Bruce Forman Aims for the Heart and Soul

In a day when it’s considered modern to hook your guitar up with a bank of amplifiers and synthesizers that make it sound like anything from a big band to a dragster screaming down the quarter mile, guitarist Bruce Forman has other ideas. The 32-year-old artist with a keen ear for a steaming jazz groove would rather just plug his instrument into a single amp and let his fingers do the talking.

“The electronic sound doesn’t appeal to me as a player,” he said by phone from his home in San Francisco. “Though I like to listen to it, and though I’ve experimented by trying some of the equipment, I feel removed from the instrument when I play with that stuff. I feel as though there’s something between me and the music.”

Forman, who plays the Loa in Santa Monica tonight through Sunday, feels that he can best obtain the type of “warm, personal sound” he favors without resorting to gimmickry.

“If there is a little distortion, I like it to be a natural distortion that comes from mainly the amplifier itself, giving a slight edge to add warmth,” he said. “When I get hard edge, I still like it to have that sound of the (guitar) string, a real organic sound.”

The guitarist--whose latest release is “There Are Times”(Concord Jazz)--also disdains such contemporary approaches as utilizing a plethora of rock rhythms. Still, he by no means sees his style--which ranges from “Latin to blues and avant-garde almost”--as anachronistic.

“Basically, I’m a be-bopper,” he said, “but just because I have been mostly influenced by a style that was in fashion 30-to-40 years ago doesn’t mean that I’m a relic. I’m not trying to recreate the ‘40s or ‘50s; I’m trying to make my statement of today with respect to the traditions.”

Being “modern, per se” isn’t very important, said Forman, who has worked with Bobby Hutcherson, Richie Cole and Joe Henderson. “I guess Louis Armstrong’s not modern and his music still sounds as fresh today as Michael Jackson’s,” he said. “What is important is to be of the time you’re in, which you achieve by being honest musically. Allow all the things that have influenced you to become part of your basic perspective and you can make music that’s as modern as anything today. Just because you plug in a synthesizer doesn’t make it modern music.”

Forman’s imagination is the foundation of his expression. “I play everything that I’m about,” he said. “I try to paint a lot of pictures with feelings and moods. I don’t want to establish just one particular criterion and keep doing it all the time. That doesn’t make a complete musical statement anymore than it makes a complete human. Basically, I’m just trying to make good music and express myself at the moment. That’s one of the beautiful things about jazz--it’s so improvisational.”

Another aspect of high-level be-bop-based jazz that Forman enjoys, and something that drew him to it as a teen-ager, is its challenge.

“It’s extremely difficult,” he said. “You need to be able to rhythmically swing while having a lot of looseness. Yet at the same time, you need to be able to expand harmonically and melodically within the musical conversation that’s going on onstage. It’s a demanding, intricate form of music to play, yet very rewarding and beautiful when it’s done properly.”

Forman feels his strongest facet is his flexibility. “I can go (in) a lot of different directions,” he said. And while he considers himself “pretty proficient technically,” he added that “I don’t go ga-ga over technique. To me, the heart and the soul is what I listen for and hopefully is what happens when I play. So I have a lot of technique. So did Bird, so did Coltrane. I’d like to be considered more in that realm of expression than in that realm of technique.”

Raised in San Francisco, Forman began music as a pianist studying the classics, “but it always seemed like work to me,” he said. “When I was 13, a friend had a guitar and that seemed like more fun, so I just started playing jazz and never looked back. I never really came up through the rock school. Most of my early gigs were rhythm and blues or jazz/blues with organ trios.”

Hearing Charlie Parker had a profound effect on the then teen-aged Forman.

“He had complete control of his instrument, was expressive--more so than anyone I’d ever heard--had the ability to choose his phrasing; he could color the music to his own feeling of the moment. That feeling within a structure and the obvious technical challenge, that’s what I liked about jazz.”

Ultimately, it’s the joy of playing that moves Forman. “I really love music,” he said, “and I really love to play jazz. That’s what I want people to get out of my playing, to experience the joy along with me.”