Guitarist Roni Ben-Hur is an old soul. You can hear it in his playing on Keepin' it Open, his fifth as a leader, or on the string of stellar jazz recordings he has appeared on as a valued sideman since arriving in the States back in 1985 at age 22. There's a certain seasoned quality evident in his phrasing on reflective ballads, soulful bossa novas or burning bop-fueled romps that reflects his affinity for the old school approach to jazz. It's all about feeling -- the intangible, elusive element that you can't get from a book or instructional video or from any university. As one old school jazz sage put it, "You have to live it before it can come out your horn."

The stuff that Roni has absorbed in his bones comes not from any academic setting but rather directly from the source, via the oral tradition. It comes from hanging out at Barry Harris' Jazz Cultural Theater, the epicenter of hip in Manhattan during the 1980s. It comes from driving home from gigs in the wee hours with Walter Booker Jr., listening to stories about the jazz life from the late, great bassist who worked with jazz immortals like Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley and Sarah Vaughan. It comes from being on the bandstand alongside venerable jazz pianists like Chris Anderson and the late John Hicks or the bebop maestro himself, Barry Harris. In that sense, Ben-Hur is very much a keeper of the flame, an esteemed representative of the real deal who continues to pass on the jazz tradition every time he hits the bandstand.

"People like Walter Booker and Barry Harris offered me a window to this music," says the Israeli-born guitarist who has been a stalwart on the New York jazz scene for the past 20 years. "They both became important mentors of mine, and I think what attracted me the most is the maturity of their playing. It goes to the essence of what this music is about. They showed me how it is not just about chords and scales and musical theory. They were able to show me how to forget about that and remember the music. That's an important lesson for every young musician to learn."

Roni began learning that lesson shortly after arriving in town. Fortunately, he went to the right place to absorb that kind of wisdom -- the Jazz Cultural Theater, which occupied a small but hallowed spot on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea back in the day. "There were so many people around there that I was able to hang out with," Ben-Hur recalls with a touch of nostalgia for that legendary but now defunct nightclub which also functioned as a school where Professor Bop presided over a roomful of aspiring young players from all over the world. "Tommy Turrentine used to live there, C# used to live there, and then on any given night you had people like Harold Vick, Lou Donaldson, Milt Jackson or Sun Ra just hanging out. And for me, just coming off the boat, literally, and being surrounded by all these amazing jazz musicians was just phenomenal."

By 1991, Roni got his first call to gig with Barry Harris. Four years later he made his own first recording as a leader, Backyard on the Swiss TCB label. By then he was a 10-year veteran on the New York scene and had absorbed plenty of those life lessons from the elders that helped him formulate a concept for his own direction in jazz. "As the years progressed and I would hang out with more and more people from the older generation, we would talk about some things during rehearsal or during the gig," Roni recalls, "and they would always refer back to how they learned jazz. And it was the same way as Barry taught it. They got it as part of that oral tradition. That's how the music was passed along. That's how the spirit of the music gets conveyed from one generation to the next."

"Lewis is so meticulous and he really gives you all of himself in the studio," says Ben-Hur. "He was constantly working on how to make what I wanted to sound better. On 'Andaluza,' for instance, he was really looking for something to take this Spanish tune to another level. And he found this thing with the brushes that is so hip and so original. When it's straight ahead, Lewis is a natural and totally in his element. But when it's something unusual, he really gives his all and comes up with this wonderful way of playing it."

Roni acquits himself with equal parts fire and finesse on this versatile collection that runs the stylistic gamut from an engaging standard like "Can't We Be Friends" to the exotic Israeli folk song "Eshkolit," from a gorgeous rendition of "Like a Lover," one of the most oft-recorded songs by the great Brazilian composer Dori Cayimi, to a dramatic reading of the flamenco flavored number "Andaluza." Other highlights here include a hip interpretation of Monk's "Think Of One," a lush take on the Tommy Dorsey-Frank Sinatra chestnut "Indian Summer" and a rousing rendition of "One Second Please" by the great pianist-composer Elmo Hope, whose brilliant and distinctive works were considered by musicians to be on par with jazz visionaries like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, though he remains largely unknown to a majority of jazz fans. "When I play this tune, people ask me if it's an original because they never heard it before," says Roni. "Here you have a tune which is completely within the classic language of jazz but so underplayed that most people just hear it for the first time."

Throughout Keepin' it Open, Ben-Hur's warm, clean tone, crisp articulation and forceful attack on his hollow body Gibson jazz box are firmly rooted in the tradition of jazz guitar masters Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Grant Green, all towering influences on Roni when he began immersing himself in jazz back home in the small desert town of Dimona. Since those formative years, he has developed into a respected player on the New York scene and an accomplished composer to boot. Roni's originals here include the appealing mid tempo swinger "Back When" and the all-out burner "My Man Harris," a boppish ode to his mentor Barry Harris that gives every member of the quintet a solo taste.

The collection closes on an upbeat note with the lively samba "Recado Bossa Nova." Along the way, Ben-Hur breaks down the ensemble into different configurations from track to track -- from trio to quartet, quintet and the full sextet -- to stir up new textural possibilities. "I like the variety," says Roni. "I like that it's not just one dynamic that cuts across the entire album. That's how I like to listen to music. I have very eclectic tastes as a listener. and that's how I like to set up my recordings."

 

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