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Kim Reith

About Me

”BAIL!” is my first album, recorded in late 1999 to document my compositions and my ensemble work with San Diego bassist Bruce Grafrath. Subsequently, I collaborated with Bronx-born Swiss resident Edmund J. Wood on a series of experimental open improvisations, featuring Edmund on fretless bass and implied-time drum loops and me on hollow-body electric guitar. Unfortunately, the world lost a great creative soul when Edmund died in March, 2002. My most recent creative cohorts are LA-based musicians Dan Krimm, electric bassist, and Steve Sykes, with whom I've worked on trio interpretations of my compositions. I also do quite a bit of solo jazz guitar performance in the LA area, mainly playing chord-melody style jazz standards, as well as some of my own pieces conducive to solo performance.

I play a Herb Ellis model Aria Pro II hollow-body electric guitar through a Polytone Mini-Brute amp.

To backtrack a bit and fill you in on some personal history, I was raised in San Diego, California, but lived in San Francisco for 18 years. I've also traveled extensively throughout Europe and Japan. I returned to my hometown in 1993, then in 2000 moved to LA. Until 1985, when I began studying the guitar, my background was in art and writing. As a child, I was exposed to a large jazz, blues, folk, opera, world and ethnomusicology recording collection belonging to my mother. I studied guitar privately with San Francisco jazz guitarists Marlena Teich and Duncan James and with the LA/San Diego jazz guitarist Art Johnson, and spent many years in independent study. I have been composing jazz works for small and large ensembles since 1993, formally studying jazz theory, composing and arranging under Rick Helzer at SDSU.

In 1979 I made my entr