Lee J. Boice knows the ropes of rock and roll. As a guitarist, he’s been on the New York music scene since the 1960s, starting out in garage bands in Jersey City before working his way over the Hudson River to become a fixture in the New York City scene.
Although he will make an appearance at the End of the Year dance on June 23 put on by the town’s recreation department, Boice has recently released a CD that explores music across several cultures, and features some of the great performers of Indian music.
Boice, a resident of Secaucus for about 20 years, arrived in town in what he calls “the usual way,” moving to Hoboken before climbing the hill. He started out in 1960s garage bands playing music by Jimi Hendrix and Cream and music with classic roots, such as rhythm and blues.
Boice has been a professional guitarist, writer, and producer for over 25 years.
Over the years, he has been involved with New York City musical institutions such as Sweet Revenge and a half dozen other music performers, as well as becoming a relatively popular studio musician.
“I’ve spent half my adult life on the road,” he said, “doing the whole circuit like Danny’s Castaway and other places.”
Hotel food became more of a staple of his diet than home cooked meals.
In the 1970s, he became a sessions man, often appearing on other people’s records, while delving into creations of his own. Local tours took him around the tri-state area.
During those years, he always appreciated Indian music and variations of it in the pop scene, such as George Harrison’s “Within you and Without You” from the classic Sergeant Pepper’s album.
It took Boice a long time to actually start playing sitar, something he began about five years ago, learning it from some of the masters of the craft, like Bina Kalavant and Kadar Kahn at the Kalavant Music Center in Manhattan. He compares many of these performers to the masters of Western Classical music, and since he started studying, he began meeting up with some of the best performers of that culture, long after he became bored with rock stars.
“There are very few people in the industry that I haven’t met and very few that still impress me,” he said. “I mean I would be impressed if I met Eric Clapton, but not many other people.”
Boice, in one of his many gigs, is the guitarist for the New York City-based Indofunk, a band that blends Indian raga forms with funk grooves and modern jazz. He also plays guitar for Chunka Riddim, a popular rock/reggae artist based in New York.
Boice has recently released a solo CD called Sacred Spaces, which combines Indian and Latin rhythms with urban beats, and overlays melodies with guitars and textural keyboards as well as traditional Indian instruments.
Several icons of modern Indian music have joined him on this CD, including Ustad Sutan Khan, who sings and plays the Sarangi, a classical Indian string instrument played with a bow. Khan is one of the foremost Sarangi players of India, renowned for the emotional depth of his playing and his extraordinary technical and melodic control. He is best known for performing with Pandit Ravi Shankar on George Harrison’s 1974 Dark Horse World Tour. He has also performed with Madonna and Duran Duran.
Also on Boice’s CD is Badal Roy, the foremost exponent of the tabla in jazz music, who has played with musicians such as Miles Davis and Herbie Mann.
Some music critics have compared Boice’s work on Sacred Spaces to an updated John McLaughlin.
Boice said the study of Indian music and its haunting philosophies has intrigued him, and provides him with a deeper understanding of his own guitar work. He finds he can bring fresh ideas to his own instrument through his study of the Indian classical instruments. His performances involve textures lacking in rock, yet bring to the surface a combination of musical traditions and time signatures as from jazz and other directions.
But at the dance on June 23, you can expect him to dig deep into his rock and roll roots, with a performance with a band called Rivercat. The event starts at about 7 p.m. inside the ice rink at Buchmuller Park.
“This is funded by the recreation department at the suggestion of the Secaucus Municipal Alliance,” said Town Administrator Anthony Iacono. “We wanted to give kids a place to go, and by putting it into the rink, we’re creating something like a club atmosphere.”
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