Chris Luquette
by Rebecca Frazier
Chris Luquette is best known for his work as longtime guitarist with national touring outfit Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen. He is electrifying as an articulate, adept bluegrass flatpicker, and he also shines as a multi-instrumentalist in his local Brooklyn music scene and on his two album releases, ‘The Way I View the World’ (2019) and ‘City Suite for Two Guitars’ (2022).
Luquette grew up in Seattle, where he gravitated towards the guitar at eleven years old. “My dad was listening to classic rock and roll radio all the time, and my ears perked up,” he remembers. He began his music journey with a nylon-string guitar, an electric guitar, and an eclectic mix of Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and eventually the Grateful Dead. “I simultaneously kept playing acoustic and electric guitar those first few years. As a teenager, the electric guitar was full-force, the most important thing.”
So how did bluegrass find its way to Luquette’s musical palate? “Having had some time on the nylon string acoustic guitar, I still had the taste to play some acoustic stuff,” he says. A friend pointed him to the music of the Grateful Dead, and the folk and bluegrass roots of the Dead’s music resonated with Luquette. He dug a little deeper, reading books about the band and their influences, and found a live Bill Monroe album at the local library. This recording, featuring Del McCoury on guitar, inspired Luquette. “I remember thinking, this is it right here, it’s fast and furious and the energy’s high. I was just hooked right away,” he reminisces. “It wasn’t until I’d already been playing six or seven years when bluegrass came into my life, and that’s when the acoustic guitar took over for decades.”
During those teen years, now with a steel-string Martin guitar and a “hankering towards bluegrass music,” Luquette also acquired a banjo and mandolin and studied both of them. With this diverse background, Luquette finds that his skills land him quite a few gigs in the vibrant New York City music scene. When asked if he has a practice routine to maintain his many skills, he explains that his life as a busy working musician keeps him warmed up on his different instruments and styles. “I’ve been playing a lot of gigs, so my work schedule might be a telecaster gig, a bluegrass guitar gig, two mandolin gigs in a row, a banjo gig—it’s crazy. So I don’t even have to think, ‘Oh am I going to practice this today?’ I just go to a gig and do it. I’m not saying I practice on the gig; I like to warm up and practice some stuff in the morning, or the day of the show, but I don’t have as much time as I wish to do some of the things I’d like to do.”
Luquette’s 2019 recording, ‘The Way I View the World,’ is a masterful showcase of his musical breadth, a unified blend of his many styles. He presents his bluegrass songwriting, acoustic flatpicking, mandolin and banjo artistry, as well as his classic country and telecaster work. He also includes a Dawg-style original tune with jazz voicings, two versions (acoustic and electric) of Tony Rice’s ‘Is That So.’ And, a classical rendition of a traditional polka somehow fits right in. Explaining his concept for this eclectic mix, Luquette says, “Maybe there’s a little jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none thing going on here, but I like all these different sounds. So it’s just trying to keep myself interested, too.”
Luquette enjoys playing his influences off of one another in order to stay engaged. “I wish to sound like myself but also pay tribute, because it all comes from somewhere. You can follow along in that idea of respecting the boundaries of each genre, the sounds, and also how they all influence each other too. Country telecaster does have some fiddle elements, and some pedal steel elements. So it’s really fun to find a voice on each instrument, and see what happens.”
Originally published in Americana Rhythm Music Magazine
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