After spending three years going head-to-head with rock guitar icon Jeff Beck in his band, and a decade as the featured six-string soloist in pop-music legend Michael Jackson's group, Jennifer Batten was ready to downsize.

"I really needed a change," said the guitar wiz.

"After 20 years of living in Los Angeles, I wanted to breathe real air, drink water out of the tap and not share roads with 17 million other people. It occurred to me that all I needed was an airport, because 70 percent of my work is in foreign countries. And I wasn't participating in L.A.; I've seen more concerts since I moved to Portland (Oregon) than in L.A."

Moving to Portland three years ago has also been a source of nonmusical inspiration for guitar master Batten, whose current solo tour is the first concert trek of her career under her own name.

In addition to completing "Whatever," her recently released third solo album (which includes a bonus DVD), she spent a year in Portland studying how to make stained glass. Batten now divides her time between the guitar and making glass art, samples of which can be seen on her website at www.jenniferbatten.com.

While the techniques for making music and glass art are quite different, the creative impetus is very similar, she noted.

"To me, it's exactly the same, except that I run the danger of injuring my fingers doing glass art and I don't have that danger with guitar," Batten said.

"Both deal with the excitement of creating something that wasn't here yesterday, whether it's writing songs or making glass art. It's all about stretching your creativity."

Stretching is nothing new for this dazzling guitarist, who no less an authority than the legendary Beck has hailed as "fantastic," "great" and a "vital ingredient" to his band, with which she performed from 1998 to 2001.

Along with Bonnie Raitt and Joan Jett, Batten is one of the few women musicians who has had a major guitar company create and market a signature guitar model bearing her name.

She has been cited as an inspiration by male and female guitarists alike. One of them, acoustic guitar wiz Kaki King, told the audience a few years ago at a Portland concert that she wouldn't have become a guitarist if it wasn't for Batten (who was present) paving the way. In turn, King inspired "First," Batten's debut acoustic guitar foray.

A New York native, Batten moved to San Diego when she was 9, a year after she started learning guitar. Batten later joined the all-women band Purl, which — she now laughingly recalls — "played everything from Top 40 and fusion-jazz to weddings."

After spending several years in the band of jazz and soul singer Ella Ruth Piggee, Batten moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, where she wowed audiences with her instrumental command and stylistic versatility. She also taught at the Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT), where women instructors were a rarity.

"I had an open class that anybody could come to," Batten recalled. "And there'd be guys with an attitude of 'What can you show me?'"

How did she handle them?

"I just played and did my thing," she said. "Some people just didn't want to know; some gave me respect. It's funny, because a lot of guys treat guitar more like professional wrestling, like it's a competition. And to tell you the truth, guitar is treated as a competition everywhere by guys. I've done guitar clinics around the world for years, and its always more than 90 percent men in the audience.

"When I started touring with Michael Jackson in 1987, I really thought there would be more women playing guitar now. It's disappointing that there aren't. Playing lead guitar in rock 'n' roll is aggressive. And a lot of women are raised to think that doing aggressive is not OK."

A quick visit to the website YouTube should yield any number of concert videos in which Batten more than holds her own as she trades solos with Beck. She credits the English guitar hero for jump-starting her songwriting, which is the main reason many of the songs on her new album have a pronounced Beck-ish feel.

"Jeff really updated my ears," said Batten, who coined the phrase "guitronica" to describe her new album. "He turned me onto electronica and techno, and I haven't looked back. I dived head first into that medium and got into computer recording and programming.

"When he first called me to come play with him, he wanted songs, so I started writing immediately and a lot of the new songs on my album were written for him. He (only) used a couple, which was fine, because he was the catalyst to get this stuff going. And, previously, I hadn't done much writing."

Although Batten is the only musician featured on her current solo tour, she has strived to make her performances both visually and musically appealing. She uses film and video footage on stage, be it vintage Charlie Chaplin clips, classic performance shots of big-band pioneers Count Basie and Cab Calloway, or "old footage of race cars, the cheesier, the better!" She also tells colorful stories between songs — such as what it was like to be covered by 150,000 bees during the 1991 video shoot for her high-octane version of "Flight of the Bumble Bee" by Russian classical composer Rimsky-Korsakov.

Yet, while Batten has played in some of the biggest arenas and stadiums in the world with former employers Jackson and Beck, her own shows are not mega-decibel affairs.

"My ears have been completely trashed by playing with Jeff Beck for three years," she said. "Playing by myself, I don't need to blast it or keep up with the volume of the drummer. It's very relaxing. Plus, I don't have to feed a band and put up with their complaints."

To find out more about George Varga and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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