Are you getting back out there now with live gigs?

Yeah, things have picked up quite a bit. I’d say that I’m up to eight to 12 gigs a month, which is certainly less than I was doing pre-pandemic, but a good sign of progress in the live music world. My weekly Sunday gig since 2007 at the Riverview Wine Bar looks to be gone now as they have closed their doors. But on the positive side, I have a record coming out this September, with a release show at the Dakota on September 19, and I am lining up tour dates around the Midwest this fall in support of that, so that will be something to look forward to.

You’ve said that during the pandemic you played in new styles of music to keep yourself stimulated. Might you play in some new groups as a result?

We will see. That’s definitely a possibility. When everything first shut down and all of my gigs got cancelled, I just didn’t have the motivation to practice the music that I’d been playing so much for the past 15 years…modern jazz and standards. So from March 2020 through the summer, I was playing a lot of acoustic guitar, including rekindling my love of bluegrass, which I played a lot in my 20s touring with a “jamgrass” band. In the end, I got very into home recording and ended up launching a Patreon site to put out these home recordings, many of which were acoustic guitar driven. I certainly have a good batch of tunes from that which I have considered doing with an acoustic guitar trio perhaps. Time will tell, but right now my primary focus is on the Zacc Harris Group record this Fall.

Who are your favorite jazz guitarists?

I remember checking out Wes Montgomery’s Full House record from the college library when I was 19 and listening to it a repeat. I never returned it! That record cost me over $100. I also got very into Grant Green at that time on the recommendation of one of my professor’s. Any guitarist could spend a lifetime digging into those two. From there, I became obsessed with Pat Martino for several years. The story of how I met my bandmate in Atlantis Quartet, drummer Pete Hennig, is that I was playing with a trio in a practice space here in the Twin Cities not long after moving here and we got done with a tune and heard a knock on the door. It was Pete, who was listening outside, and he said something like, “Sounds great … which one of you sounds like Pat Martino?” That was a great compliment but also made me realize that I needed to expand my listening. I got into Kurt Rosenwinkel, Adam Rogers, Ben Monder, and then players like Lage Lund, Mike Moreno, Gilad Hekselman and more recently Mary Halvorson. But I’ve really become less into the idea of favorite players and prefer listening to as many great players as I can because they all have different voices on the instrument, different feels, different ideas, and for me, not listening to any one player too much has helped me to sound more like myself as a guitarist.

You run Shifting Paradigm Records and have said that during the pandemic some of your sales went up as people consumed music while at home. What adjustments did you make to keep Shifting Paradigm afloat?

Yeah, it’s interesting that despite the label only putting out a few releases in 2020, it was one of our best years. We didn’t do a whole lot except work together as artists to help push each other’s music. I think that fans were just really great about supporting artists last year as live performances were shut down.

Shifting Paradigm is an artist-friendly label, where artists get at least 75 percent of the sales revenue. Is there any hope that streaming services will pay more in the future?

I certainly hope so. Streaming is such a tricky thing. It takes roughly 2000 song streams to equal the revenue from one album download on Bandcamp. However, if a song gets on a playlist with a big audience, it can generate a huge amount of revenue. I think it’s clear that the music industry has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, and Congress needs to revise the laws that govern the industry in the digital age.

Most of the artists on Shifting Paradigm are from the Midwest. How important is it to you to develop a center of jazz artists that reflect our regional aesthetic?

I think one of the best things about the label is that it has brought more visibility to a lot of great artists in the Midwest and also brought the scenes together to a degree. I think there is a movement toward a “regional” sound in this music again and I think it’s great that SPR can help elevate that notion and these artists.

What’s a venue or room in the Twin Cities that you feel is underrated to hear jazz?

Honestly, I don’t even know right now. We have some great spots like Icehouse, Saturdays at the Black Dog, the Dakota of course. I do think that the Twin Cities needs something akin to what the Artists’ Quartet was. A full time, dark, dank jazz club with a bar. I am hopeful that something like that might open up as we navigate through and eventually out of the pandemic.

When you teach, what is one record you recommend to students? 

I do like to recommend that Full House record by Montgomery. I think it’s an underrated album. It’s basically Smokin’ At the Half Note (same rhythm section of the Wyn Kelly Trio) plus saxophonist Johnny Griffin. But I would say that I more frequently recommend albums to students based on their needs or things that I think might inspire that particular individual or group.

What are you listening to at the moment that is exciting you?

I find myself listening to a lot of different things all the time rather than staying locked on a few for a while. That said, I think one of the most compelling records that I checked out in recent months was Promises by Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders. I got into running during the pandemic and the first time I listened to that record, it was transcendental. Throughout the last year, I’ve also been listening to In Common 2 from Matthew Stevens & Walter Smith III, Little Big II from Aaron Parks, Copper from Romain Pilon, Mount Royal from Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge and a lot of Charlie Christian and Wilco. Oh, and a great live Jim Hall record that I have on LP. It’s great to go back to listen to albums again and discover new things, but I also just love to find new things to listen to all the time. There are a lot of cons to the digital age of music, but the vast amount of great music at our fingertips is definitely something that is exciting too.

What was your inspiration for your new album?

This new Zacc Harris Group record, “Small Wonders,” is the follow up to my first album as leader with more or less the same band, “The Garden,” which I released in 2012 a few months before becoming a father. The tunes on the new album have all been written during these years of parenting young children, so I was already thinking of that when we recorded back in 2019, but then when the pandemic hit, and I was home 24/7 with my two kids, I knew that I wanted that them to be central to the album. A couple of tunes are directly inspired by them. The title reflects this theme of course, with a dual meaning of how every time I’m able to actually get a new tune composed it’s a “small wonder” in itself with life so crazy these past several years. Overall, I think that all of the tunes depict the beauty and also the complexity of parenting and navigating those challenges in life. It is without a doubt the best record I’ve ever made and like my kids, I’m really proud of it.