Guitar, Ensembles
I am a Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, producer/arranger, and teacher with over 40 years experience. I took my first guitar lesson at Old Town School of Folk Music in 1975! As a teaching-artist I'm well versed in most electric and acoustic guitar styles: Finger styles from Nick Drake to Simon & Garfunkel and more, hybrid picking, funk/R&B, altered tunings, all hard and soft types of folk and rock & roll. I'm dedicated to curating a fairly wide variety of music programming genre-wise in classes I lead, as I have a borderline encyclopedic knowledge of popular and unpopular music from the 1950’s through the 2000’s.
I have a B.A. in music from Columbia College in Chicago (1993). I spent 4 years getting a music degree; now I’m spending the rest of my life learning to forget a lot of the whole music school trip. My goal is to just keep getting better at PLAYING MUSIC, often with others, as well as coaching others to help do it too! Music is for everyone. I'm largely self-taught on most instruments I play, but if I’m being honest some of the best teachers are among the many, many artists who inhabit a fairly massive physical & digital music collection I have built over time. I also think in the past 15 years, my best teachers are many of my fellow teaching-artists at OTS, many of whom I’m lucky to get to play music with, and of course students I’m lucky enough to get to coach. We all learn from each other.
Professionally I've self-released multiple albums of original music, playing most all the instruments/effects, ranging from rock/pop to softer acoustic, and instrumental Ambient Guitar Soundscapes to electronic/experimental and beyond. The most recent full-length LP being “More Songs About Time” (2019). My music can be found on Bandcamp, YouTube and more recently on the artist-friendly HI-RES streaming service Qobuz. I’ve played on numerous recordings, including tributes LP's paying homage to Roxy Music/Brian Eno, Squeeze, Jellyfish, Aimee Mann, & Michael Penn and more.
I perform regularly as a solo artist, and have performed with (on guitars, vocals, drums, bass and misc instruments) artists including Steve Dawson, Phil Angotti, Peter Mulvey, Tributosaurus, Congress of Starlings, Jon Brion, Happy Chichester, Dag Juhlin, Justin Roberts, Green, Ralph Covert, Push Puppets, Abbey Road Beatles Project, and more. I've performed at (& helped present) specialty concerts honoring music of Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkel, The Kinks, Laurel Canyon, The Rolling Stones, DISCO, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Jill Sobule, Donovan, and of course Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison & many more.
Now that all that "justify my musical existence" stuff is out of the way, I should point out I love teaching music. I take special care to provide a fun challenging communal learning experience. I believe in “folk music” as an ideology, rather than a specific genre or time period in music history. So much music can be taught via oral tradition… and AURAL tradition. Listening is something we can all get better at as we go at whatever instrument we play. So in a way… whatever can be taught from a song/chord sheet can be considered "folk music” when it’s learned via folk tradition. Be it James Taylor or Taylor Swift. Many things that were popular when I was teenager can be considered “standards” now. It’s not an exclusive realm of Tin Pan Alley songwriters from the last century. We’ll likely be saying that about popular music from the last decade in another 15-20 years, and so on. In a way, I like to think it’s all folk music.
At OTS I teach ensemble classes Tuesdays (909 West Armitage) and Wednesdays (Lincoln Square), and online Saturday mornings (British Rock Songbook Sept-May). I also visit OTS as a substitute teacher for core Guitar, Theory, Songwriting and ensemble classes. I present workshops in person or online, including seasonal Beatles Songbags, and other artists/themes, as well as "Fretboard Geography”, open-tuning and other skills workshops. When not fully immersed in music I enjoy cats, Frisbee, Chicago Bears, White Sox, & Blackhawks, the beach, vacationing in MI, WI & MN, and… true story… my wife’s last name is FOLK (kind of fitting, at least I think).
Education: Education: BA in Music Studies, Columbia College, Chicago 1993
Started at the Old Town School in February of 2011
