Berklee today is the official alumni publication of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. It is a forum for contemporary music and musicians.
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faculty profile Rick Peckham A Concerted Effort By Mark Small Rick Peckham Ralph Peterson Appearing on the CD is Fred Lipsius on saxophone, among others. Professor of Percussion Ralph Peterson will release The Duality Perspective on June 19, his sixteenth CD as a bandleader. It features a number of current and former Berklee students, plus Sean Jones (trumpet) and Tia Fuller (saxophone). Professor of Bass Oscar Stagnaro is the musical director of the Congreso Latinoamericano de Escuelas de Música and continues to play with saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera. Professor of Guitar Guy Van Duser released the new CD A Session with Guy Van Duser, featuring a seven-piece faculty band. Rob Jaczko, the chair of Berklee's MP&E; Department, engi- neered the album, a collection of songs in the style of guitarist Chet Atkins. Professor of Composition Julius P. Williams was interviewed by Lynn René Bayley for the May-June issue of Fanfare magazine. Visit www.fanfaremag.com/content/ view/48061/10253/. Professor of Harmony Michael Wartofsky collaborated as the com- poser on two new musicals: Cupcake and Car Talk: The Musical, which will run at Boston's Club Café and the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, respectively, in June and July. Professor of Music Therapy Karen Wacks gave music therapy clinics at the Panama Jazz Festival in January in conjunction with the Berklee Global Jazz Institute. On Friday January 20, Guitar Department Assistant Chair Rick Peckham found himself in Ireland onstage at Dublin's National Concert Hall as the featured soloist with the Raidió Telifis Éireann National Orchestra. With 90 top European orchestral musicians behind him and about 1,200 symphony goers in front of him, the situation bore little resemblance to the settings in which Peckham typically plays. Cutting loose on a Monk tune or jazz standard with a quartet behind him would have been more familiar territory. Nonetheless, about a year ago, when renowned Irish composer and bassist Ronan Guilfoyle approached Peckham to be the solo- ist for the premiere of his Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra, Peckham didn't shrink from the challenge. Over the years since Guilfoyle and Peckham met in 1993, the two have collaborated on several projects. But this music was a different order of magnitude. "I thought Ronan would write something for me that was similar to what I would usually play, but he was true to the concerto form," Peckham recalls. "The lines he wrote for the guitar were angular and long. It was like a 20-minute bebop head." With the exception of the cadenza, Peckham says that there was little improvisation and a lot of reading. The three-movement work integrated Peckham's clean-toned Telecaster figures into the orchestral fabric in the outer two movements, but the electric guitar was front and center in an open-ended cadenza in the Adagio middle movement. During an extended orchestral tacet, Peckham used his JamMan effects pedal to build loops derived from the concer- to's themes and then improvised over them. "I needed the loops to defend myself against the massive sound of the rest of the piece," Peckham recalls with a wry grin. He relates that the orchestral players were quite intrigued by his cadenza that incorporated an array of effects pedals. (Visit www. rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/ rteradioweb.html#!rii=16%3A3174214 %3A8861%3A20%2D01%2D2012%3A to hear the premiere performance.) The whole experience was fairly removed stylistically and geographi- cally from Peckham's midwestern musical roots. He grew up in Norwalk, Ohio, which is between Toledo and Cleveland. His father played Chet Atkins records around the house, and other relatives sang in church choirs, but the younger Peckham is the only career musician in the family. During the late 1960s, Peckham's grandmoth- er gave him a guitar and he started learning rock tunes and joined a garage band. He picked up the mechanics of the instrument from instructors at local music stores and from another teacher who was pivotal in Peckham's development as a player and, later, an educator. "I had a great high-school teacher named R.P. Laycock," Peckham recalls. "He was very devoted to music and teaching, and he made a big impression on me. It's important for a young musician to run into someone like that. You never know how much that will affect you later on." When it came time for college, Peckham wasn't sure about becoming a musician. He took a number of gen- eral music courses before committing to being a music major. "There was no interest at all in rock music [from the administration] at the school," Peckham says. "So I went about rein- venting myself in order to get a jazz performance degree. I got interested in the playing of Wes Montgomery and Grant Green and found jazz pull- ing me in deeper." He was drawn to the more angular music on the jazz spectrum. "I really loved the album The Avant-Garde with Don Cherry and John Coltrane. I sensed the kind of energy in that music that I'd felt in the music of Jeff Beck and other rock players." In 1978, Peckham heard drummer Billy Cobham's band with keyboardist George Duke and guitarist John Scofield '73. Hearing how Scofield had blended different influences to emerge with his own voice inspired Peckham to do the same. After earning his master's degree at North Texas State in 1986, Peckham read an ad stating that Berklee was seeking faculty members. He landed a job and taught in the ear training and performance studies areas before being appointed as the assistant chair of the Guitar Department in 1992. "Working with [Guitar Department Chair] Larry Baione has been great. The position has allowed me to do a lot of things educationally and performance- wise. It's been outstanding." In addition to his other duties, Peckham teaches 8 to 10 guitar pupils every semester. "Through the years, I've had some great students," he says. "Lionel Loueke and Kurt Rosenwinkel were among them. I encouraged Lionel to do his vocal percussion thing along with his playing. I told him, 'It's great that you're working at playing lines like Mike Stern or John Scofield, but when you sing with your playing, you're the only one on the planet who sounds like that.'" Peckham's discography lists several albums, including two with Guilfoyle's group Lingua Franca, Life Cycle with late faculty member John LaPorta, and Peckham's own critically hailed trio outing Left End. He authored Guitar Chords 101 and 201 for Berkleemusic. com, two 12-week online courses that have reached thousands of guitar- ists worldwide. His DVD Jazz Guitar Techniques: Modal Voicings and Berklee Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary have been best sellers for Berklee Press. As for the Guilfoyle concerto, it was a hit with the audience and con- ductor Scott Stroman. The maestro is planning future performances in the United Kingdom, so Peckham will need to keep his fingers limber. "This was a bit different from other work I've done," he says. "I put in hundreds of hours working on the piece. When I was onstage playing it, I was grateful for every minute I'd spent." Spring 2012 9 Sami Moukaddem