Nelsen Hutchison
Nelsen Hutchison is a San Francisco Bay Area based guitarist, educator, and scholar. As a teenager in Alameda, Nelsen developed an interest in jazz and was initially inspired by guitarists associated with hardbop in the 1950s and 1960s such as Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, and Wes Montgomery. To pursue his passion Nelsen took private lessons, attended group classes and clinics at the Jazz School in Berkeley, listened to his parents’ record collection, and regularly attended concerts with his family. As Nelsen worked to immerse himself in the jazz tradition, he encountered and fell in love with the music of Django Reinhardt through watching the Hot Club of San Francisco perform and listening to their records. Though he largely continued to focus on learning and performing “straight-ahead jazz,” the spark of his interest in hot jazz and Django had been ignited.
After graduating high school, Nelsen continued to pursue his interest in jazz guitar in college, studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston for a year before transferring to the New School for Jazz in New York City where he had the opportunity to study with guitarists such as Howard Alden, Ed Cherry, Satoshi Inoue, and Peter Bernstein. Upon graduating college and returning to the Bay Area, Nelsen continued to practice and began performing locally, occasionally being asked to perform in the style of Django Reinhardt. A few years later, he had grown frustrated with “faking it” and, along with some friends, decided to rekindle the spark of his interest in hot jazz and commit himself to learning the music of Django Reinhardt. Over the next few years Nelsen spent many hours practicing, listening, and attending concerts, clinics, and lessons with guitarists such as Paul Mehling, Jimmy Grant, Paulus Schaefer, and Doug Martin.
Today Nelsen has a rising profile in the gypsy jazz/swing scene in the SF Bay Area and is thrilled to have the opportunity to perform with Le Jazz Hot and the Hot Club of San Francisco.
In addition to his passion for jazz guitar, Nelsen also maintains an interest in the academic study of music. He is currently a PhD Candidate at UC Santa Cruz, where his dissertation focuses on the working lives of the Bay Area jazz musicians and the ways in which they practice and theorize the “gig economy.” He has taught courses in jazz, American popular music, and the music industry at UC Santa Cruz and University of the Pacific and now teaches courses in guitar and global music traditions at Skyline College in San Bruno.