Charlie Ballentine
Guitar
Charlie Ballantine plays guitar like someone who learned early that the instrument keeps a long memory. There's Wes Montgomery in there from his Indianapolis upbringing, Frisell and Scofield from his bebop conservatory years at Indiana University, Hendrix and Chet Atkins from his father's record stores, and a Telecaster running through a Deluxe Reverb that carries all of it into the room at once. Jazz, rock, folk, surf, country, blues, the angular geometry of Thelonious Monk, the wild mercury sound of Bob Dylan, the high lonesome reaches of American song. He moves between these as if the borders were never really there.
His catalog reflects that range. Twelve albums since 2014, including Vonnegut, Cold Coffee, Where Is My Mind?, a double album dedicated to the music of Monk, and Life Is Brief: The Music of Bob Dylan. All About Jazz named him one of the top 200 living guitarists. Jazziz placed him alongside Scofield, Frisell, and Julian Lage as a player who brings the harmonic seriousness of jazz to the tonal vocabulary of rock and roots music. Vintage Guitar described his world as one where jazz, rock, and folk coexist peacefully, which sounds simple until you try it.
Ballantine has a right hand that combines flatpick with middle and ring fingers, a Danny Gatton-adjacent approach he developed reconciling Chet Atkins and Merle Travis tunes from childhood with the Charlie Parker bebop heads he encountered in college. The technical fact matters because it's audible: his lines have a textural depth most jazz guitarists don't reach for, chord melodies and chromatic runs and singable phrases woven together into something that reads as one voice.
Born in Indianapolis, son of guitarist Scott Ballantine, Charlie spent over a decade as a pillar of the Indianapolis jazz community alongside his wife, saxophonist Amanda Gardier, before relocating east. He now teaches at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins and tours behind a body of work that keeps growing.
