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Gary Lucas is an American guitarist, a Grammy-nominated songwriter, an international recording artist with over a dozen solo albums to date, and a soundtrack composer for film and television.
Dubbed “legendary leftfield guitarist” by The Guardian (24 Dec. 2005), “Guitarist of 1000 Ideas” by The New York Times *, and “a true axe God” by Melody Maker UK (Dec. 1991) the British world music magazine fRoots UK recently hailed Gary Lucas as “without question, the most innovative and challenging guitarist playing today” (March 2002). He was also cited recently by the editors of Down Beat magazine as one of their “Hot 66 6-Stringers” alongside John McLaughlin, Richard Thompson, B. B. King, Pat Metheny, and others.
Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters
Gary Lucas tours the world both solo and with several different ensembles, including his longtime band Gods and Monsters — a psychedelic rock band based around Lucas's guitar playing and songwriting, whose members have included the late singer Jeff Buckley. The most recent Gods and Monsters album was released in Russia in summer of 2005 by Exotica Music and is scheduled for release in the rest of the world in the fall of 2006 (in the UK by Universal-distributed label Side Salad), with mixes by Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) and vocal contributions from David Johansen (New York Dolls), sultry French singer Elli Medeiros, Richard Barone (Bongos), and others.
Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters recently contributed a song to Light of Day, a Bruce Springsteen tribute album for charity, and Springsteen himself has hailed Lucas as “a phenomenal guitarist” . Lucas recently released a compilation of the best of his early band and solo work entitled Operators Are Standing By, which garnered a 4-star Mojo review: “The album confirms Gary Lucas as THE psychedelic guitarist for the post-modern set.”
Hailed as “a 21st century Cream” by Rolling Stone, the band features Gary Lucas on guitars and vocals with Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers) on bass and Billy Ficca (Television) on drums, and Jason Candler (Hungry March Band) on alto sax. Time Out New York recently wrote: ”The group is mind blowing!”--while The New Yorker called them “An underground-rock fan’s dream team”. Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters recently completed a tour of Moscow and Saint Petersburg Russia in the company of former Talking Heads keyboardist / hit producer Jerry Harrison, who is now playing regularly in the band and is in the process of producing their next album.
"Beefheart University"
Gary Lucas established his reputation as a guitarist's guitarist with five years spent playing with his childhood hero, the visionary vocalist/composer/bandleader Captain Beefheart (alias Don Van Vliet). Long an admirer of Captain Beefheart's music, he joined the last incarnation of Beefheart's Magic Band, distinguishing himself as an interpreter of Beefheart's difficult music and recording solo guitar pieces on Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow (1982), which featured his explosive solo renditions of Don Van Vliet’s twisted instrumental compositions, "Flavor Bud Living" and "Evening Bell"--about which the latter piece Esquire wrote "Gary Lucas apparently grew extra fingers in order to negotiate his way through it". These recordings put Lucas on the musical map and laid the groundwork for his subsequent career.
Lucas co-leads a jazz-oriented, all instrumental Beefheart tribute ensemble, Fast 'n' Bulbous, who made appearances at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival and the Jazz Em Agosto Festival in Lisbon this year. Their debut album Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind was profiled on NPR, and charted on college radio in the US.
On the liner notes to Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind, Lucas writes, "I feel that Van Vliet's sensibility and aesthetic definitely informs my guitar playing and overall worldview -- it's like I went to Beefheart University." Lucas actually graduated from Yale University in 1974, where he was a DJ and served as Music Director at WYBC FM.
Lucas is a member of the ongoing reunion of Captain Beefheart alumni The Magic Band, and has played at the UK’s famed Glastonbury Festival, at London’s Shepherd's Bush Empire and at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in LA and Camber Sands in the UK. They’ve made several extensive UK and European tours, and a new live double album and DVD, 21st Century Mirror Men, was released this year as a follow-up to their debut album Back to the Front which was chosen as one of the best albums of 2004 by The Wire.
First solo guitar show
In 1988, Lucas mounted his first solo guitar show at New York's downtown mecca for avant-garde and alternative music, the Knitting Factory. The club became the launching pad for Lucas's ensuing European success, as he was invited shortly after his first Knitting Factory gig to appear at the prestigious 1988 JazzFest Berlin, where the Berliner Morgenpost raved in a banner headline after his performance, "It is Lucas!”
Concerts and tours
To date Lucas has performed in 17 countries around the world, from Tokyo to Trieste to Tel Aviv. He recently made his Australian debut in the company of UK electronica band Future Sound of London, and has been a regular visitor to London's Royal Festival Hall (five separate appearances) and Amsterdam's famed Paradiso (17 separate appearances since 1980).
He recently returned from his fourth tour of Russia, where he performed his original solo guitar score accompanying the silent classic German horror film The Golem (1920) in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and appeared on national TV before an estimated 50 million viewers, as well as being feted in the Russian edition of Rolling Stone. He’s played with The Golem all over the world since debuting his live score in 1989 at the BAM Next Wave Festival—including performing at the Venice Biennale, London’s Royal Festival Hall, the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center, as part of a week long artist-in-residency at the Quebec City Summer Festival, at the Alien artist H. R. Giger’s Retrospective in Prague (home of the Golem) this spring, as well as at Atlanta’s Dragon Con, the largest science fiction festival in the world.
Other recent concert appearances include a specially commissioned concert at the Czech Embassy in Washington DC by invitation of the Czech ambassador to the US spotlighting Lucas's solo guitar arrangements of Czech classical music in honor of the 14th anniversary of the Czech Velvet Revolution (Lucas is of Bohemian descent on his father’s side). Lucas made an extensive solo acoustic tour of Spain last year, which generated large audiences and raves in the national press there.
Projects and collaborations
Lucas has played and collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Captain Beefheart, Jeff Buckley, Lou Reed, John Cale, Nick Cave, David Johansen, jazz greats Roswell Rudd, Steve Swallow, Joe Lovano, Dave Liebman, and Billy Bang; Mary Margaret O’Hara, John Zorn, Peter Stampfel, Patti Smith, Claudia Brucken (Propaganda), Paul Humphreys (OMD), Future Sound of London, Joan Osborne (Lucas co-wrote her Grammy-nominated song "Spider Web" from her triple platinum album Relish), Matthew Sweet, Iggy Pop, Van Dyke Parks, Adrian Sherwood, Bryan Ferry, Richard Barone, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Bob Neuwirth, Geoff Muldaur, John Sebastian, Allen Ginsberg, DJ Spooky, Dr. John, Graham Parker, Bob Weir, Fred Schneider (B-52s), Warren Haynes (Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule) and many others. Some of these collaborations can be heard on his recent 20-year rarities retrospective album Improve the Shining Hour which also features his film and TV music for ABC News (he has scored documentaries for the shows 20/20 and Turning Point). He’s produced albums for downtown composer/saxophonists Tim Berne and Peter Gordon, and for the French avant-rock band Tanger.
Gary Lucas and Jeff Buckley
Lucas co-wrote two of Jeff Buckley’s most famous hits, “Grace” and “Mojo Pin”, from his million-selling album Grace (which Mojo named the #1 Modern Classic Album in their March 2006 issue). Their early collaborations can also be heard on the recent Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas album Songs To No One, which charted internationally with worldwide sales approaching 100,000.
The Edge of Heaven
Other notable recent Gary Lucas releases include The Edge of Heaven, an album of Lucas's lush arrangements of classic Chinese pop tunes from the 1930s, which received international raves from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal to the Hong Kong Music Weekly. It was #1 on the World Music Charts in Canada and garnered international attention, England's Q magazine awarding it 4 Stars, and Mojo writing: "It is simply gorgeous." The album was chosen as one of the Best Discs of the year in France’s Libération newspaper. There was a lengthy profile for the album in The Wall Street Journal, as well as an NPR interview. The title song from the album was featured on the soundtrack to the Bill Moyers PBS Series Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.
Lectures and master classes
Lucas has lectured on his life and career, mechanics of songwriting, extensive collaborations, and the music business, at the Amsterdam Music Conservatorum, Yale University (his alma mater), the University of Hawaii, New York University, and Columbia University. He has given guitar master classes at the Amsterdam Music Conservatory and in Honolulu at the University of Hawaii.
Composing for film and television
Recent soundtrack work includes an original score for Trust Me, a Showtime documentary about a summer camp for Christian, Muslim and Jewish children, and a score for the award-winning documentary Bed and Breakfast 9/11, which was shown on PBS in September. He scored the new documentary by Slawomir Grunberg The Legacy of Jedwabne. This year he released his second album with Dutch lutist Jozef Van Wissem, The Universe of Absence, and was a featured performer at the Holland Festival. Lucas recently scored the Oscar-nominated Maysles Films documentary Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton for HBO, which screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of their Maysles Films 50 Year Retrospective, and about which Variety wrote: "Gary Lucas' Delta blues guitar music adds vivid color to this report from America's forgotten underbelly."
In the last few years Lucas has been profiled in the International Herald Tribune, Libération, and featured on the cover of The Forward as well as the national Dutch newspaper Het Parool.
Gary Lucas makes his home in New York City.
References
the British world music magazine fRoots recently hailed Gary Lucas as “without question, the most innovative and challenging guitarist playing today.” He was also cited recently by the editors of Down Beat magazine as one of their “Hot 66 6-Stringers” alongside John McLaughlin, Richard Thompson, B. B. King, Pat Metheny, and others.
Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters
Gary Lucas tours the world both solo and with several different ensembles, including his longtime band Gods and Monsters — a psychedelic rock band based around Lucas's guitar playing and songwriting, whose members have included the late singer Jeff Buckley. The most recent Gods and Monsters album was released in Russia in summer of 2005 by Exotica Music and is scheduled for release in the rest of the world in the fall of 2006 (in the UK by Universal-distributed label Side Salad), with mixes by Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) and vocal contributions from David Johansen (New York Dolls), sultry French singer Elli Medeiros, Richard Barone (Bongos), and others.
Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters recently contributed a song to Light of Day, a Bruce Springsteen tribute album for charity, and Springsteen himself has hailed Lucas as “a phenomenal guitarist” . Lucas recently released a compilation of the best of his early band and solo work entitled Operators Are Standing By, which garnered a 4-star Mojo review: “The album confirms Gary Lucas as THE psychedelic guitarist for the post-modern set.”
Hailed as “a 21st century Cream” by Rolling Stone, the band features Gary Lucas on guitars and vocals with Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers) on bass and Billy Ficca (Television) on drums, and Jason Candler (Hungry March Band) on alto sax. Time Out New York recently wrote: ”The group is mind blowing!”--while The New Yorker called them “An underground-rock fan’s dream team”. Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters recently completed a tour of Moscow and Saint Petersburg Russia in the company of former Talking Heads keyboardist / hit producer Jerry Harrison, who is now playing regularly in the band and is in the process of producing their next album.
"Beefheart University"
Gary Lucas established his reputation as a guitarist's guitarist with five years spent playing with his childhood hero, the visionary vocalist/composer/bandleader Captain Beefheart (alias Don Van Vliet). Long an admirer of Captain Beefheart's music, he joined the last incarnation of Beefheart's Magic Band, distinguishing himself as an interpreter of Beefheart's difficult music and recording solo guitar pieces on Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow (1982), which featured his explosive solo renditions of Don Van Vliet’s twisted instrumental compositions, "Flavor Bud Living" and "Evening Bell"--about which the latter piece Esquire wrote "Gary Lucas apparently grew extra fingers in order to negotiate his way through it". These recordings put Lucas on the musical map and laid the groundwork for his subsequent career.
Lucas co-leads a jazz-oriented, all instrumental Beefheart tribute ensemble, Fast 'n' Bulbous, who made appearances at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival and the Jazz Em Agosto Festival in Lisbon this year. Their debut album Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind was profiled on NPR, and charted on college radio in the US.
On the liner notes to Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind, Lucas writes, "I feel that Van Vliet's sensibility and aesthetic definitely informs my guitar playing and overall worldview -- it's like I went to Beefheart University." Lucas actually graduated from Yale University in 1974, where he was a DJ and served as Music Director at WYBC FM.
Lucas is a member of the ongoing reunion of Captain Beefheart alumni The Magic Band, and has played at the UK’s famed Glastonbury Festival, at London’s Shepherd's Bush Empire and at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in LA and Camber Sands in the UK. They’ve made several extensive UK and European tours, and a new live double album and DVD, 21st Century Mirror Men, was released this year as a follow-up to their debut album Back to the Front which was chosen as one of the best albums of 2004 by The Wire.
First solo guitar show
In 1988, Lucas mounted his first solo guitar show at New York's downtown mecca for avant-garde and alternative music, the Knitting Factory. The club became the launching pad for Lucas's ensuing European success, as he was invited shortly after his first Knitting Factory gig to appear at the prestigious 1988 JazzFest Berlin, where the Berliner Morgenpost raved in a banner headline after his performance, "It is Lucas!”
Concerts and tours
To date Lucas has performed in 17 countries around the world, from Tokyo to Trieste to Tel Aviv. He recently made his Australian debut in the company of UK electronica band Future Sound of London, and has been a regular visitor to London's Royal Festival Hall (five separate appearances) and Amsterdam's famed Paradiso (17 separate appearances since 1980).
He recently returned from his fourth tour of Russia, where he performed his original solo guitar score accompanying the silent classic German horror film The Golem (1920) in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and appeared on national TV before an estimated 50 million viewers, as well as being feted in the Russian edition of Rolling Stone. He’s played with The Golem all over the world since debuting his live score in 1989 at the BAM Next Wave Festival—including performing at the Venice Biennale, London’s Royal Festival Hall, the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center, as part of a week long artist-in-residency at the Quebec City Summer Festival, at the Alien artist H. R. Giger’s Retrospective in Prague (home of the Golem) this spring, as well as at Atlanta’s Dragon Con, the largest science fiction festival in the world.
Other recent concert appearances include a specially commissioned concert at the Czech Embassy in Washington DC by invitation of the Czech ambassador to the US spotlighting Lucas's solo guitar arrangements of Czech classical music in honor of the 14th anniversary of the Czech Velvet Revolution (Lucas is of Bohemian descent on his father’s side). Lucas made an extensive solo acoustic tour of Spain last year, which generated large audiences and raves in the national press there.
Projects and collaborations
Lucas has played and collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Captain Beefheart, Jeff Buckley, Lou Reed, John Cale, Nick Cave, David Johansen, jazz greats Roswell Rudd, Steve Swallow, Joe Lovano, Dave Liebman, and Billy Bang; Mary Margaret O’Hara, John Zorn, Peter Stampfel, Patti Smith, Claudia Brucken (Propaganda), Paul Humphreys (OMD), Future Sound of London, Joan Osborne (Lucas co-wrote her Grammy-nominated song "Spider Web" from her triple platinum album Relish), Matthew Sweet, Iggy Pop, Van Dyke Parks, Adrian Sherwood, Bryan Ferry, Richard Barone, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Bob Neuwirth, Geoff Muldaur, John Sebastian, Allen Ginsberg, DJ Spooky, Dr. John, Graham Parker, Bob Weir, Fred Schneider (B-52s), Warren Haynes (Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule) and many others. Some of these collaborations can be heard on his recent 20-year rarities retrospective album Improve the Shining Hour which also features his film and TV music for ABC News (he has scored documentaries for the shows 20/20 and Turning Point). He’s produced albums for downtown composer/saxophonists Tim Berne and Peter Gordon, and for the French avant-rock band Tanger.
Gary Lucas and Jeff Buckley
Lucas co-wrote two of Jeff Buckley’s most famous hits, “Grace” and “Mojo Pin”, from his million-selling album Grace (which Mojo named the #1 Modern Classic Album in their March 2006 issue). Their early collaborations can also be heard on the recent Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas album Songs To No One, which charted internationally with worldwide sales approaching 100,000.
The Edge of Heaven
Other notable recent Gary Lucas releases include The Edge of Heaven, an album of Lucas's lush arrangements of classic Chinese pop tunes from the 1930s, which received international raves from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal to the Hong Kong Music Weekly. It was #1 on the World Music Charts in Canada and garnered international attention, England's Q magazine awarding it 4 Stars, and Mojo writing: "It is simply gorgeous." The album was chosen as one of the Best Discs of the year in France’s Libération newspaper. There was a lengthy profile for the album in The Wall Street Journal, as well as an NPR interview. The title song from the album was featured on the soundtrack to the Bill Moyers PBS Series Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.
Lectures and master classes
Lucas has lectured on his life and career, mechanics of songwriting, extensive collaborations, and the music business, at the Amsterdam Music Conservatorum, Yale University (his alma mater), the University of Hawaii, New York University, and Columbia University. He has given guitar master classes at the Amsterdam Music Conservatory and in Honolulu at the University of Hawaii.
Composing for film and television
Recent soundtrack work includes an original score for Trust Me, a Showtime documentary about a summer camp for Christian, Muslim and Jewish children, and a score for the award-winning documentary Bed and Breakfast 9/11, which was shown on PBS in September. He scored the new documentary by Slawomir Grunberg The Legacy of Jedwabne. This year he released his second album with Dutch lutist Jozef Van Wissem, The Universe of Absence, and was a featured performer at the Holland Festival. Lucas recently scored the Oscar-nominated Maysles Films documentary Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton for HBO, which screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of their Maysles Films 50 Year Retrospective, and about which Variety wrote: "Gary Lucas' Delta blues guitar music adds vivid color to this report from America's forgotten underbelly."
In the last few years Lucas has been profiled in the International Herald Tribune, Libération, and featured on the cover of The Forward as well as the national Dutch newspaper Het Parool.
Gary Lucas makes his home in New York City.
External links
External links
"Gary Lucas"