E-Mail This Article to a Friend Nation building Eric Hofbauer’s DIY jazz BY JON GARELICK

If you need luck, so the gamblers say, make your own. The same could be said for musicians in a small town overcrowded with them. Not finding a lot of opportunities for original music in Boston, guitarist and composer Eric Hofbauer set about making his own. Fresh with a master’s degree from New England Conservatory, he organized a concert series in 2000 at Zeitgeist Gallery — the old Zeitgeist on Broadway in Cambridge — and hooked up with like-minded trombonist Chris Allen. They created the loose collective Creative Nation Music (www.cnmpro.com), developing concert series and residencies at places like the pub Anam Cara in Brookline and the Cambridge Family YMCA’s Durrell Hall. This Sunday, three of the bands from the Creative Nation collective will celebrate the release of four CDs on their own CNM label with a show at the Milky Way.

The four albums are all worth looking for. A couple feature Hofbauer and a couple feature Charlie Kohlhase, whose bands regularly include Hofbauer. On Live Recordings 2001–2003, Allen’s Central Artery Project puts himself and Kohlhase on alto in the front line over drums (Curt Newton) and bass (Dave Chang U. Choi or Scott Barnum) and recalls the spare rawness and angular swing of the Roswell Rudd/John Tchicai New York Art Quartet, an obvious influence. The Chuck Gabriel Septet’s Blueprints comes out of Mingus and Monk. (And, as a favor to jazz critics, its track listing specifies the form and length of each tune — 12-bar blues, 32-bar AABA, etc.) Not to be confused with Gabriel’s album is The Blueprint Project, a Trane-ish quintet session with Hofbauer and the great veteran bassist Cecil McBee.

Not least of these is Hofbauer’s American Vanity, a solo guitar album with an explicit post–September 11 agenda that Hofbauer makes clear in his liner notes. What the notes don’t make clear is his humor and playfulness. American Vanity mixes spontaneous improvisations with an assortment of covers — Erik Satie’s Greek folk dance Gnossienne #1 precedes Eric Dolphy’s "Mandrake." ("Eric plays his favorite Erics," as the track list points out.) There’s also Mingus’s "Better Get Hit in Your Soul," Hammerstein & Kern’s "Old Man River," Charlie Parker’s "Drifting on a Reed," Waylon Jennings’s theme for The Dukes of Hazzard, the Velvet Underground’s "Femme Fatale," and ’80s new-wave one-hit wonders a-ha’s "Take on Me." When I get together with Hofbauer at a Central Square coffeehouse, he brings up another humorous side of the album: "What better idea for an exploration of American vanity than a solo anything CD?"

Hofbauer’s performances are as unconventional as his choice of repertoire. He plays a big Guild hollow-bodied archtop without extra effects, preferring a dry, unprocessed acoustic sound that emphasizes his percussive attack, the squeak or ping of plectrum or bare finger against string. On the Mingus, he re-creates the bassist’s buzzing of string against fretboard. The Parker, meanwhile, flies by in fleet, Bird-like fashion. Hofbauer likes counterpoint, and he’ll pluck strong bass lines against chords simultaneously with improvised lines, a technique his guitarist friend Garrison Fewell has identified as "stride guitar," in the tradition of blues players like the Reverend Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt. But Hofbauer claims another kind of stride as his influence: "I’m really into Fats Waller and Art Tatum."

And how does one go about giving instrumental music a political content? Would Hofbauer improvisations like "American Eulogy" and "American Innocence" sound political if we didn’t know the titles? "What the titles do," he explains, "is focus in on an emotional starting point for the listener — not to tell you exactly how to feel and how you’re supposed to listen, but it’s a clue into where the artist is coming from. If you start with a tabula rasa and say, ‘Here’s this music,’ with no title, and it’s just ‘Improv #3,’ that’s why a lot of free-jazz players get misunderstood."

If the unprocessed archtop is one way for Hofbauer to create an individual voice, another is his choice of models — non-guitarists like Waller and Tatum, Mingus, Monk, Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Coltrane. Guitarists, he points out, tend to use the guitar vocabulary rather than the jazz vocabulary. "It’s easy to fall into patterns and try to find the easy way out. When you try to deal with Coltrane or Ornette or Monk on the guitar, there’s no easy way out — you can’t sound like them, so what you come up with is that you sound like you."

Eric Hofbauer, the Central Artery Project, and the Chuck Gabriel Septet play the first annual Creative Nation Music CD showcase this Sunday, April 10, at 9 p.m. at the Milky Way, 403-405 Centre Street in Jamaica Plain; call (617) 271-4704.