The guitarist-composer Karim Saber breaking through more and more all the time like a shooting star of the new generation UK jazz scene has Sundance out soon.
Berklee and Royal Academy of Music educated
Last year one of the best gigs I attended was by a guitarist composer from north London called Karim Saber.
I thought I’d follow up having heard him live, surely always the best way to discover a jazz musician, and listened to his about to be released quintet plus vocals album Sundance.
So I gave him a phone call yesterday and had a quick chat over about 40 minutes or so to scratch the surface and explore some of his background. We could have talked all day.
He says “I’ve been teaching for quite a while since moving back to London from Boston” and will also be starting at Camden Working Men’s College teaching adults soon.
Karim, born in 1996, who is of British and Iranian lineage, studied at Berklee before moving back to his hometown of London to do a two year masters at the Royal Academy of Music where he formed his band and made the acquaintance of other students with whom he would record and tour with like German pianist Lukas DeRungs.
He even toured in Germany with DeRungs and a choir and appeared on the German’s remarkable Kosmos Suite (2022) that happening Sundance double bassist John Jones is also on.
Karim says it’s difficult on the original London modern jazz scene making connections with people at jam sessions at least compared to cementing playing relationships more firmly formed at music college.
A relative latecomer to jazz only taking up the style while at 6th form he spent his earlier teenage years playing in rock bands. A teacher at school then said he should try jazz and showed him a few records.
Karim’s early rock heroes were people like Frank Zappa and Whitesnake monster Steve Vai and Joe Satriani who himself worked with Vai and Eric Johnson back in the 1990s in an outrageously powerfully preposterous outfit called G3.
At Berklee studying with Fuze
While at Berklee Karim jammed at Wally’s, the renowned club in Boston and was taught by Dave “Fuze” Fiuczynski of Screaming Headless Torsos renown and by Rick Peckham and David Tronzo. From Peckham – who has written such books as Berklee Jazz Guitar Dictionary and Berklee Rock Chord Dictionary – he learnt a lot of “the nuts and bolts of guitar” as he puts it. Tronzo went into slide guitar improvisation a bit more.
Clearly time well spent, the Londoner was holed up a lot of time practising in basement practice rooms and was like a sponge soaking up all sorts of new techniques and ideas.
Fuze gave him helpful assignments like playing pieces in different modes and time signatures. Karim enthuses about a record from the 1990s that has Fuze and organist John Medeski on it called Lunar Crush.
He says Fuze was “incredibly inspirational and kind at a time when I was very hard on myself. Fuze saw that intensity in me and helped me challenge it.”
Later at the Royal Academy in London Karim was taught by Chris Montague of Troyka renown, a player big into Allan Holdsworth.
“When I went to the Academy I knew that by the end of the two years I needed to have written an album and have a band which I did. Everything was geared to that.”
That album was Transmission and it came out in 2024.
The band remains the same with on Sundance an additional element being the vocals factored in. Tenorist Matt Cook of the band members – a player very much in the Joe Henderson mould – was the most recent to join, coming on board when Karim had a residency at Kentish town venue the MAP Studio Cafe in the summer of 2022. Singer Aitzi Cofre Real is an even newer musical acquaintance. Karim says he appreciates her “nuanced voice” lots. She’s quite Norma Winstone-like stylistically and her presence on the album is its unique selling point.
Gear used
On Sundance Karim uses a Collings I-35LC semi hollow body electric guitar that he bought off a teacher at Berklee, a Northern Irish Lowden S35 12 fret (tuned to DADGAD for the low toned ‘Autumn’) and in terms of pedals used a Wampler Compressor, Voodoo Lab Sparkle Overdrive, Electro Harmonix POG, Boss DD3 delay, Strymon delay and reverb pedals and a Fender deluxe reverb amp on the album.
Track by track
Litany
“A tone poem that evokes the litany against fear from Frank Herbert’s [1965 sci-fi novel] Dune. ‘I must not fear, fear is the mind killer, fear is the little death that brings total obliteration, I will face my fear, I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path, where the fear has gone there will be nothing, only I will remain‘. “I didn’t want too much improvising in this piece so decided just to play the melody with Matt [Cook] as the rhythm section built the energy around us. I draw a lot of inspiration from literature but this piece of writing in particular has been really impactful for me.”
Purpose
“I wrote this piece soon after finishing my first album Transmission, I was quite burnt out and struggling to find meaning in my work. ‘Purpose’ is an attempt to deal with the feelings of doubt, frustration and uncertainty which are part of life for many artists.
“The collective improv section moving into the 3-way trading between guitar, piano and saxophone signifies that process of searching and finding, and the realisation that whilst making music can be fraught with negative emotion, at its best it is absolutely life affirming and incredible. Recording this song took a LONG time because we had to get a take that Alex [Wilson], Matt and I were all happy with.”
Sister Song
“For my sister Thalia, I tried to imagine a melody I might hear her humming around the house. When I was getting ready to record the album I decided I wanted a different dimension for some of the melodies and called Aitzi Cofre Real who is one of my favourite singers. This is the first song on the record that she lends her wonderful voice to.”
Canvas
“Inspired by music from the Berlin and Amsterdam jazz scenes, I just love the way those low chords sound on the guitar. I listen to a lot of rock music and that is perhaps most evident here.”
No Virgos
“One of the more detailed tracks on the album, I enjoy the contrast of the intricate melody with the sections of heavier riffing. This tune serves as a bit of a showcase for Matt, particularly because of his ability to maintain a flow and build the energy of a solo over a long period of time.”
Hush
“Born out of my exploration of open strings on the guitar. One exercise I like to do is take a fixed harmonic structure (in this case 1, 5, 9, 13) and add an open string or two. Then I’ll move it around so that while the fundamental structure stays the same, the open strings create unusual chord qualities you might not usually conceive of. That might sound like quite an involved process but it’s not really, you just try to find a flow of sounds that works and then go back and label them later. The piece is notable for a particularly beautiful intro from Alex.”
“SCMC [another album track] stands for Small City More Clear. This is dedicated to my good friends in the Lukas DeRungs Quintet who I have done so much travelling, playing and learning with over the last few years. Lukas’ writing has been very influential for me – his compositions can appear complex at first but the strength of his melodic writing means that his music never loses sight of the emotional element – SCMC is my attempt to do something like that.”
Autumn
“A duet with Aitzi, I’d originally written this as a solo guitar piece but something about it wasn’t clicking and I was unsure about including it on the album. We got together once before the recording and played through it and her singing made it so much more evocative. I’m always blown away by the power the human voice has to connect emotionally, I think it’s something all instrumentalists should aspire to.”
Sundance
“I wanted to write something that was full of joy but retained a bit of a dangerous edge. The sun is the source of life on this planet but can also drive people pretty crazy – that’s what I’m trying to capture here.”
Reprise
“A reframing of the melody from ‘Sister Song’. I wanted to showcase a side of Jack [Thomas]’s drumming that people don’t often see, he’s such a powerhouse and is so varied in what he can do.”
- Sundance is out on 30 January. ‘No Virgos’ from the album is streaming. On the eve of release, the Karim Saber Quintet plus Aitzi Cofre Real, play the Vortex, Dalston.
The interview held my attention because the guitar never feels like a topic being discussed, it feels present, almost audible between the lines. I found myself tracking how touch, habit, and discipline shape a sound long before it reaches an audience.
What lingered was the sense of a musician listening inwardly while speaking, as though playing, teaching, and composing are not separate activities but different pressures on the same string. The reading slowed me down in a good way, making sound feel considered rather than asserted.