Gene Bertoncini was having a pretty rough day. First, his fancy Buscarino guitar escaped from its gig bag, resulting in a fractured top. Then, and unexpected traffic jam nearly made him late for his weekly gig at Le Madeleine in Manhattan's Theater District. But Bertoncini seem infazed by these inconveniences, and after he gave his guitar a makeshift repair, with Scotch tape, no less, he got to work, pleasing the diners with his appealing fusion of classical, jazz, and bossa-nova idioms.

A musician since the age of 7, Bertoncini was a professional guitarist byt he time he turned 16; his first regular gig involved accompanying singers on a children's television program. As a teenager, he also had the good fortune of receiving tutelage from a jazz guitar legend. "Johnny Smith was teaching at a studio nearby," Bertoncini remembers. "So I just went in there with my cowboy hat on, played a couple of things, and said that I would love to study with him. He didn't even want any money from me. He taught me the great art of creating an arrangement, plus technical things like using the guitar's whole neck and alternate picking. So I was off to a great start."

While Bertoncini played in New York City jazz clubs during his later years of high school, he became dubious of the whole scene. "The people in the clubs were a little… strange," he says, chuckling. So Bertoncini, who was fond of copying real estate drawings from The New York Times, headed to Notre Dame to study architecture, a discipline that came to inform his music making. "Architecture," says Bertoncini, "is very similar to music. In making a building, there are givens, such as the points of orientation that influence the form of the structure. It's the same thing with a song. Each has its own melodic message that helps you decide where to draw the lines."

Acoustic Romance, a trio album with bassist Rufus Reid and durmmer Akira Tana, finds Bertoncini rendering elegant lines with an architectural sensitivity; on a program ranging fromThelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" to Bronislaw Kaper's "Invitation," Bertoncini respectfully adds his own facades to venerable older structures. The guitarist's improvisations are at once breezy and profound, and each one follows a very satisfying trajectory. Says Bertoncini, "On every single chorus, I try to take the listener on a roundtrip vacation — even with this poor, broken guitar."

— John Adam Perlmutter
© 2004 Guitar One