Although he's been playing his instrument for almost thirty years and performing as a professional musician for twenty of them, Rik Wright feels as if he's just started to get somewhere with his efforts. “It wasn't until these last few recordings that I really felt like I had started to have something unique to say as a jazz musician.” says Wright, referring to his most recent releases on Seattle’s HipSync Records. That’s quite an interesting statement coming from an artist who is known for his stark creative expressions and genre-bending recordings, leading Jazz Views magazine to proclaim that “Guitarist Rik Wright is a musical experimentalist who is totally unafraid to cross stylistic barriers to achieve his musical vision. Quite simply, such barriers do not exist for him”.

These days Wright is best known as one of the shining lights in Seattle’s jazz guitar community, having promoted hundreds of performances while establishing himself as one of the Northwest's most notable guitarists and composers. Rik has released numerous acclaimed recordings and his compositions have aired on television and radio broadcasts around the globe. He has been performing throughout Oregon, Washington and British Columbia for over ten years, playing hundreds of venues as well as becoming a mainstay on the Pacific Northwest festival circuit.

However, Wright’s musical background is a different story altogether. He grew up surrounded by country and bluegrass in the Shenandoah Mountains of Northern Virginia, picking up the guitar at a very early age. By the age of sixteen he was also a published poet and accomplished illustrator who considered art school, but instead ended up touring with several bands on the college radio and alternative music club circuit, before landing in a collegiate jazz program led by renowned pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis.

While maintaining a hefty live performance schedule on the local club scene, Wright immersed himself in master classes with the likes of Gary Burton, Ahmad Jamal, Gerri Allen, Gene Bertoncini, Branford Marsalis and John Scofield. Simultaneously he worked as a session player recording jingles for radio commercials, themes for TV shows, and as a “gun for hire” playing lead guitar on tracks of innumerable regional recording acts. It was this time in the studio that led to him compiling an EP for a small independent label consisting of weird amalgams of heavy-metal influenced jazz standards and swing based rock-tunes that Guitar Player magazine described as a “somewhere between jazz fusion, progressive rock and Saturn”. That tiny article from perhaps the world’s most recognized guitar publication was all Wright needed to decide to move west. He’d lived all over the eastern half of the United States, but several connections in the burgeoning progressive jazz scene of the Pacific Northwest had already piqued his interest. So he drove across country with little more than his girlfriend, two cats, a custom-made Stratocaster and a vintage Mesa-Boogie amplifier.

In less than a year Wright was making a name for himself in the West Coast’s vibrant jam band scene with upstart projects like Jackhammer Trio and Zen Tornado. Just about every journalist that came across him compared him to either Frank Zappa or Bill Frisell (or both) and from Wright’s perspective, that wasn’t a bad place to be. But being able to pay your bills playing the club and festival circuit from British Columbia to California was a pretty tall order, and although he supplemented his income (once again by moonlighting as a musical gunslinger) the pay scale for live acts and studio sessions in Seattle was considerably less than the East coast and most of the work on the West coast was recorded in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Still, he had fallen in love with Seattle. “I remember after one trip back East, I was flying into SeaTac and the plane broke the clouds over downtown and I realized for the first time that this was home. I love Seattle. I wouldn’t consider living anywhere else. There are many reasons, but the music scene is a big part of it. The thing that stands out to me about Seattle is that it is a destination for musicians who operate outside of the mainstream, in much the same way as, say, Prague or Amsterdam are to the European jazz scene. Seattle is the first place outside of the New York downtown scene where I heard electronic manipulation with acoustic orchestration - and this was fifteen years ago! Seattle is one of those unique places where you can walk into your local shop to grab a coffee and hear the cellist from the ballet and the trombonist from the symphony and the DJ from the hip hop club jamming together on a little stage in the corner.”

The musical diversity and staunch open-mindedness of the city led Wright to revisit his motivations in pursuing his music as a living. For a while his only live performances were as a sideman in various friend’s indie pop projects and occasional free improvisation gatherings in local art galleries. To keep himself busy, he founded a record label, produced recordings for other artists and promoted jazz concerts in venues all over Washington and Oregon. “It’s hard making a living as a musician,” says Wright, “and after struggling for so many years just to be able to pay my rent, I got kind of sick of it. I wanted to take some time to investigate exactly why I was so compelled to live that way.” What he found was that his passion was for the guitar, not the music business. He took a job “somewhere in the computer industry” and used his free time to further explore the depths of the capability of his chosen instrument. “It was on a trip back East that I rediscovered my love for jazz guitar. I saw Pat Martino at the Iridium in New York playing with Joe Lovano and I thought ‘Man! That’s what I want to do’. The next night I caught Jimmy Bruno at a different club and I was sold. I went to Mandolin Brothers and started pricing archtops!”

Wright proceeded to completely drown himself in the history of jazz guitar, amassing a collection of hundreds of documents of just about every known player ever recorded. He also studied the architecture of the tone of the instrument, the famous builders of the guitars themselves like John D’Angelico and James D’Aquisto, the technique of infamous players like Johnny Smith, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall, the regional stylings of West Coast Cool Jazz, Chicago Blues Jazz and New York Post-Bop. He started jamming with local jazz ensembles and cracked open his folder of dozens of original compositions he had written years before. “I brought some of my charts into a rehearsal and the musicians all flipped over them. I seem to have a knack for this sort of composition. I consider jazz composition one of the highest of art forms. The biggest icon for me in terms of writing and orchestration is Thelonious Monk. Right behind him are Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy. I am also incessantly inspired by those great guitarists who were intense composers like Kenny Burrell, Pat Martino and Wes Montgomery. I basically write in the hopes that one day my material can stand up next to just one of any of theirs.”

Wright has taken his love of the art of jazz composition and passion for jazz guitar to just about every corner of the State of Washington and parts of British Columbia, Oregon and Idaho. These days, his recordings are noted for the richness of his writing, the warmth of his guitar tone and a swinging sensibility that makes even the most outlandish elements of his adventurous nature seem approachable. His live shows are critically acclaimed not just for his stellar cast of some of the region’s most talented instrumentalists, but also for the energy in which they collectively reinvent the true spirit of the art form. “Forty years ago, mechanics and cooks and janitors would do this for relief from their lives” explains Wright. “They’d get off their jobs and assemble at a tavern or coffee house to make some music together. That’s the passion behind many of these tunes. It’s an expression of the human condition, a joy and revelation of creating something uplifting in a community setting. It has nothing to do with selling CDs or making music videos. It’s the joy of the moment, of the live performance, of seeing normal people walk in and create something from nothing. That’s what I hope our audience gets out of our performances.”

With no two shows being identical, either in instrumentation or set list, Wright’s groups more than deliver on that promise. Rik is currently performing throughout the Pacific Northwest with several variations of ensembles. The full quintet performs at regional festivals and large venues while various quartets come together to perform at mid-sized venues. For quieter and more intimate settings, Rik and cohorts occasionally play in trio configurations. The astute listener might also catch him moonlighting around Seattle from time to time backing various vocalists with solo guitar arrangements of jazz standards.

His groups have developed a considerable following and are known for their aggressive solos, odd “standards” and unusual cover songs. "We all swim upstream, so to speak.” Wright explains. “At our best, any tune can become a game of hot potato where we’re constantly one-upping each other. It’s very hard to have a bad night with these guys. There’s always one smart-ass on the stage who’s going to take a left turn and make everybody think on their toes for the rest of the tune.” He goes on, “I realized back in jazz school that I wasn't a musician who was a dictator. I wasn't somebody who would come in and say ‘this is how I want it; I want the guitar part exactly like this, the drum part exactly like this.’ What I get out of music is the conversation, the give and take between people. I get very bored if I am not with players who are constantly challenging me, doing things that make me feel like I have to go home and rehearse more before I can play with them again. All of these guys are that way.”

When asked if things ever get out of control Wright comments, “One critic once described our performance as a musical rugby match. I never quite figured out what he meant by that but I try not to dwell on it. I try not to debate what's happening when it's happening; I just do it. I can contemplate it after the show's over. I kind of look at life that way too. I just throw myself into it. Regardless of whether it's good or bad, hard or easy, I learn something. I’m an improviser at heart, so I just do something and then sort my way through it in real time. As a musician you can't control what a listener brings to the table. It's where they end up that you can influence. I have no idea where the end of this road will turn out to be. I just know that I haven't turned all the corners on it yet."