My sister was in town so we went down to First Friday to see what we could see. We did the usual gallery hopping and band watching, avoided the fire eaters and freak shows while seeking out something good for the blog.

There were loads of people, the largest crowd I’ve seen in a while, and a very good vibe on the street. This time one of the things that most impressed me was the true diversity of the crowd, in age and color, and everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves and taking in the street fair feeling.

We saw some of the Sonorous set in the grassy area east of Carly’s, and it was cool listening to their noir-ish jazz in the light breeze and open air. We saw a few songs from an emo band called Dust Jacket in front of Fate restaurant and I made a mental note to go see them in a club.

We walked passed Holga’s more than once and little seemed to be happening. I later heard someone got hurt near there. While I hope it isn’t true, it might account for the low vibe in the usually crowded music space. We heard a few other bands on Roosevelt row and saw lots of art – some cool installations at Eye lounge and a couple of one-man bands. One featured a fella playing a metal contraption. It consisted mostly of him striking tuned forks that stuck out liked melted keys to make the rusty belly of the instrument resonate, which was pretty neat.

We wanted to rap things up on our art walk with a stop at the Paper Heart, my sister Laura’s favorite Phoenix art space before heading out to the bars. The art is usually pretty good there, and they have beer and wine and comfortable seating. They are also open later than many other spaces, so it was a logical place to end the art portion of the evening. There was a rowdy female lead honky-tonk band playing as we walked through the gallery and looked at the show. The band sounded pretty good, though our focus for the moment was on the visual. As the band wound down we sat down on a comfy couch left of center stage and cooled our heels and souls with a beer.

We decided to wait and see what the next band was like, partially on the advice of Paper Heart proprietor Scott Sanders and partially because we were tired of walking. Good thing we did because this band, for whom we had zero expectation, absolutely blew us both away.

The band is called Merle Jagger and from the first lick of guitarist Mark Christian’s Telecaster, I knew we were in for something special. Though my description might fall short, they play sophisticated, fast tempo hillbilly guitar music based around jazz-fusion concepts, with doses of improv and elements of surf, bluegrass and banjo all coming from one guitar, and often all in one song.

A power trio of pros from Southern California, Merle Jagger was born when Christian became disenchanted with modern rock music and rediscovered the classic country his parents played around the home as he was growing up. The rhythm section of Patrick Flores on bass and drummer Brandon Goldstein bring a rock and jazz sensibility to the instrumental Americana. The combination of musicianship and flair makes Merle Jagger explosive to watch and Christian’s picking and frailing mastery doesnt overshadow the band’s good time in favor of indulgent noodling.

A session player by trade, Christian is one of the best guitar players I’ve ever seen, in any genre, and while this is extreme guitar at its very essence – basically the entire song is a guitar solo – it’s the good kind of guitar wanking that knows how to move from different parts and leave space for the other players. Christian calls their music a progressive Hillbilly experiment and the title is apt.

He has studied and assimilated styles of old flat-picking masters and hot-shot country players, guys that thrived in a golden age of California country from the late ‘30s to the late ‘50s. And he also incorporates a healthy dose of jazz greats and rock and roll players to compliment of styles.

You really have to hear what they are doing to understand it, (visit their Web site) but it was a great dumb luck surprise when my sister and I stumbled on something we both really enjoyed.

To try to explain Christian’s technique would be difficult, though he does try for us lay people in the interview below. It’s something like a mutant combination of old time banjo picking, claw hammer and flat picking, styles that are seldom used together. The whole thing is played at a hundred miles an hour while the rhythm section sets a sturdy table for his musical horn of plenty.

The three players were each so strong that you could easily spend whole songs listening to what each was doing, though the feature was unquestionably Christian’s crazy licks and runs. I cant think of anything contemporary that’s similar to what they’re doing. Maybe take a little Junior Brown and speed it up. Throw in some Chet Atkins and maybe a little bit of surf guitar and some jazz-fusion improv and you are getting close.

If that sounds too much like guitar wanker-ism, keep in mind it’s the fun kind. The kind that makes you tap your foot and induced a middle age couple to spring from the couch near us dancing from the time their feel hit the floor, as if it were the only way to communicate themselves across the floor.

These guys were fun, and the musicianship had me shaking my head at least once a song.

I am going to give up trying to describe it anymore and instead state that Merle Jagger should be signed and touring with other traditional or Americana acts, no question.

Thinking it was probably a better idea to speak with Christian himself about exactly what he was doing, I sat down with him the night after their Paper heart show and asked some questions. We sat in his van parked on Mill Ave. after their Tempe gig. We talked about his musical life, the band and the new Country scene in LA.

JB – Tell me about your background musically and what youre doing with Merle Jagger.
MC – When I got out of college at the age of 20 I got into the session musician business in Hollywood by a fluke. I met producer Robert Margouleff who produced the Stevie Wonder Talking Book and Inner Visions records and was instrumental in manufacturing and designing the polyphonic synthesizer.

JB – Okay and you hooked with him as a guitar player?
MC – Yes, he hired me out to be a back-up musician for a country rock singer he was producing.

JB – Let’s just talk about the band for now. You guys formed how long ago?
MC – We’ve been catching on or doing well in the last 6 months or so, we’ve actually been together for two and a half years. Our former drummer was the drummer for the Dwight Yoakam tour in 2002 and then as a result of that tour he became a very popular hired musician and was unable to keep playing with us. At which time we got Brandon Goldstein – the current drummer – who is sort of a Keith Moon afficionado. That mix of the aggressive drummer and flamboyant playing sort of worked with our hillbilly progressive experiment.

JB – Hillbilly progressive experiment. That’s very good.
MC – Actually Progressive hillbilly is what I call it.

JB – I’m not a guitar expert, but I’ve never seen anyone play the amalgam of styles that you use. Can you describe it?
MC – That would be a result of years of my influences, I keep discovering new guitar players or new styles of music that fuel my desire to re-invent myself.

JB – Did you grow up on country and where are you from?
MC – I’m from Orange California, which is Southern California, Disneyland area. I grew up on an orange tree ranch and the records that my parents were trying to get me to listen to when I started my guitar lessons at the age of 8 were Roy Clark and Chet Atkins, and then of course in the late ‘60s when I was a little kid I used to watch Roy Clark on Hee-Haw.

JB – From hearing you last night I would say you’ve got a lot of Bakersfield guitar style among many others.
MC – Exactly, the music, the Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and all the classic songs and records were around in my childhood but I abandoned them for rock and jazz. Recently, in the last six years, I’ve had a desire to go back to my roots through becoming bored with rock as it is now. I started to rediscover the musicianship of the great guitar players Joe Mathis, Danny Gatton, Roy Clark, Chet Atkins and Jimmy Bryant, and so this inspired me to go back to basics.
I put Merle Jagger together as my retro-contribution to the Hollywood country music scene, which is really big right now and has been for the last five years. Unbeknownst to my own imagination the band got really popular, I didn’t expect it to catch on as an actual band that would draw people to the shows and that would be making CD’s. I just did it as a hobby.

JB – I would think as a studio musician you would have the pick of the litter as far as who you want to work with.
MC – Yeah, Los Angeles does have very, very gifted musicians and professionals at that who can come into a recording and as soon as their gear is set up they make it happen. They make magic happen right in the recording session.

JB – I’d like to talk with you some more about your guitar playing. What I saw and heard last night encompassed a lot of things, but beyond the country picking there were definite elements of surf guitar, would you agree with that?
MC – That’s very interesting because I recognize surf music and realize it has its place in modern music but I never went to the surf records as a reference or to learn licks. The one guitar player who greatly influences me, Joe Maphis, was a big influence on the surf bands.
To answer your prior question, all of the music I grew up on over the years, I would go from one phase to the next, but ‘70s jazz fusion was a big influence on Merle Jagger song arranging. The way I arrange songs is in keeping with ‘70s jazz fusion where theres a melodic theme and then in the middle of the song the band spontaneously goes into improvisation.

JB – I was wondering how much of what you guys were doing was improv, there were definitely parts where it seemed like you guys were laughing at your own musical jokes.
MC Yeah, exactly because the great thing about ‘70s jazz fusion is how structured it is and yet how spontaneous it is. The structuring is like sketches. There is melodic structure. There are verses and choruses and bridges like a pop song but when youre playing instrumental music you really do have a lot of freedom when you get to the bridge or the solo section where the band can go to a completely different musical situation. We use that to put a sense of humor into the music.

For example, I used to be a grunge heavy metal guitarist and some of that energy comes out in the music. We might go into a Soundgarden riff right in the middle of a flat picking hillbilly number. Our song “Flash Tornado” has your typical bluegrass, flat picking scale that facilitates the main hook or riff or whatever you want to have it, and then when we go into the bridge we have that sort of Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden part.

JB – I was amazed by your finger work, the picking and everything else you did; to be honest it’s outside of my understanding.
MC – I’ll make it inside your understanding. It’s very simple. I love banjo and banjo picking. I have adopted the sort of claw-hammer, but I’m faking it. I only use two fingers holding the pick and one or two fingers doing the actual picking that bounces off the drone note and a lot of our songs encompass that sort of banjo picking on the guitar and then I’ll write a melody that goes around it. That’s one style. The other is flat-picking which was pretty much pioneered by Joe Maphis and bluegrass.

JB – Joe Maphis, what band was he most known for playing in?
MC – Joe Maphis is one of the great known-unknowns, I guess. He’s very known in some circles. Joe Maphis was the guy from the ‘50s. He was a gifted fiddle and banjo player and he couldnt figure out why folks didn’t play their electric guitar like the fiddle or banjo.

JB – This is kind of odd but last night, two different times, and I’m not making this up, I leaned over to my sister and said ‘the guitar sounds like a violin’ and ‘it sounds like a banjo.’
MC – There you go. Good, you guys picked up on it.

JB – So we’ve got some of your influences and playing style and some background, I would also like to hear about some of the stuff you’ve played on as a studio musician.
MC – That’s fine, but those recordings will never resemble Merle Jagger.

JB – So Merle Jagger is where it’s at for you now.
MC – I’ve re-invented myself as a musician in Merle Jagger so I can have the freedom and fun to do the kind of playing I most admire, kind of flailing through the licks. And also I have a great love for the whole body of music and music scene that happened from the late ‘30s to the late ‘50s when recording music was innocent and bands had to gather around the microphone and everyone had to be really good at what they did. Technology changed all that.

JB – I’m sorry maybe I wasn’t clear enough with the question, I was asking you to tell me some studio work you’ve done that might be fun to hear about.
MC – I got off on a little tangent there, forgive me. I never played on a hit song, but I played on some records that did well, like Monkees comeback record in 1987, Pool It!. Robert Palmer produced a record by the guy who did “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor),” Moon Martin, I played on his Mystery Ticket record and the guitar player from Lone Justice, Marvin Etzioni, I played on his solo stuff. Berlins best of CD Blow It Sky High – I’m on the first track. There was movie in the ‘80s called That Was Then… This Is Now, which I played on the soundtrack. The Max Headroom TV show, I did a lot of the guitar for that. Recently I’m on a new R&B artist record, on Sony records, Nicky Flores, which coming out in September, sort of Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey kind of music.
I’ve got a banjo track that I played on Heather Myles’ Sweet Talk & Good Lies who is a great authentic honky tonk singer. Shes on Rounder Records and I played on Home wrecker blues. I highly recommend the Heather Myles CD.

JB – What I’m trying to get at here is that for a number of years, maybe 20 years, as a studio musician, how many other bands did you have outside of your studio work?
MC – I’ve done it for 20 years, and in that time I had two that saw the light of day. Berlin broke up and re-grouped as The Big F, which was one of the leading grunge bands in the early ‘90s. We toured with Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, TSOL, Mudhoney. We were known and loved in those circles and then at the end of the decade, ‘97, I formed Disappointment Incorporated. We were signed by Time Bomb Recordings and we toured with Godsmack, Hole and Limp Bizkit. We were sort of a modern Beck meets Jane’s, sort of that white rap thing. I was playing guitar and sort of masterminding the band. In the summer of ‘99 I decided to bail and get back into country again, or what I would call Americana roots music.

JB – Were getting close to the end here, is there anything youd like to say?
MC – I would like to say that I’m absolutely fascinated through my research on the internet and the whole country scene in Los Angeles how many young country bands – as you’ve seen tonight – are celebrating authentic roots music, from Hank Williams to Gram Parsons. It’s just really amazing and you would think as soon as something catches on, be it rap or heavy metal, hard core or emo, as soon as you think that theres something thats going to catch on, all of a sudden a classic art form from the past pops up. I’m just really fascinated at how big the scene is in LA alone, all these bands are coming from all over the U.S. to become part of this authentic Americana/root community thats going on there, which is amazing because the record companies have turned a deaf ear to it. But it doesnt stop the bands from existing, and that’s beautiful, that innocence of not caring, just doing the music that you do.

JB – So what’s in the crystal ball for Merle Jagger in two years?
MC – Hopefully in two years Merle Jagger will reach that audience that went to Stevie Ray Vaughn shows. Jerry Douglas, the greatest Dobro player, he plays with Allison Krauss. He kind of does what I do. He has a solo band and he travels. His violin player – Gabe Witcher – is going to play on my CD when I finish it. He’s great. But instrumental music had its day. Edgar Winters “Frankenstein,” “Green Onions” by Booker T and the MGs, Almond Brothers has “Jessica.” And they were No.1 singles and you don’t hear that anymore unless its the Chemical Brothers or something. To actually see a bunch of guys get up and play their instruments like we are doing is rare and thats one of the reasons we are doing it. That’s our artistic statement: Authenticity and integrity.