October 3, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
EXPLORING NEW DEGREES IN DRUMMING
By Andrew Gilbert

Forget Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. For serious connectivity, there's no beating Scott Amendola.

The most musical drummer to emerge on the Bay Area's fertile 1990s music scene, Amendola has woven a dense and far-reaching web of bandstand relationships that tie him to influential figures in jazz, blues, groove, rock and new music. An organizer by nature, he has become a creative nexus for a community of musicians stretching from Los Angeles and Seattle to Chicago and New York.

Although he first gained widespread notice a decade ago in eight-string guitar ace Charlie Hunter's trio, in recent years Amendola has stepped forward as the leader of several compelling bands that showcase his supremely supple trap work. As a jazz player, for instance, he's been busy in recent months with the cooperative group Plays Monk, a trio featuring clarinetist Ben Goldberg and bassist Devon Hoff that focuses on the brilliant, knotty composition of modern jazz giant Thelonious Monk. The band, which performs Oct. 21 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival and on Oct. 30 at the Jazzschool in downtown Berkeley, forged its slinky improvisational approach at the elegant South of Market restaurant Bacar.

"We've created certain moods for tunes, more than developing set arrangements," says Amendola, 35, who as Bacar's artistic director has turned the restaurant into one of the city's hippest jazz hangouts. The Oakland drummer intersects with the world of punk and alternative rock through his close association with Los Angeles guitarist Nels Cline, who recently joined Wilco. A volatile player who can move from thrash distortion to sweetly chiming harmonics within a phrase, Cline has been a creative catalyst on the Southern California music scene for more than two decades, often collaborating with former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt and Mothers of Invention keyboard player Don Preston.

Cline has nurtured the forceful rock edge in Amendola's sound, while also encouraging his experiments with electronics. They first started playing together back in the mid-'90s in the free improv ensemble Stinkbug (now L. Stinkbug). Their musical connection deepened when the guitarist started a new group to play his expansive compositions, the Nels Cline Singers, a band that recently released a beautifully spooky session on Cryptogramophone, "The Giant Pin."

When Cline took over the guitar chair in Amendola's quintet in 2002, he helped turn the band into one of the most exciting working groups on the California scene, with a combustible chemistry captured on the 2003 album "Cry. " Now that Cline is spending most of his time on the road with Wilco, Amendola has taken his band in the opposite direction, exploring the transparent, unplugged dynamics of a chamber ensemble. Its latest incarnation, a quartet called Chambers of Grace, features bassist John Shifflett, pianist Art Hirahara and violinist Jenny Scheinman. The band concludes a West Coast tour with a performance tonight at Kuumbwa and Monday at Yoshi's.

The band's book is similar to Amendola's old quintet, with instrumental covers of songs by Jimi Hendrix ("Manic Depression") and Fela ("This Is Sad") and the occasional spiritual ("His Eye Is on the Sparrow"). But the band's repertoire is mostly made up of Amendola's engaging original tunes, pieces that are so well crafted they can work as high-velocity fusion or as gentle, folklike themes.

Born and raised in the New Jersey suburb of Tennafly, just a stone's throw from New York City, Amendola was the kind of kid who showed an inclination for rhythm almost from the moment he could walk. His grandfather Tony Gottuso, a highly respected guitarist who split his time between studio sessions and gigs with jazz luminaries such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Nat "King" Cole, offered plenty of support when Amendola began to get interested in jazz.

"I used to bang on things as a kid," Amendola says. "I'd just sit around banging on pots and pans and coffee cans. When I was 9, we had to pick an instrument in school, and I started studying drums." His passion for music only deepened during his four years at Boston's Berklee College of Music, where it wasn't unusual for him to practice for 12 hours a day. Amendola decided he had to find his own voice, rather than model himself after established drummers.

After graduating in 1992, he decided to move to San Francisco, where he quickly hooked up with Charlie Hunter. They went on to play together in the three-guitar-and-drums funk jazz supergroup T.J. Kirk, with John Schott and Will Bernard.

"From the first gig we played together, Charlie and I had a really great hookup," Amendola says. "Ever since my grandfather, I've just really loved the guitar, and I wanted to meet a young guitar player who was doing something different. And you can't get more different than what Charlie's doing."

While Hunter and many of the other players Amendola worked with in the '90s have moved to New York, the drummer feels he's found the perfect environment in the Bay Area. And with creative relationships spreading out across the country, he's never more than one degree away from a powerful musical hookup.

<- BACK