“ I was driving down the road with my mother and my grandmother in South Carolina...and I was lying down in the back of the car and it was in the evening... and I popped up...and there was a guitar store right there and I said “Mother I would like to play the Guitar” 

Is that a true story?
Yeah, I was seven years old and she pulled over, I was just about to turn eight, she pulled over and we went in and she bought me a Giannini classical guitar and I picked it up the next day.

Had you thought about playing the guitar prior to this?
No.

You just saw a guitar store and said that looks cool?
Yes.

Had you been listening to music that had guitar in it?
Yes, I had been listening to the Beatles...and Bob Dylan, they were my introduction to pop music.

You studied at the University of Miami. How would describe your experience there and how does UM compare to the Berklee experience for you?
I was there in the late 80's and it was very much a jazz boot camp. It was very intense, the criticism was very harsh. A lot of people didn’t survive, it was a very small program so you were under a microscope. I think it was great actually, I really had a great time. The improvisation classes were great in particular.

You studied with Fred Hamilton?
I did, that was at the University of North Texas where I got my master’s degree.

What did you do after graduating from the University of Miami?
I gigged around Miami for a while and I ended up back in Texas for various reasons. I was living in Denton Texas playing a lot of horrible gigs, and I was selling some equipment and Fred Hamilton, the chair of the jazz guitar program at the University of North Texas came over to buy some gear. He saw my University of Miami diploma on the wall and we started talking and he suggested that I come in and audition for him. After I auditioned for him he offered me a graduate teaching fellowship. So they paid me to go to school and get my master’s degree. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

What year did you graduate from UNT?
I graduated from North Texas in 1995.

When did you start teaching here at Berklee?
I started teaching here in the fall of ’96, I’ve just finished my twelfth year here.

What brought you to Boston as opposed to staying in Texas where the Austin scene in particular is very good.
I lived in Austin from 1983 to 1988 and then I moved from Austin to Miami and then back to Texas, the Denton Dallas area. I moved back because my ex- wife was getting her Doctorate degree in psychology and UNT had one of the best programs in the country so that is why we moved back. She then went looking for post doctorate fellowships and asked me if I would consider moving to Boston. I thought I might be able to get a teaching gig at Berklee so I contacted Rick Peckham (Rick had gotten his Master’s degree from North Texas as well.)
I called and asked Rick if he would hire me. At his request I sent him a demo tape and he and Larry Baione really dug it and they gave me a job here.

You teach a Jeff Beck lab as well as a Jimi Hendrix lab. I hear their influence in your playing and improvising. Who are some other artists that have influenced you?
Well first it was the Beatles and I learned as many of their tunes as I could by ear. Later on I heard about Clapton, Cream and Hendrix and I traced all of that back to the Blue’s guys. Freddie King was really big for me as well as early B.B King, and T Bone Walker. Later on Wes Montgomery’s playing became quite influential for me, he’s kind of a transistion point for guitar players. Following that, I listened to horn players, Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Miles Davis as well as pianists Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans, who I stole a lot of chords from.

On your most recent CD The New Imperial  you use two note voicings, diads, voiced in seconds and they are sometimes quite dissonant sounding. You manage to blend the Hendrix/Beck pentatonic realm of playing with the more far out jazz related harmonic style. How did you enable yourself to seemingly bridge the gap between these two divergent styles of playing?
It seems to work somehow (laughs) I grew up with a lot of classical music in terms of that really dense harmonic stuff. I grew up with that music being played in my house all of the time because my father is an audiophile and a classical music fanatic. Even now I’m constantly hearing it in the car or at his house.

Who are some of the composers that your father listens to?
A lot of Beethoven, Bartok, Berlioz and Mahler. Debussy, Stravinsky and Messian. None of those sounds are foreign to my ears. The type of music that a lot of people might think is far out melodically or harmonically has always sounded from the very beginning completely inside to me. When I first heard Miles Davis’ Nefertiti and all of those Wayne Shorter tunes I had no idea what was going on technically but it sounded completely natural to me. I found out later on that harmonically a lot of that music was actually influenced by Stravinsky and Debussy.

In terms of blending those two styles, the blues based pentatonics with the jazz related harmonies, in a sense I think that’s kind of my lifes work. I don’t really like modern fusion and I don’t really like slick kinds of playing. I’m more drawn to the guitar playing of Hendrix and Jeff Beck. Earlier fusion by John McLaughlin and Mahavishnu was also big for me. I loved the Billy Cobham Spectrum album with Tommy Bolin. There was something very primal and natural in all of that music and powerful that related directly to say Hendrix playing Machine Gun which to me related directly to hearing really late Coltrane such as Interstellar Space where it was just pure emotional primal direct playing.

So I have always been searching for a way to bring those two musical elements together while bypassing all of that more modern fusion even though I respect those people. I used to listen to Holdsworth, he is a very natural player and early on I was drawn to him but there is something that happened later on with a lot of that music that just became too slick for me. So for me it’s the whole element of trying to implement the harmonic and melodic material of the great jazz players while bypassing all of the fusion stuff and then somehow connecting it to Hendrix.

You have a lot of emotion and aggression in your playing, it comes through very strongly.
Well I think a lot of that has to do with the tonal approach. Just keeping it raw and natural.

Turning to your recent album, how did you come up with the title The New Imperial.
I was on the road when I was 18 with a blues band and we played in a place in Charlotte North Carolina called the “Double Door Inn” which is still there. The guitar player in Muddy Water’s band, Bob Margolin was leaving the club as we were coming in with our equipment and we asked him “Bob, where’s the best place to stay around here, they hadn’t given us a room?” He told us “ You gotta stay down at The New Imperial Motel, cause they got porno on the t.v. 24 hours a day”. So of course all of the guys wanted to go there. It was an old school cheesy, sleazy motel out by the used car lots in Charlotte. The tune by the same name has a sleazy kind of B-3 groove, it reminded me of that motel.

If someone hadn’t ever heard you play before, which track on the CD The New Imperial would you have them listen to?
That one is really hard. I think the tune that is most evocative of where my music is coming from and where its going is All of the Years, which is a ballad that has a very strange harmonic structure along with a Hendrix type vibe. In the solo I use all kinds of things to get through the harmony and still convey that Hendrix kind of vibe though it’s not one of my more accessible tunes.Julien Kasper Band

That tune is on the mellower side of your playing spectrum. Why would you prefer that tune over an upbeat tune such as The J.B. Groove?
If the answer to the question is what most expresses what I am as a musician then that would be my answer because of the harmonic structure and the intensity of that tune. If I wanted someone to be engaged by the album and say “this is cool, this is groovy and accessible”, I’d say The J.B. Groove and that’s why I put it first, so people would be drawn into it and not alienated by a bunch of weird chords.

Speaking of The J.B Groove, the tone you got was amazing. Too often guitarists concentrate on technique as opposed to getting their sound happening. Which guitars and amplifiers did you use on that track?
That tune has a number of different guitars on it, it was one of my few forrays into multitracking a number of different parts. For the rhythm guitar I used my Korina SG. Then for the tremolo guitar I used a Gibson 330 through a Gibson amp with tremelo but I blended that with one of my old vintage strats which I played on the basic track through a Univibe and a 100w Marshall. For the solo I used my D’Pergo. I used an  MJM London Fuzz which is a fuzz face. It’s like the later fuzz faces that Hendrix used in the Band of Gypsys, a silicon diode fuzz face. The amp I used was my old 100w Super Lead Marshall.

The songs Promise, About Rudy and Requiem are instrumentals. Each with their own theme and texture. Are those tunes composed or are they improvised?
They’re completely improvised. The plan was that I was going to include only one improvised solo piece on the CD but it turned out to be three. The first improvisation I recorded became About Rudy. Basically I went in the studio one day by myself and after setting up the amps I just started to go and I played all day long and we recorded everything. I was improvising around the various themes and melodies from songs on the CD. I was extrapolating ideas from those themes.

Like an Overture to the album?
Exactly.

That’s scary though isn’t it? To put something like that out there?
It is. A lot of people have listened to those three tracks, many are fellow musicians that I really respect and  they have told me that those tracks are their favorite pieces on the album. Something speaks to them in those pieces.

I really like the tune I am a Centaur because of the tone you got. Which guitar did you use on that track?
I used a 52 tele that belongs to Chris Rival who owns and engineers at Middleville Studios in North Reading. The studio we recorded the album at. It’s a great studio, it’s like a vintage playground. Chris has amazing amps and guitars. It’s actually very funny how that came about. We were playing the tune and I was using one of my old strats and it was coming out a little too slick for me. I wasn’t happy with the way things were sounding so on the spot I said “Hey what if I play that guitar right there” and there was this old tele hanging on the wall and the strings were all old and the action was high. So I took that guitar and plugged it into the same setup that I had been using with the strat which was a Fulltone Soulbender Fuzz which is like a Tonebender, that Jeff beck used to use. An analog delay and a 100w Marshall. I made a few changes in the arrangement of the tune and we played it that one time and the sound was just so nasty. I also used an Octavia pedal. At the end of the tune I was on the neck pickup of the Tele using the Octavia, and you can hear the drums coming through my amp. I’m proud of that track just because it was really spontaneous.

All of the Years has a distinctive Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers vibe about it. How has Jeff Beck’s playing on that tune impacted you as a guitarist?
Oh yeah, Becks playing on that is just transcendental. It’s one of those things, every time I hear it I think man if I could just do one thing in my life that good.

The tune Sister is really sweet. It has a very complex progression in terms of improvisation. What was the basis for that tune?
Sister and All of the Years were written in my last semester at North Texas. I was in a very complex harmonic frame of mind at that time being in grad school and all of that. That being said, I never deliberately write from a harmonically complex point of view. I just follow my ears and what I perceive as the natural flow of the composition. When I try to remember the process of writing a tune, I often have no recollection of what led me to make those harmonic and melodic choices. Complexity is never a goal of mine though a number of my tunes have certainly ended up that way.

How do you approach soloing over a complex progression such as that?
I almost have this inverse relationship in my playing where the more complex the chords are, the more likely I will try to play more bluesy and rocky over it. I tried to keep the solo a little more bluesy while the chords are going all over the place. It is difficult to solo over.

Jacket Full of Bees is a cool tune. What was the inspiration behind that tune?
That tune started off as a bass and drum groove at a rehearsal and I had been recording reherasals so when I listened back I thought there’s definitely something there to work with. I thought “What would it sound like if it had an atonal melody”? So I started writing a melody for it and I had this other tune that was more Coltrane influenced. I ended up using the harmonic structure of the Trane based tune and wrote the melody over that. The solo is just mental illness... you know, basically. (laughs).

I read on your website that Guitar Player Magazine reviewed your demo and wrote “this guy is really good, someone should give him a record deal quick”. How did that make you feel?
I thought someone should give us a deal quick. (laughs). It’s funny they left me a message on my answering machine and this was when I was in Texas. All of the editors had listened to it and were saying call us back. It was a time around ’93 when music started to lean towards the internet self marketing route. I shopped the demo around like crazy and it was exactly what you’d expect. I shopped it to blues labels and they responded with”oh you're jazz”. I shopped it to rock labels including Scrapnel and they all said it was too bluesy or jazzy. So no matter where I would go people would always claim it was something else.

They always wanted to put me in a little box and no one would say “hey we think you make good music” and want to sign you. At that time if you didn’t get signed there was literally no way to get your music out there. The upside being there were a lot more gigs so you could tour more. That was frustrating, I had gotten nice calls from other musicians such as Bill Frisell saying they liked it. Eventually I came to Berklee, became a sideman with Bruce Katz and a few others, and put my solo career on the back burner until I reemerged with Flipping Time and my own band 10 years later. By that time I had the means to release and promote CD’s myself. The New Imperial was released by the British label “Nugene Records”.

You're working on a new album. How is that coming along?
I think it will take the listener to new places. Some of the music rocks a little harder and some of it is more ethereal and spacey so it goes in both directions and I continue to shoot myself in the foot commercially no matter what I do so I’ve accepted that.

Do you feel it’s more important to make an aesthetic statement with your music for no other reason than to satisfy yourself or is there a part of you that would prefer more commercial appeal at the possible expense of aestheticism?
I think asthetically I have to make the right music. If I stick with that and something beautiful happens then great, but you know I have a pretty good life. I teach here, I surf. I write and play my music as much as I can.

    Photo of Julien surfing by Tom Herde

Your playing is very passionate. What other interests are you passionate about?
Surfing. Surfing is one of the only ways I can actually escape from music and at the same time channel it’s energy into inspiration for music as well. When your catching a wave and your on a wave, you literally cannot think about anything else. You have to be in the moment and it’s exactly like improvising. It really feels that way to me.

When someone is listening to your playing, what do you hope they get from your music?
That’s a hard one to answer. I hope that they understand how personal it is for me and how much of it is improvised because much of it is.

One last question, what do you draw upon for inspiration when you improvise?
Sometimes for me it’s when the whole band just locks into this place and it’s like a wave that lines up. It breaks perfectly down and you're on it. There’s a feeling of this elevation that you get where the minds meld as one and the audience is there. That inspires me and the striving for those moments when they occur. Just keeping an open channel that that might occur is what keeps you coming back from one gig to the next.