Odds & Ends

This page is for those extra odds and ends that don't really fit anywhere else on my website. I may include here, from time to time, thoughts about various subjects, non musical works such as poetry or stories, and, well, various other odds & ends.

The first "odd" is a list of artists, both musicians and non-musicians, who have influenced me as a musician. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list, but can hopefully point someone somewhere to a new discovery that hopefully can have a positive effect on either their art, or their life (or, hopefully, both).

my influences are many; just a few include jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, Johnny Smith, Sarah Vaughan, Clifford Brown, Chet Baker, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Jim Hall, Joe Henderson, John McLaughlin, Pat Martino, John Abercrombie, John Scofield, Lenny Breau, Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, Mick Goodrick, Charlie Haden, Marc Johnson, Peter Erskine, Ben Monder, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Henry Threadgill, Jim Black, and probably many more I'm not thinking of.

I've also been heavily influenced by other styles of music, from pop/rock artists like the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Van Halen, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, K.D. Lang, Emmylou Harris, and many others.

Classical composers like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Ives, Copeland, and Berg (plus many others) have had a big impact on me, as well as film composers Bernard Herrman and Ennio Morricone.

As much as any music, I feel like my musical development has been influenced by books I've read(authors like Poe, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Hemmingway, Thomas Hardy, Gunter Grass, John Irving, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez), paintings I've seen (Picasso, Bosch, Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Frederic Remmington, George Catlin), poems (Archibald Macleish, e.e.cummings, William Carlos Williams)comedians like Charlie Chaplin, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, and films (from filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Fellini, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Sam Raimi, Darren Aronovsky, and many more).



The following are some of the old "News" sections from my home page that might still be worth reading for someone.

News from Summer '07

Despite the lack of gigs, there are few things to report.

No, I didn't get any recording done this summer. Surprise, surprise.


No new stuff up in the articles section, either. I should be ashamed.


The concerts I did this summer both had their moments, and both were caught on video. The solo set I did opening for Nestor Torres for the John Wurm benefit is now available for purchase. It's $40 from www.lightningvideos.com, with the money from all sales going to benefit John Wurm. If you don't know who John Wurm is or why he and his family need money, there is info at the site on that as well.

The show at Glades Guitars went well, and was a lot of fun; it was great to see so many people there to hear Dave, Tony and I. I can't say enough good things about Glades Guitars proprietor Steve Wildey's efforts on behalf of the south Florida music community. He also has a great selection of guitars and guitar related products and accessories, and offers guitar lessons at the store. Check it out at www.gladesguitars.com. When I have the time and energy, I'll put some of the footage from the concert up here.


This fall I'll be starting as the jazz guitar instructor at Florida International University. I'll be directing their jazz guitar ensemble and teaching private lessons. Between that and my existing teaching duties at Miami/Dade College and New World, I'm anticipating having a dizzyingly busy school year this year. I'm looking forward to starting at FIU, though. I've also just completed a new guitar ensemble arrangement of John Coltrane's Blue Train.


This summer I bought a few new books that I'm pretty excited about. The first is Melodic Improvising For Guitar by my friend Bruce Saunders. It has some great concepts, and addresses a problem common to a lot of guitar players (and probably other instrumentalists as well), being able to compose coherent melody lines through a set of chord changes. Most guitarists (myself included) are guilty at one time or another of playing one idea over one chord, another idea over the next chord, and so on. The visual/pattern aspect of our instrument makes it easy to fall into this trap. In his book, Bruce gives exercises designed to break out of those habits. I'm going to be using some of the ideas from the book this fall in my improv class at Miami/Dade. The book is available from Mel Bay, and I highly recommend it.


I also finally picked up Mick Goodrick's Almanac Of Guitar Voice Leading, volumes I and II. I consider Mick to be a huge role model; I have based much of my playing and teaching on the concepts outlined in his book The Advancing Guitarist. With these newest volumes, Mick addresses the "complete set" of all possible 3 and 4 note chords in the context of the major, melodic minor, and harmonic minor scales, and presents every possible way to move from one chord to the next using common tone voice leading. When I first saw a copy of the first volume a few years back, I was pretty befuddled by all the lists of letters and the different colored pages. But after I read and absorbed the introduction and played through some of the examples, I realized what a great and valuable resource this is. I've been working with just the triad section of book one for the last several weeks, and have already begun to see a significant impact for the better on my playing. Anyway, I highly recommend these two volumes, particularly the first one, and am looking forward to the release of volume III. To any of my students who are reading this, I'm sure you'll be seeing some of the material from these books in upcoming lessons.

For anyone who isn't familiar with Mick Goodrick's books and/or teaching, one of the most fundamental ideas he stresses is the idea of presenting the student with the nuts and bolts of how things work in music and on the guitar, and setting it up so that the student has to figure a lot of the specifics, the "method," his or her self. You won't find any "licks" in Mick's books, or any quick and easy "no nonsense" shortcuts. As my teacher Jack Petersen used to say, "music's hard and tricky." It's a huge undertaking, one that would take several lifetimes (or maybe more) to explore completely. A lot of the instructional materials I've seen show you how to do something; "play this and it'll sound good." That way of doing things does indeed often produce quick results, but at the expense of creating a firm grounding with which to build one's music on. What I love about Mick's ideas is that they tend to concentrate on the big picture more, and each person who works with them will probably produce different specific results (and maybe, just maybe, come up with their own musical voice in the process). I've also found myself many times over the years coming back to The Advancing Guitarist and rereading sections, and finding things in them, or new ways of looking at them that I'd never noticed before. Anyway, if you are merely looking for a shortcut to being able to wow people with your chops, Mick's books probably aren't for you. If, on the other hand, you want to approach the undertaking of music and playing the guitar as a long term adventure, one that's got the potential of bringing you and your audiences deep spiritual satisfaction, I can't think of a better place to start than with The Advancing Guitarist and now the Almanac Of Guitar Voice Leading.


By the way, I swear I'm not getting any kickbacks or bribes from Glades Guitars, Bruce Saunders or Mick Goodrick.