Zen Tornado, as the name alone might imply, is a tempestuous brew of jazz fusion with moments of almost transcendental tranquility. The eponymous ensemble, a semi-conventional four-piece unit, is led by guitarist Rik Wright, and has a distinct thrust and direction that suggests Wright is able to get precisely what he wants out of the group without suppressing individual initiative or spontaneity. Wright's quartet has found its groove in music that takes many warped, distended, and refracted shapes, all to good effect. Together, the four achieve a good deal of hallucinatory or dreamlike mood, tone, and color.
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."
Although he's been playing his instrument for as long as he can remember, 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 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 guitar community, having promoted hundreds of performances while establishing himself as one of the Northwest's most notable guitarists. Rik has released numerous acclaimed recordings and his compositions have aired on television and radio broadcasts in a variety of countries. 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 music in the Shenandoah Mountains of Northern Virginia, picking up the guitar at a very early age. By the time he was sixteen he was also a published poet and amateur illustrator who considered art school, but instead ended up touring with several bands on the alternative radio and indie pop 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 “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 the country with little more than his girlfriend, 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 Hidden Groove Witches. Just about every journalist that came across him compared him to either Frank Zappa, John McLaughlin or Bill Frisell, 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 Vancouver to San Francisco 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 recording sessions in Seattle was considerably less than the East Coast, and most of the work on the West Coast was recorded almost a thousand miles away in 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 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 local artists creating experimental soundscapes of electronic manipulation with acoustic orchestration. The 'Emerald City' 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 songwriting projects and occasional free improvisation gatherings at local art galleries. To keep himself busy, he founded a record label, produced recordings for other artists and promoted 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 technology industry” and used his free time to further explore the depths of the capability of his chosen instrument.
Wright has taken his love of the art of jazz composition and passion for fusion 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.
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.”