Jazz Articles about Ryan Blotnick

Ryan Blotnick: Solo, Volume I

by Mario Calvitti
April 7, 2014

Dopo due album a suo nome registrati con formazioni variabili (trio, quartetto, quintetto), il giovane chitarrista Ryan Blotnick (classe 1983) ha sentito il bisogno di ritrovare una dimensione più intimista, dedicandosi intensamente alla pratica del solo, allo stesso tempo ritornando nel nativo Maine dopo alcuni anni trascorsi a New York. Ne scaturisce un lavoro delicato e interessante, intenso pur nella sua brevità (poco meno di 34 minuti), ricco di spunti e stimoli in un approccio strumentale alla chitarra che riesce ...

Ryan Blotnick: Solo, Volume I

by Matt Marshall
January 29, 2013

Solo, Volume I finds guitarist Ryan Blotnick returning to his roots. Not only has he scaled back to his bare, musical minimum--a man and his guitar--but he's also relocated from New York City to the Amherst/Northampton area of Massachusetts, all in an attempt to get closer to the life and music he knew growing up in Maine. The idea was simple: armed with his 1959 Martin 00-18, outfitted with a single coil pickup, he'd fashion a personal, acoustic/electric music not ...

Ryan Blotnick: Everything Forgets

by Martin Gladu
October 8, 2009

Ryan Blotnick Everything Forgets Songlines 2009

While there are no fast rules or proven paths for developing a craft and career as an improvising musician, most players arrive at free playing and pure expression in the course of their development rather than starting their careers there. In other words, the artistic process leads more commonly to abstraction than it leads to formalism. (This can also be observed in the visual arts, with ...

Ryan Blotnick: Everything Forgets

by Wilbur MacKenzie
September 4, 2009

Guitarist Ryan Blotnick has been intermittently active in New York for years now, but since the release of his debut recording as a leader, Music Needs You, his activities have taken him throughout the world, with his own groups and also with Michael Blake, Pete Robbins and Kresten Osgood. Blotnick's second record, Everything Forgets, travels through a wide array of textures, moods and atmospheres, at one moment careening through a dense cloud of rhythms, then gliding through ...

Ryan Blotnick: Music Needs You

by AAJ Italy Staff
June 26, 2008

Il giovane chitarrista americano Ryan Blotnick si presenta con questo suo primo album che lo vede fronteggiare un quintetto ben coeso che affronta con eleganza e ottimo senso dello spazio queste nove composizioni originali (una del saxofonista Pete Robbins, le altre del chitarrista) sospese fra jazz da camera ed educata modernità. La casa discografica è la canadese Songlines anche se il progetto ha molti punti in comune con le cose abitualmente pubblicate dalla spagnola Fresh Sound nella sua collana New ...

Ryan Blotnick: Music Needs You

by Marcia Hillman
February 6, 2008

Guitarist Ryan Blotnick is on a journey of exploration on this, his first CD. All of the compositions are his originals with one exception--a ballad by alto saxophonist Pete Robbins. Blotnick is accompanied on this journey by Robbins as well as Albert Sanz (piano), Perry Wortman (bass) and Joe Smith (drums), a quintet that was assembled for a tour last year and is well-attuned to each other. There is a chamber feel to this CD because of ...

Ryan Blotnick: Music Needs You

by Martin Gladu
January 31, 2008

As Jack Kerouac's call for a “rucksack revolution" enticed America's youth to discover themselves and the world through rallies and road trips, musicians, for their part, have found taking the road at the same time an uprooting obligation and liberating transience. After all, as the proverb goes, travels do broaden the mind.A young globe-trotter in his own right at twenty-four, guitarist/composer Ryan Blotnick's enviable travelogue has prompted him to precociously abandon his studies at New Jersey's William Paterson's ...