Jack West/Walter Strauss: Guitars on Life

Emerging from the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s, acoustic guitarist Jack West forged a new style on 6-and 8-string instruments that integrates percussive use of the strings and guitar body with melody and harmony. Spicing his tunes with repeated harmonics and slide flourishes and incorporating influences from jazz, folk, rock and Americana music, West has released several albums, both solo and with his group Jack West & Curvature in which his guitar was complemented by percussion, saxophone, cello, and mandolin. West is also an inventor of musical instruments (a "Gliss guitar," currently being prototyped, that allows full octave pitch alterations while playing) and solar power technology, pursuits which have put music somewhat in the back seat over the past decade or so. With Otá Records concurrently releasing both a brand-new album, Guitars on Life (Ota Records, 2026), as well as a double LP Curvature collection, Essential Curvature (Ota Records, 2026), West is making a welcome return to the musical forefront.

Guitars On Life features duos recorded live in the studio with fellow guitarist Walter Strauss, who has had a wide-ranging career including collaborations with a variety of well-known acoustic guitarists as well as West African musicians. When not playing slide solos, West lays down each tune's percussive bed, incorporating bass runs and chord shapes over which Strauss's fingerpicked figures, harmonic patterns and melodic solos are expertly deployed. The result isn't straight-ahead jazz per se; rather, jazz's improvisatory spirit, rhythmic complexity and harmonic depth is applied to distinctly American folk, blues and funk styles.

The highlight here is "Double Bounce," featuring Strauss's catchiest fingerpicked patterns over a deliciously funky stop-start melodic rhythm by West. The duo raise and lower the temperature throughout the song, vignetting a series of alternating dialogues between the two guitarists that demonstrate their distinct melodic styles. Also beguiling is "Youth," a stomping folk hoedown that, in its bridge, recalls the particular droney, suspended acoustic guitar feel that Jimmy Page occasionally brought to Led Zeppelin's early albums. In "Across The Bardo," Strauss establishes a U2-like pattern of harmonics alongside which West solos on slide, after which the musicians switch places, West laying down a rhythmic pattern for Strauss to solo over. A cover of Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" is fun, and "OO" provides an impressive showcase for Strauss, but the closing "Follow the Water Down" stands out from the rest of the album for its slower pace and mysterious feel, providing a welcome balladic openness.

Guitars On Life is also available on an excellent-sounding pressing on clear, recyclable PET, a vinyl alternative. Multi-camera videos from the sessions, well worth watching, particularly for fellow six-string slingers, are also available on YouTube.