolin.
All through this time DeSalvo was improvising on classical guitar. In his liner notes to his solo guitar record Jubilant Rain (UR9987) he says, “I discovered improvised music little by little as a teenager, studying classical guitar and playing in garage bands. It was, however, the solo recordings of Keith Jarrett that intimated a process that was perhaps even more paradigm shattering than the astonishing jazz that I was listening to at that time. Jarrett wasn’t simply improvising over the harmonies inherent in a composed song.
“He was making the whole thing up.
“…I was determined to search for, if not the same process, a process that would necessitate moving myself out of the way and allowing music that clearly already exists in some other world, some other dimension, some parallel universe beyond myself, to flow through my instrument, the guitar.”
A chamber group version of DeSalvo’s piece The Guest was commissioned by the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and performed by Anthony Scafide’s chamber ensemble.
He continued to perform his own music in New York at various spots including performances at The Internet Cafe arranged by and featuring saxophonist Tony Malaby with a quintet that also included trumpeter Dave Ballou, bassist John Hébert and drummer Ed Ware followed by a quartet with Ron Horton on trumpet, Hébert and Tony Moreno on drums.
This period turned into a time of intense self-reflection and focus on classical guitar repertoire from renaissance lute music, through Bach to modern works including Britten’s Nocturnal and transcriptions of Ginastera’s piano music.
DeSalvo premiered composer Sean Hickey’s classical guitar piece Tango Grotesco, which was dedicated to the guitarist, at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.
A return to Omni-Mix Studio for a different type of solo guitar record, Pramantha (UR9988), with steel-string acoustic guitars and his own compositions, that, like predecessor recordings My Goals Beyond by John McLaughlin and Bill Connors’ Theme To The Guardian on ECM and even Bill Evans’ Conversations With Myself, renders a most personal album.
DeSalvo’s relationship with UNSEEN RAIN Records and producer-engineers Gene Gaudette and Jim DeSalvo has created an artistic home for DeSalvo’s work as a recording artist and as a producer, bringing in artists he respects and admires and offering a catalog of over 120 recordings, many audiophile.
DeSalvo performs now primarily with his own groups as well as Quintrepid, Parabola and others.
Following Jack’s brother Jim’s untimely and tragic death in 2019, Jack and Gaudette merged Unseen Rain with Woodshedd Records uniting with partners Tom Cabrera, Julie Lyon and recording engineer Larry Hutter.
