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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
