Truth be told, Kurt has done his share of unusual jobs--some tough, some actually enjoyable (such as being a musician in a circus). Music may be his muse, but it doesn't necessarily pay the bills. So it's our good fortune that Kurt has stuck with it throughout decades and difficulties, not the least of which was the tendinitis which sidelined him for a couple of years. Born in Berkeley, California, he started on 'cello and went on to the almost obligatory electric bass (an instrument which he still enjoys playing: "I figure it's best to use the right tool for the job--and there are times when that's an electric bass"). He attended UC in his home town, pursuing a double major in Music and Political Science. "Political Science was something of a sop to my family," says Kurt: he could be "unemployed in a more acceptable way".

The "Kurt Ribak Trio" CD is Kurt's first recording as a leader, and one populated entirely by his own compositions. Now, any business school will tell you that this is "unwise": where is the familiarity of melody which enables the listener, on first hearing, to "relate" to the music?

Nothing daunted, Kurt responds as follows. "The reason why I got the band started was that I love to write, and I wanted to have a band that was a vehicle for playing my tunes. I love playing jazz standards. There's a great body of repertoire in jazz, but I wanted to bring in my own things as well, and so I decided to just go ahead and feature my own songs." Kurt wraps this argument up nicely: "Besides, I wrote the check for the recording, so I'll put what I want on it!"

And, in this case, the exception proves the rule. This is a recording which pleases on several levels: not only are the melodies and arrangements finely constructed, but the playing and the performances are downright enjoyable.

Some of the credit naturally goes to Kurt's partners in the trio. Pianist Greg Sankovich is a UC Berkeley contemporary of Kurt's with whom he reconnected a couple of years ago: "a fabulous pianist ... plays great grooves", says Kurt. He describes Tim Solook as a "fine drummer" from New Jersey via Houston to San Jose. Kurt volunteers that they, and Greg especially, have "been really critical to the development of not only ... the overall sound of the CD but really of how I've grown as a musician."

Credit, of course, must always go to the composer (if the nature of the pieces isn't important, then why is there such a wealth of material so often revisited from the Great American Songbook and from more recent "jazz standards"?) and to the leader of the band--in this case the same person. Kurt is no dilettante here: he's thoroughly grounded in the fundamentals of music, from his time as a grade-schooler in the San Francisco Boys' Chorus ("wonderful musical training, very good discipline"), via UC Berkeley's music program, through to his time at Berklee College of Music.

Rhythm is innate in Kurt: one of his earliest musical memories is of the time, while he was a pre-schooler, that his mother finding him "in the kitchen hopping from one foot to another with a rapt expression on my face... I was dancing to the sound of the dishwasher!"

So it's not surprising that several of the pieces have a happy, rhythmic feel, from the Gospel-sounding "Finally Home" (which came to Kurt while he was dragging a pallet on the graveyard shift during one of his "tough" jobs) to the pair whose titles suggest as much: "Pseudoafrocubanismo" ("pseudo-" because "what I was hearing in my head was something of a Cumbia rhythm ...I am not an expert in Latin music--I play some Latin music, I've studied some of it, but I sure am not an expert, and ... this is kind of my take on it.") and "Bolero Amargo", the newest of the seven tunes. (Check out Tim Solook's work on "Pseudoafrocubanismo": getting the effect of timbales from trap drums is no easy matter.)

"A lot of music is about making your obsessions work for you" says Kurt, and "Obsessions" is the musical result of a difficult period in Kurt's life. Other tunes come from happier times. For example, late one night Kurt heard, playing on a juke box in a bar, a song by the still underrated balladeer Roy Orbison. ("Roy Orbison had a real gift for melodies," says Kurt, "rather unusual melodies for the genre ... a lot of big leaps.") This got Kurt to thinking about some of the elements of Orbison's writing: the germ of a tune came to him; before bed, Kurt had a sketch of the tune, and the next day it was finished. The result was "Roy".

The CD wraps up with "The Munsters Have Martinis", something which started as a harmony exercise at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Kurt completed the tune in a loft in New York City in 1987, so it's the oldest of the seven tunes here. He noticed that the melody has some descending elements which he describes as "clichés from horror movies ... scary house movies and the like". But, notwithstanding, it's so cheerful that it conjured up for him the image of "the characters from the Munsters TV show having a fine old time and sharing a pitcher of Martinis."

As stated above, Kurt formed his trio specifically to play his own compositions. He's a prolific composer who's waited some two decades before recording any of them. "Kurt Ribak Trio" is the first of what should therefore be quite a series of recordings. In fact, a little bird tells me that the next is in the works even as these words are being typed. But there's no need to wait: there's plenty of musical mileage to be found in "Kurt Ribak Trio".

Michael Burman

Producer, "Desert Island Jazz"/Announcer, Weekend "Jazz Oasis"

KCSM-FM

© 2005, Michael W. Burman