Chris Peck is a singular artist. The first time I saw him perform was outside the 16th & Mission BART station during one of those Thursday night gatherings, straddling the nerdy and the hip with smart, speed-changing rhymes, a lean-in and an open-faced, underplayed hand-clap. Is this guy serious, I wondered, but the answer was obvious; not only was he compelling — directly communicating with the loud and often indifferent crowd of Dionysians — but shouts of “Peck!” and “Peck the Town Crier!” told me he’d earned the kind of respect reserved for only a small portion of the recurring performers there.
The next time I saw the Town Crier was also at the corner, but this time he had a guitar. Instead of leaning into the crowd, he stood calmly in the center and strummed up a cyclic, bouncy refrain that built in positive emphasis each time he repeated it. Every time I saw Peck he seemed to do something entirely different; at home in a multitude of styles and moods, he didn’t quite belong to any one clique so much as fit into all of them.
If you ask him, he owes much of this to an accident. After a youth steeped in the hippie/jam-band scene (he saw at least 10 Phish shows before he was 15 and “played in bands that sounded like that, just playing guitar and never singing,”) a high school teacher introduced Chris and his friends to the 1970s’ electric jazz of groups such as Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. His crew — about 30 in all — fast became devoted fanatics of the genre and drove into San Francisco from Marin to experience it in person.
“We would go to Yoshi’s or something and Tony Williams would be playing, before he died, and one of us would get up the courage to ask him for a lesson and he would say, “Yes, come to my house.” That’s the weird thing about jazz musicians: even if they’re really famous, they’re not famous for being famous, like Mick Jagger, and it’s like you probably can’t hang out with Mick Jagger; but, in the case of Tony Williams you can hang out with him, but you can’t play like him. You know? And that’s what he’s famous for.”
Shortly after Peck went to NYU to study jazz, he was building a basement studio and the months of construction resulted in a major case of tendinitis in one of his wrists. This injury prevented him from really playing an instrument for nearly five years. “My whole vibe as a guy was up in the air: like, what am I going to create with; how am I going to be an artist?” Still writing songs but unable to play them, Peck became more focused on lyrics and his studies in liberal arts, on “literature, activism… using a loop peddle and getting into dancing… just, any way to still be a creative guy.”