From left: Perry Smith, John Storie, and Brady Cohan of New West.

Since meeting as classmates in the studio guitar department at the University of Southern California in 2003, the members of the New West ensemble (newwestguitar.com) have forged a musical alliance that has taken them to concert halls in Tokyo, Berlin, throughout Canada and the United States, and resulted in three superb recordings that highlight their tight-knit chemistry. Originally a quartet, the group established a compelling sound based on the artful blending of electric and acoustic instruments, as documented on 2005’s Introducing: New West Guitar Quartet and 2007’s Wide Awake. But on Sleeping Lady, New West (now a trio consisting of Brady Cohan, Perry Smith, and John Storie) focuses exclusively on the lush sound of acoustic guitars. And the results are stirring, ranging from chamber-like elegance and fragile introspection to exhilarating swing and gritty blues.

Recorded in Matt Kursh’s studio on Mount Tamalpais, overlooking San Francisco Bay in Marin County, California, this collaboration showcases the beautifully resonant acoustic guitars built by Santa Cruz, California, luthier Jeff Traugott (traugottguitars.com) as played by Cohan, Smith, and Storie. Together they explore all the parameters of timbre and texture presented by these instruments.

Family Ties

“I’ve seen these guys come from their inception when they started playing together in college and watched them move through their quartet down to a trio,” says Traugott, who is Cohan’s uncle. “My nephew has had one of my guitars forever, and they started using that instrument a little more mixed in with the electric guitars on their last album, Wide Awake. Then they had a gig that required all acoustics—a strictly nonamplified setting in an old church in northern California. I loaned them enough guitars to do that. That concert is kind of the culmination of what I do, getting to hear kids like this play the instruments that I build.”

Impressed by the concert, Traugott proposed an idea to New West. “I suggested doing an all-acoustic CD in a nice studio where we could get some ambience from the room and record it the old-fashioned way,” he says. “Just go in there and play it and see what we can come up with.”

As executive producer of Sleeping Lady, Traugott provided four guitars for the session (see “The Sleeping Lady Guitars” below), which Cohan, Smith, and Storie shared, delegating distinct roles for each tune. “We all play rhythm parts, we all play lead parts,” Cohan says. “We passed the guitars around quite a bit for this recording.”

Considering that Cohan previously played a G&L Telecaster-style guitar, Smith played a Gibson ES-175 hollow-body electric, and Storie played a Gibson L-5 archtop, this all-acoustic incarnation of New West was a departure. “What we’ve built our sound around over the years is the combination of the acoustics with the electrics,” Cohan says. “We thought it would be a great idea and a challenge for us to write some new music and arrange some of our older tunes that would accommodate the all-acoustic format.”

On the album’s breezy 7/4 opener, “Crooked Railroad,” Storie uses fingerstyle comping while his partners pick the single-note melody in harmony lines panned left and right. Cohan’s delicate waltz-time number, “Birthday Girl,” is a perfectly nuanced blending of strumming, open-string voicings, and simple melody playing. “I was going for the wall-of-sound approach here,” Cohan says. “I’m playing the bass accompaniment part, which is the traditional waltz part. Then I wrote a midrange accompaniment part for John that had a lot of open-string voicings, which fills out that texture.”

Elsewhere on Sleeping Lady, Storie creates a stellar arrangement of the Manuel Ponce melody, “Estrellita,” a favorite of Andrés Segovia’s. He also contributes the folkish “California,” which he plays on a Traugott Model R long-scale guitar in D A D G A D, the only use of an altered tuning on the record. Cohan contributes the bluesy “RC Think Tank,” which is underscored by steady Freddie Green–like comping and features some of the most urgent-sounding guitar work of the session. “One of the cool things about the guitar is the ability of it to sound kind of dirty,” Cohan says. “And that’s something I really wanted to incorporate on this tune.”

Cohan’s meditative “All in My Head” unravels slowly through a latticework pattern of ringing arpeggios and single-note lines. Smith’s “Sweet Kathleen” is based on a minimalist motif that recalls some of the music of Steve Reich, while his loping closer, “Blues for Brubeck,” gives the members a chance to tackle challenging unison lines and wail with impunity on some loose call-and-response improv. “Coming from a jazz background, improvisation is obviously a huge element in our music and something that we always strive to incorporate in this sort of chamber music setting,” says Cohan.

Keeping It Honest

Looking to the California Guitar Trio and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet for inspiration, these young guitarists (all in their mid-20s) are staking out their own niche with Sleeping Lady—and building a substantial grassroots following in the process. Shortly after releasing Sleeping Lady, the group opened for Diana Krall. “We’ve been able to convince rock clubs to book us, but we also play at Yoshi’s jazz club in San Francisco,” Storie says. “So we’re trying our best to bridge as many genres as possible while still being honest to the music. That’s the trick.”

Bill Milkowski is a New York–based freelance writer whose first published musician interview came in 1974. He has since written more than 4,000 pieces for various magazines, including several pieces for Acoustic Guitar.