Home » Jazz Musicians » Chuck Hammer

Chuck Hammer

Chuck Hammer is an American guitarist and soundtrack composer, known for textural guitar work with Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Guitarchitecture. As an artist, Hammer is best known for his Guitarchitecture recordings, though he is also widely regarded as a leading soundtrack composer, having scored approximately 300 documentary films. He is currently developing a series of improvisational textural guitar recordings.

He attended State University of New York at Buffalo, studying classical guitar with Oswald Rantucci, jazz with Archie Shepp, and attended lectures presented by Karlheinz Stockhausen. As a guitarist Hammer was a central figure within the Lou Reed Band that hosted the June 1979 concerts at The Bottom Line in New York City that included Don Cherry. He was born in New York City.

Hammer toured extensively as a textural guitarist with Lou Reed from 1978 through 1980. During these concerts Hammer utilized new guitar technology, known as guitar-synth, to orchestrate songs from Berlin, Street Hassle, The Bells and The Velvet Underground. It was during this time that Hammer developed an approach to composing and recording known as Guitarchitecture. Hammer recorded with Lou Reed on Growing Up in Public, January 1980.

In March 1980, Hammer recorded guitar-synth tracks with David Bowie on the album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), including multiple textures across "Ashes to Ashes" and "Teenage Wildlife", both of which marked the earliest use of guitar- synth in Bowie's catalogue. The actual instruments utilized on these tracks included a Roland GR-500 with Eventide Harmonizer and multiple analogue tape delays.

Textural tracks such as those on Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" and "Teenage Wildlife" exhibited a highly experimental multi-layered, approach to recording and composing with the guitar. Hammer's recordings with David Bowie represent one of the most influential and genre defining approaches to textural guitar layering. And are regarded as having opened the door to the textural guitar movement that followed.

Hammer's recorded work is broadly known as Guitarchitecture, a process and term which he developed in 1977. The underlying thought behind Guitarchitecture is to extend the sonic vocabulary of the guitar. Guitarchitecture involves widening the guitar's textural vocabulary by altering its temporal sustain characteristics and context. This approach often utilizes extended sustain, reshaped timbres, discreet vibrato techniques, textural event layering, and simply breaking down a chord to its basic elements and recording each element separately (as a modified guitar orchestra). The term Guitarchitecture applies to both Hammer's soundtracks in the digital film medium, and his recorded guitar work.

Read more

Tags

9
Live Review

SPHERES at Nublu 151

Read "SPHERES at Nublu 151" reviewed by Peter Jurew


SPHERES Nublu 151 New York, NY July 8 and August 6, 2019 SPHERES is a jazz collective recently started by keyboardist Jamie Saft and electric guitarist Chuck Hammer playing monthly gigs at Nublu, a loft-club showcase for new music in New York City's East Village. Taking inspiration as well as its name from Thelonious Sphere Monk, their two gigs to date have seen Saft and Hammer pair up with top-flight rhythm sections and journey back ...

22
Extended Analysis

Chuck Hammer: Blind On Blind

Read "Chuck Hammer: Blind On Blind" reviewed by Peter Jurew


Award-winning composer, guitarist, recording artist and producer Chuck Hammer has been an active influence on the progressive music scene since the mid-1970's, working with Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Tony Visconti, Nile Rodgers, and Lou Reed, with whose band he recorded and toured globally for several years. An early adopter of the Roland guitar synthesizer, Hammer has been a leading innovator on the edge of the rapidly evolving technology of sound production and engineering. While working with Reed, Hammer was ...

Read more articles
Hammer's early work with Lou Reed and later on Bowie's "Scary Monsters" remains in many ways the true north origin for the contemporary textural guitar movement. His Core Guitar Tones are widely regarded as pivotal and seminal within the textural guitar community. Think pure guitar sustain - meets Miles Davis extended twenty first century phrasing and intonation aesthetic - wherein the silences are played and every bent note counts. Hammer gets credit for beautifully nailing a certain piece of emotional and sonic real estate and doing it really early. The music is well informed with seriously refined textural, harmonic and percussive invention

Read more

Photos

Music

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.

Install All About Jazz

iOS Instructions:

To install this app, follow these steps:

All About Jazz would like to send you notifications

Notifications include timely alerts to content of interest, such as articles, reviews, new features, and more. These can be configured in Settings.