Interview with guitarist Jennifer Batten; She plays Hood River Thursday, Aug. 26
Our Jim Drake zoomed in with Jennifer Batten, whose career as a rock guitarist is most notable for several world tours with the King of Pop, Micheal Jackson. Calling Portland home, Batten has assembled a lineup of NW musicians for her new band, Full Steam, who specialize in 80s rock covers.
For an unedited video of Jim’s interview with Jennifer Batten, click below.
Spending a day online with Jennifer Batten
By Jim Drake
Jennifer Batten needs a Zoom Roadie! No, really, when we connected on Zoom a couple of months ago, she was scrambling around plugging and unplugging wires and cable and goodness knows what else, trying to get her Audio connections to work.
Now, think about that for a second. Batten has been on how many stages with how many guitars, on hundreds of stages big and small with backup crews and roadies to handle her every sound need. But I found out that deep down, she’s just like me and most of the other people in the world, a regular person who has to scramble around at the last minute with Zoom audio connection issues. And that’s fine, because it all worked out in the end. Or, rather, at the beginning of the Zoom video. And that’s a good thing.
It was exciting to learn that Batten was going to be coming to Hood River to play guitar. To me, this is an opportunity to see someone who truly has a long history with the instrument. I know she’s been featured in many guitar magazines over the last Decades, and she has learned from a lot of the best players in the world. She has taken skills from jazz, rock and blues and has made unique inroads to the guitar craft. If you play guitar, no matter what style - you should be attending the Jackson Park show on Aug. 26.
In the video you’ll learn about her new band, what styles they’re into, the Steampunk influences and some of her background as a guitar player. We talk about what kind of skills a guitar player should have in today’s music world. We talked about the influence of Les Paul on the music and music recording industry. And we talked about her online guitar symposium, https://www.guitarcloudsymposium.com/ which she graciously invited me to attend for a day.
Batten mentioned that one of the major music instrument distributors in the US, Sweetwater, (they’re in Indiana) managed to sell 1,000 guitars a day during the pandemic. This information prompted her to get Guitar Cloud going - as she predicted 1,000 people per day are going to need 1,000 guitar lessons a day.
As Batten mentioned in the video, the online school covered singer-songwriter material, a specific slide guitar blues workshop, and a Django-style jazz class. One of the teachers was in the Led Zeppelin cover band Zepparella, and she talked about getting inspiration and ideas for composing music from all sources, including classical music.
Batten’s segment focused on the technical details of how she goes about recording guitar parts for projects she gets hired to play on. She mentioned a few artists that she likes to listen to for practicing, and names like BB King, Don Henley and Chris Issack came up. She admitted that simpler music can have more weight placed on each note - as opposed to the faster guitar “shredding” that she helped pioneer in the 80s.
To say the symposium was inspiring and varied is an understatement. Students get pages of tab notation, specific technique demonstrations, a chance to upload videos on what they learned in terms of playing, and interactive chats with all the other students and teachers. By the end of the day, we were in a Zoom Afterparty with guests like Toto’s guitarist Steve Lukather who was talking about his early session days with Boz Scaggs. Yeah, it was a pretty cool day!
