On 29 October 2024, ipop hosted a workshop with the American rock guitarist Jennifer Batten. In a field dominated largely by men, Batten is surely one of the best-known and most successful women—and her renown extends beyond the confines of the guitar community.
Batten’s musical training included a period of study at California’s GIT (Guitar Institute of Technology, now the Musicians Institute), where she also became the first woman to assume a teaching role later on. She rose to public prominence during her many years of work as a live guitarist for Michael Jackson, in whose band she played lead guitar between 1987 and 1997 on the world tours for the albums Bad, Dangerous, and HIStory.
Following her work with Jackson, the 1998–2001 period saw Batten collaborate on the albums Who Else and You Had it Coming of the British guitarist Jeff Beck, whom she also joined on multiple world tours. Alongside these two studio albums, their work together is also documented on the DVD Jeff Beck Live in Tokyo 1999. In numerous conversations and interviews, Batten has described Jeff Beck as being among her most important and earliest musical influences—and the artistic experience of collaborating with him indeed embodied the fulfilment of one of her dearest, longest-held wishes.
Alongside her involvement with Jackson and Beck, she has also recorded three albums under her own name—Above, Below & Beyond (1992), Momentum (1997), and Whatever (2007)—as well as the album One Planet Under One Groove (1995) with her band The Immigrants.
Moreover, she can be heard as a guest on numerous releases by other musicians (including Carmine Appice’s Guitar Zeus of 1995) and has authored the guitar tutors The Transcribed Guitar Solos Of Peter Sprague (1991, Woodshed Books) and Two Hand Rock for Guitar – Music, Tablature and Analysis (1995, Hal Leonard).
Batten received the She Rocks Icon Award in January 2016 and was also inducted into Guitar Player magazine’s Gallery of Greats.
In contrast to those numerous guitarists who tour primarily with live bands, Jennifer Batten also offers a solo programme whose substance is situated somewhere between workshop and multimedia show. This nearly two-hour programme, which she presented at ipop, consists of live performances of pieces from her musical career underlaid with visuals; for the most part, it features compositions from her solo albums plus a few pieces from her period with Jeff Beck and an instrumental cover of a Taylor Swift number. In this context, she does without pieces from her time with Michael Jackson such as the guitar solo in Beat It. Her interpretation of that technically demanding part, originally recorded in the studio by Eddie van Halen in two takes, made waves at the time and went on to become one of the musical highlights of those live performances with Jackson.
Between the various pieces, Batten addressed themes including guitar technique-related aspects of what had just been heard such as the role played by tapping or the use of the whammy bar. She also addressed issues beyond the purely musical, discussing her technical equipment and providing tips for working with in-ear monitoring systems, which are now quite common in live work but often little-liked by guitarists due to how their sound takes getting used to. Questions from the audience concerning biographical and musical topics as well as aspects of self-marketing and self-management were likewise answered. On the whole, one noticed this workshop’s fairly “American” orientation, with its educational content being accompanied by a substantial performative component. The latter was underlined above all by the visuals that accompanied Batten’s musical performance, on account of which this workshop’s character did indeed match the genres (pop, rock, virtuosic instrumental music) with which Jennifer Batten is associated.
Above and beyond the specific topics that workshops provide the opportunity to address, some of which are naturally rather instrument-specific, I view the value that mdw students derive from workshops by internationally active artists as being situated above all in two aspects:
First of all, it’s important to encounter as many different successful career paths in the music business as possible. Despite how different we faculty members may be, including in terms of style, what we have in common is the fact that a significant share of our livelihoods is based upon teaching—which means that we present students with a comparably narrow spectrum of life scripts. Against this backdrop, being confronted with successful freelancers’ modes of work and attitudes most certainly represents a great enrichment.
Secondly, a rich assortment of workshops and variously oriented master classes enables our students to also recognise those commonalities among the diverse approaches to a life with music that many of our presenters, regardless of genre, seem to share. In such formats, themes like the importance of functional musical communities for individual musical development, awareness of the power of rhythm and groove, and the ambivalent role of music in the lives of professional musicians between lofty ideals and a mundane means of sustenance are regularly discussed. It is in precisely this combination of universally relevant questions and professional musicians’ individual attempts at answers that we can discern workshops’ and master classes’ great potential to compliment teaching in students’ main artistic subjects.
