I’ve always been curious about Kurt Rosenwinkel’s technique. To me it looks quite similar to albert lee. What do you guys think?
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I’ve also wondered if Kurt is crosspicking - check out this video:
In this example, Kurt plays 26 2 very cleanly. At around 11 seconds, he plays a Db arpeggio in the melody and seems to shift his wrist - doesn’t look like crosspicking and looks more like Mike Stern-esque 2 way pickslanting thing.
Kurt also does a ton of legato lines and in the video you posted I’m hearing hammer-ons mixed in with his picking.
I haven’t done an exhaustive look at Kurt’s technique but I’m guessing he’s not crosspicking…
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This is right on. He’s escaping on both upstrokes and downstrokes, and he’s using two directions of wrist motion to do it. That’s really the simplest way of describing what is going on in this video.
This is another instance where I’ll apologize for the confusing terminology. We’ve stopped using the term “crosspicking” to describe a pickstroke that is curved. Instead, we’ve just been saying “double escape”. How that double escape pickstroke is being generated, whether it’s via wrist motion, finger motion, etc. is another question you can ask. But the term “double escape” is generic, it just means any pickstroke that escapes at both ends, no matter what physical motion you use to do it.
The future of terms like “two way pickslanting” is less clear. What does it even mean? If it’s what the pick itself looks like, then some techniques do look very obviously like a pick being slanted in two different directions. Two-way economy players like Frank Gambale and Oz Noy fit that bill. Pretty much any time two-way sweeping is involved you’ll see this. The term makes some sense for this because the pick is doing what the word implies.
For now, I think simply looking at what the player is doing is the simplest way to go. Do you see escaping in both directions? Well, continuous back and forth inside picking like Kurt is doing requires this, by definition. So you know right away this is a double escape pickstroke. Then you can ask what kind of physical motions is the player using to do that. And so on.
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