Dave Murdy

Dave Murdy’s career makes more sense when you stop trying to fit it into a genre. He came to the guitar through a broad sequence of influences—folk, rock, Steely Dan and Larry Carlton, then Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. At USC, where he earned a degree in Jazz and Commercial Guitar, that breadth became a discipline rather than a contradiction. His early jazz album That Goes to Show Ya! put the straight-ahead side of his voice on record, while his work as an original member of Kilauea sent him into a very different pop-jazz world. He later recorded with Toxic Jazz, worked sessions, arranged, composed commercial music and wrote for Universal Studios theme parks. Then came another long-running musical relationship. Matt Mauser had first known Dave as a guitar teacher. Matt later invited him into Tijuana Dogs, and in 2005 Dave introduced Matt to bandleader Pete Jacobs. That connection eventually helped open the Sinatra lane that would grow into Matt Mauser: Sinatra + More. At Campus JAX, all of those histories now coexist in public. With the Dave Murdy Trio, he is the musical center of the evening. With Tijuana Dogs, he becomes part of the engine. In Sinatra + More, restraint and arrangement matter as much as vocabulary. In JAX DUOS, everything is exposed. In SongStage, the job is to serve an original song rather than decorate it. That may be the clearest way to understand Dave Murdy: the setting changes. His judgment doesn’t.