Craig Chaquico, Instrumental and Smooth jazz Artist
This week’s Featured Artist is a gifted guitarist. In the 70s and 80sduring his early musical career he was the lead guitarist for the legendary rock band Jefferson Starship. Meet Jazz Guitarist –Craig Chaquico
Born in Sacramento, California, U.S.A
Genre:Contemporary Jazz, Blues, New Age
Craig Chaquico is an American guitarist of Portuguese and Native American descent. He has had over thirty years of success in a variety of genres: in the1970s with the post-Summer of Love Jefferson Starship, in that band’s 1980sincarnation, Starship, and in the 1990s and 2000s as a contemporary jazz and New Age solo artist.
Craig Chaquico gives credence to the oxymoron “rock and roll prodigy.” IndeedChaquico wrote his first song at age 12, played professionally in a popular San Francisco band at age 14, and joined in a professional studio session at age 16. Immediately upon graduation from high school, Chaquico joined the celebrated Jefferson Starship band and played with the group until 1990. He never missed a performance or a recording session. After the demise of Starship, Chaquicoembarked on a solo career in the musical genre of new age jazz, writing and performing uniquely poetic melodies for acoustical guitar.
As a child, growing up on a farm in northern California, Chaquico imagined himself as a singing cowboy with a guitar on his knee. He first started to play acoustical guitar when he was in grade school, around ten years old. He loved the instrument and one day it became particularly precious to him. It was his guitar that kept his young life from falling apart after a serious auto accident when he was 12 years old. The Chaquico family, out in the family car, was struck by a drunk driver. The three were lucky to escape alive, although Chaquico himself suffered two broken wrists, a broken thumb, a triple fracture of one leg, and a cerebral hemorrhage which left him unconsciousness for three days immediately following the accident.
For some time afterward his life was a blur of wheel chairs, crutches, and corrective shoes. Unable to return to school for three months; Chaquico passed the time playing the guitar. He didn’t simply strum the guitar but played riffs and arpeggios all over the frets. His doctor, along with his parents, encouraged him to play as much as possible as a form of therapy to help recapture the dexterity in his wrists and thumb. All he could really use was one finger because of the casts that confined his hands and fingers. Chaquico’s father promised to buy him a new guitar, an electric model, as an incentive to work hard and recuperate fully. Dauntlessly, Chaquico practiced, his fingers flew. He composed his first substantial melody during that painful convalescence, with his arms still wrapped in casts. The tune, “E-lizabeth’s Song,” was named for the doctor who brought him through that difficult time and for the E-string on the guitar, because that was all that he could reach with his fingers wrapped up in plaster. Although the entire song was composed for one string, high E, it is nonetheless lively, a busy song with an astonishing profusion of melodic riffs. In time, the creative 12-year-old healed, and he received the coveted electric guitar as a gift from his father. So dramatic was Chaquico’s recovery in fact, that by the time he started high school he was truly a skilled guitarist, despite the debilitating accident.
Chaquico was only 14 when one of his teachers, Jack Traylor, invited him to join a band called Steel Wind, a popular combo in the San Francisco bay area. Chaquico was so young that he disguised his appearance with pasted-on whiskers in order to work in the clubs late at night. Steel Wind meanwhile caught the ear of Gracie Slick and Paul Kantner of the top-selling rock group the Jefferson Airplane. Slick and Kantner invited Chaquico to join in a recording session to back up Airplane violinist Papa John Creech for a solo album release called Sunfighter on Grunt Records-Slick and Kantner’s own label. Chaquico, only 16 years old, was honored to play in the session with rock and roll greats David Crosby, Graham Nash, and the late Jerry Garcia.
In 1974, after Chaquico finished high school he went straight to a world-class rock group, the Jefferson Starship, a reincarnation of the former Jefferson Airplane, under the direction of Slick and Kantner. Years of practice as a youngster, playing his old wooden guitar while healing from the auto accident, and jamming on his electric guitar as a teenager with Steel Wind paid off for Chaquico who stepped onto the stage and played lead guitar behind the world famous singer Gracie Slick. Chaquico’s first performance with the Jefferson Starship was truly memorable because his high school band, Steel Wind, played the opener of Chaquico’s debut concert with Jefferson Starship. Chaquico played with Steel Wind and then played with the Starship for the duration of that same concert.
After that first concert, Chaquico has played on every Jefferson Starship recording through 1984, at which time the group turned over and lost the rights to use the word Jefferson in their name. At that time the band was renamed to Starship, and Chaquico kept playing lead guitar. Eventually he held the distinction as the only member to play on every record and in every performance of Starship, including the band’s time as Jefferson Starship. Chaquico stayed with Starship until 1990 when the group spontaneously dissolved. Starship earned a combined total of 13 gold and platinum albums during those years.
After Starship, Chaquico intended right away to assemble a new band and keep on performing. He first attempted to assemble a band called Big Bad Wolf. The failure of that group in part, combined with his wife’s first pregnancy, led Chaquico to re- invent himself. Chaquico discovered very quickly that his pregnant wife Kimberly much preferred the soothing sounds of his old acoustic guitar to the brash electric instrument. In due time Chaquico was not merely playing his old guitar for his wife; he was singing to their unborn child, and writing songs for each of them. By the time son Kyle was born in 1991 Chaquico substantially had written the score of an entire CD release.
His first solo album, Acoustic Highway, was released in 1993 and was followed by a sequel, Acoustic Planet in 1994. Chaquico meanwhile worked with Washburn Guitar Company to design just the right acoustic guitar to suit his own ear and meet his professional needs. The collaboration resulted in the Craig Chaquico signature series guitar, a Washburn EA-20 model, with custom Chaquico features including wider frets, lower action, and steel strings. Chaquico, a die-hard environmentalist who lives by a redwood forest, negotiated with the Washburn Company to “give something back,” by planting a tree for every Chaquico guitar made. Overall the effect Chaquico achieved with his instrument design was that of an acoustic guitar that plays, feels, and sounds in many ways like an electric; and Chaquico plays the instrument as if it were electric, employing bends, stretches, hammer-ons, and other electric techniques. After taping Acoustic Highway, Chaquico gave his first live performance at the very same hospital where he had received treatment many years earlier as a 12-year-old auto crash victim.
Biographical information courtesy of browsebiography.com
For more information and reading on Craig Chaquico click on links below.
http://www.browsebiography.com/bio-craig_chaquico.html