Ever since becoming a father, I had quietly hoped that one of my children might someday take to the guitar as I had decades earlier. After years of music lessons on other instruments, I had mostly accepted that this was unlikely to happen. Then, around the time my daughter, Lake, turned 14—the same age I was when I got my first guitar—she took a sudden and unexpected interest in the instrument.

Lake had a leg up on many young players, having taken cello lessons for years and been given access to a guitar that is hardly a beginner instrument: a well-loved Martin 000-18 that her grandfather bought new in 1956 with money earned from newspaper routes, and which eventually will go to the grandchild with the greatest affinity for the guitar. Needless to say, I am quietly rooting for Lake.

It’s been beautiful to watch Lake learn an instrument whose layout is entirely different from the cello’s, and to see her begin connecting the dots between songs, styles, harmonic movement, and techniques. I’ve also been struck hearing her lament not having a guitar on vacation—something I remember feeling acutely at her age.

Just as gratifying has been watching her gravitate not toward whatever music happens to dominate among her peers and the airwaves, but toward whatever genuinely catches her ear. So far that has meant everything from metal tunes like “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica to folk songs like “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell.

As she plays, I am frequently tempted to offer well-meaning suggestions—small corrections, alternate fingerings, shortcuts that might make things easier. My wife always stops me. She feels it’s better for Lake to discover things on her own, to overcome struggles and develop her own relationship with the instrument. When I mentioned this to a friend who has retired from music publishing and now runs a community music school in the Bay Area, he agreed.

“Let her come to you,” he said.

So I was especially pleased when Lake did just that the other week with a question about open-D tuning after learning “Both Sides Now.” She had become curious about “Shelter from the Storm,” from Blood on the Tracks, but the charts she found online didn’t sound right—cowboy chords in standard tuning that clearly weren’t capturing the more colorful and resonant sound of the studio recording.

I was proud of her for noticing, and I jumped at the opportunity—not just to help but to be something other than weird and embarrassing, if just in passing. I jotted down the progression below in the style of Bob Dylan’s guitar part, played not in standard tuning but in open D with a capo at the second fret.

In the last few years, Lake has also become a big fan of sea shanties, particularly as sung by the British folk band the Longest Johns. She recently discovered the group’s arrangement of the traditional song “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song),” which is also played in open D, capo II, and found some tablature online.

Like so much internet notation, it was crude and only loosely related to what was actually being played. I was pleased, to say the least, that she had already begun recognizing this for herself, just as I had with songbooks at her age.

Though it’s often hard to justify the time required to notate songs properly for usage outside of professional life, I took Father’s Day as an excuse to transcribe the arrangement, with its simple shapes but colorful chords, as heard on the Longest Johns’ 2023 collection, C-Sides. I am hoping that Lake will eventually ask me what all those unfamiliar chord symbols mean and how they work.

Fare Thee Well (dink's Song) Full Score

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What I’ve come to understand is that passing on music, at least in my case, has less to do with instruction than with presence and availability. Much as I may want to explain or clarify, most of that only matters when the invitation comes. Until then, perhaps the best thing I can do is keep the guitars nearby and be ready when curiosity strikes.

And there’s something especially moving about watching the old Martin that belonged to Lake’s grandfather in her hands. A guitar bought 70 years ago with paper-route money has somehow found its way to another generation of player. I have no idea whether the instrument will become a lasting part of Lake’s life—and it’s not up to me—but for now it feels meaningful enough just to see that instrument making this particular journey.

Of all the fingerstyle guitarists to emerge over the last five decades, few have followed a path as wide-ranging as Richard “Duck” Baker. Equally at home with old-time music, ragtime, swing, Irish traditional music, modern jazz, and free improvisation, Baker has spent much of his career pursuing whatever music happened to catch his ear—and then figuring out how to make it work on the guitar.

After immersing himself in blues and folk music, along with ragtime, early jazz, and other largely neglected American styles during his formative years in Richmond, Virginia, Baker moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s. There he played bluegrass, learned swing from older musicians on the traditional jazz scene, and absorbed ideas that would shape his approach for decades to come. At the same time, he began arranging some of that repertoire for solo guitar, continually revisiting and reimagining it over the years, while also composing original pieces, of which there are now hundreds.

Baker’s curiosity led him in many directions—from the New York improvising scene, where he worked with musicians such as Eugene Chadbourne and John Zorn, to the United Kingdom, where he immersed himself in Irish and other traditional music. Along the way he recorded more than three dozen albums as a leader, along with 11 duo recordings, and documented many of his ideas in books and instructional videos.

Among the highlights of that discography are his debut, There’s Something for Everyone in America (1976), a collection of old-time tunes and arrangements accompanied by a tablature book; Kid on the Mountain (1980), a pioneering album that appears to have been the first solo-guitar recording devoted entirely to Celtic music by a single artist; and two personal favorites, Spinning Song (1996), devoted to the compositions of the brilliant and underappreciated jazz pianist Herbie Nichols, and Duck Baker Plays Monk (2017), a deeply personal exploration of the music of Thelonious Monk.

When my friend Teja Gerken, a former editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine, recently mentioned that Baker was retiring and suggested I feature him on this Substack, I realized we had somehow never spoken. That seemed worth correcting. In the conversation that follows, edited and condensed for clarity, Baker reflects on a long career spent following musical interests wherever they happened to lead, and on a life that, while never especially lucrative, has been rich in music, friendships, and experience.

Coming of age in Richmond, Virginia, what was your path into music and fingerpicking?

Well, I came out of the folk scene and playing in rock bands and electric blues bands when I was a teenager. The musician who probably influenced me most wasn’t a guitarist at all. He was a ragtime piano player named Buck Evans.

This would’ve been around 1965 or ’66, and nobody was paying much attention to ragtime then. The big revival hadn’t happened yet. It wasn’t until Joshua Rifkin’s records started coming out around 1970 that everybody suddenly got interested in Scott Joplin. Buck was way ahead of that. He got me listening to ragtime and early jazz and reading about it. Jelly Roll Morton and all that sort of thing. He opened up a whole world for me.

When I first got interested in fingerpicking, I learned from other kids hanging around coffeehouses. One of them, Larry McCullough, was a really good acoustic blues player and showed me a lot of things I wouldn’t have figured out on my own. Beyond that, I was mostly self-taught. I was playing guitar six hours a day and trying to figure out how things worked.

One thing that probably made me a little different was that I never thought I was supposed to sound exactly like other people. There was a Willie Brown piece called “Mississippi Blues” that a lot of players tried to reproduce note-for-note from the recording. I never really saw any reason to do that. I just thought of it as a piece of music. If I wanted to change a phrase or alter something, I did.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that’s the only way to approach things. There are lots of great musicians who came through more formal study. Somebody like Ralph Towner. Somebody like Julian Lage. Nobody could complain about the results they’ve gotten. But I came straight out of fingerpicking and folk music that had been defined by older blues players, as well as people like Dave Van Ronk and, to a large extent, Merle Travis.

One thing that never made much sense to me was the idea that if you wanted to become a better musician, you were supposed to go study classical music. A lot of people felt that way, but it wasn’t really my path. I was trying to expand the folk approach I already had. I started learning swing chord changes and making fingerstyle arrangements of tunes I had been playing in a duo setting.

People like Charlie Byrd were important to me because they seemed to point toward another possibility. Charlie’s father ran a little country store where local musicians—including Black musicians from the area—would gather and play on the porch, and Charlie knew Joe Maphis when they were boys. He came out of a musical world that made sense to me.

Once I started playing swing, I thought, well, I’m supposed to be improvising solos. So I began trying to improvise while keeping the bass going. That’s really what I’ve always been trying to do. For more modern jazz, somebody like Thelonious Monk or Herbie Nichols, it often works better if the bass moves in half notes instead of an alternating-bass pattern. As long as you’re playing that alternating bass, it tends to sound like swing or ragtime.

That’s why the idea that I should go study classical guitar or work with a jazz teacher never made much sense to me. Obviously there are great musicians who took that route—Julian Lage would be an example—but it wasn’t how I got there.

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For reasons I can’t entirely explain, I never spent much time with the music of James Blood Ulmer. I had long been aware of his reputation as one of the most singular voices on the electric guitar and had of course encountered his music from time to time over the years, but I never really dug into the recordings. When I learned of Ulmer’s death on June 3 at the age of 86, it seemed like a good opportunity to correct that oversight.

Born in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Ulmer grew up playing gospel music before spending years working in R&B, funk, and jazz settings throughout the Midwest. After moving to New York in the early 1970s, where he became a mainstay on the downtown scene, he met Ornette Coleman and became one of the musicians most closely associated with the saxophonist’s harmolodic concepts, which emphasized melodic freedom over predetermined harmonic movement. Coleman coproduced and played on Tales of Captain Black, Ulmer’s first album under his own name, and the two worked together extensively throughout the 1970s.

Over the next several decades, Ulmer released a series of acclaimed recordings and built a devoted following among musicians and listeners alike. Though he never exactly became a household name, his influence can be heard in many subsequent players. Albums like Are You Glad to Be in America?, Free Lancing, Black Rock, and Odyssey are a good place to start for anyone interested in music that draws freely from jazz, blues, funk, and rock, yet sounds unlike much else before or since. The music is often incredibly exciting.

While listening to Ulmer’s music over the last couple of weeks, I became curious about what was going on in his guitar playing. To get a better sense of his approach, I transcribed a handful of passages that can be conveyed in standard notation, even though much of his music seems to resist that kind of treatment. On the harmonically static “Page One: Grand Finale” from Harmolodic Guitar with Strings, for instance, Ulmer begins alone, establishing a two-bar theme that repeats throughout the piece, calling to mind the heads of such compact tunes as Thelonious Monk’s “Friday the 13th.”

The strings state the melody almost exactly the same way each time, but Ulmer’s lines change markedly from one pass to the next, as shown in bars 3–4 and 5–6 below. Equally striking is the guitar’s percussive quality. The repeated open strings sometimes resemble pitched drums more than a conventional guitar accompaniment, and the placement of accents is often difficult to predict.

The excerpt below captures only a small part of the performance, which clocks in at around 90 seconds total. If nothing else, spending time with these few measures has convinced me that I should have been listening to James Blood Ulmer much sooner.

Page One Grand Finale (excerpt) Full Score

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Last week I was on a family vacation in New York when I noticed on Instagram that tickets would be going on sale within the hour for a show on the 29th, in which Julian Lage would be talking about his most recent album, Scenes from Above, …

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Every week, hundreds of press releases land in my inbox. Most get a quick scan before I move on to the next thing. The announcement for Matthew Stevens’ new self-titled album might have met the same fate had I not happen to notice a guest appearance by guitarist Dylan Day, whose music I had become fascinated by while preparing an interview for this Substack.

The record turned out to be a fortunate discovery, to say the least. Though Stevens has spent the last two decades building a reputation as a guitarist and collaborator—working with artists including bassist Esperanza Spalding, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, and saxophonist Walter Smith III—the thing that drew me most strongly to the album was not the guitar playing itself. Rather, it was the overall sound of the record: the interplay of acoustic and electric textures, the sharp attention to timbral detail, and the sense of space around the instruments. I found myself listening not to any one part but to the sound of the record itself, which felt every bit as important as the notes and their durations.

Born in Toronto and now based in the Boston area, where he is an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music, Stevens has followed a musical path that has taken him well beyond the traditional boundaries of jazz guitar. In addition to three previous albums as a leader, his work has touched everything from adventurous improvised music to singer-songwriter projects and ambitious studio productions, and those varied experiences seem to inform every corner of his latest record.

In a recent conversation over Zoom, Stevens reflected on the musical path that took him from Toronto to New York and eventually Boston, his evolution as a guitarist and bandleader, the challenges and rewards of collaboration, and the ideas that shaped the new record.

You grew up in Canada and later spent years in New York before settling near Boston. What shaped you musically during those periods?

Growing up in Toronto was a great place to be a guitar player, especially one who was interested in improvised music. There has always been a really strong music scene there, and when I expressed an interest in improvising and jazz, it was like, “Well, why don’t you just go see Ed Bickert play every week?” That was really formative for me. Not only Ed, but lots of other great musicians like Lorne Lofsky and Reg Schwager. And of course, Lenny Breau lived there for quite a long time. I feel like his influence permeated the guitar community and was pretty strongly felt in Toronto. So all of that was highly influential and really formative for me.

Your music seems to draw naturally from jazz, folk, ambient music, and Americana without ever sounding contrived. How did you arrive at that openness?

I think it was gradual. When you’re trying to earn a living as a musician, there’s so much that’s outside of your control. Opportunities come from all different corners of the music world, and I was always just trying to bring my best to every situation.

I didn’t start playing improvised music—I started playing in bands with friends in middle school. That’s really where I come from musically. That community and that way of making music and collaborating always felt very natural to me, so it was kind of omnipresent in everything I was doing.

As I started getting called to do different things, I became really aware of not wanting to feel like I was shape-shifting or putting on a different hat to play in a different corner of the music world. Some of the musicians I admire tremendously, like Daniel Lanois and Brian Blade, seem able to function really seamlessly in a variety of situations while maintaining a core sense of themselves and how they sound. They find a way to connect with what’s important about whatever music they’re playing.

I think I made a concerted effort to do that at first, and gradually it became second nature. At this point I really see it all as one much larger thing. I’m naturally drawn to seeing the continuity between these different musical languages and what carries over between them more than what separates them. It feels very second nature to me now.

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A couple weeks ago, I was doing some mindless scrolling on Instagram when I noticed Adam Levy had liked a post by a guitarist whose name was unfamiliar to me. Given Levy’s impeccable taste and musical curiosity, I figured the like was worth paying attention to, so I clicked on the video and quickly found myself down a rabbit hole wa…

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Not long ago, I encountered a steel-string acoustic guitar that spoke to me like few ever have: a custom OM1 A Maple from Collings Guitars’ new Hill Country series. The instrument felt almost magical, the notes possessing a thick, cutting presence without excessive brightness, the registers perfectly balanced, and the intonation…

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When I first interviewed Wendy Eisenberg in 2019, they were emerging as one of the most distinctive voices in a younger generation of guitarists shaped by free improvisation and nonstandard musical thinking. We spoke for Acoustic Guitar magazine around the release of Its Shape Is Your Touch, a solo acoustic album built from spontaneous compositions and exploratory approaches to harmony, gesture, and texture. Eisenberg talked about improvisation less as a style than as a way of engaging critically and personally with sound—setting up problems on the guitar and teasing them out in real time, whether through unusual chord voicings or the emotional associations contained within something as simple as an open C chord.

In the years since, Eisenberg’s music has continued to expand in all directions. They’ve moved fluidly between free improvisation, art-rock, noise music, jazz, and folk-informed songwriting, often within the span of a single year or even a single project. Albums like Auto and Viewfinder pushed further into collaborative and large-ensemble territory, while other releases explored banjo music, intimate song forms, and increasingly personal writing. Along the way, Eisenberg has become not just a prolific recording artist and collaborator but one of the most compelling musical thinkers working around the guitar today.

Eisenberg’s recent self-titled album feels different, though not necessarily like a break from the earlier work. Written during a period of major personal change following their move from Western Massachusetts to Brooklyn, the album channels many of the same exploratory instincts into songs that feel unusually direct, emotionally open, and deeply rooted in the history of the guitar itself. The record draws inspiration from figures like Gillian Welch, Willie Nelson, and Judee Sill, as well as more idiosyncratic songwriters like Richard Dawson and Joanna Newsom, while still carrying the sensibility of someone shaped by years of improvisation.

When we spoke recently, our conversation ranged from songwriting to the enduring influence of Ran Blake, the emotional resonance of certain guitars, and why a taped-on car bumper and an encounter with a Tacoma acoustic guitar on a trip to Staten Island ended up becoming important parts of this particular record. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

When we last talked, a lot of your thinking centered on improvisation as a way of understanding music in real time. I’m curious about how improvisation shows up in your latest work, which is of course more singer-songwriter oriented.

The journey that that took me to this record or something is kind of paralleling something deep in my life, where before I even improvised at all, I was trying to write songs. So it feels kind of like a strange return to form, to be presenting something so extremely song-forward. Like, let’s not be too weird with the song itself, but show how weird song form itself can be.

There’s one narrative of my life in music that would be easier to trace, which is when you were 12 years old you wrote songs, and then you got into things that were improvisational because you loved it, but it was all kind of in service of some aesthetic or spiritual impulse within a song, which is the spark of recognition.

And I think for many years in my 20s—and now I don’t know why I’m saying my 20s like I’m 100 years old or something—but every bit of free improvised work that I really love takes on the character of a song. I file it in my brain in the same place the best songs live. And it’s because there’s something that’s recognizing me, or that I’m recognizing, that I had previously not known or not admitted to myself. Songs just seem to be the places where that kind of psychoanalytic space is contained.

So the actual material practice of it, beyond this weird philosophy, is that every time I sit down to write a song, it’s based on some kind of improvisation, and it’s segmenting the improvisation until I can enlarge it into the thing it’s reminding me of. A lot of the songs on this record would have been momentary occurrences in a longer-form improvisation—or they were when I was writing them. But there’s just something that made me want to come back. You can’t really write a new song without improvising a little bit, I think. Or at least not a good one.

What does that look like in practice?

Improvisation is just the practice of living for me. Whenever I sit and practice guitar, I’ll be trying to touch up on things that are more programmatic or already existing or something. But usually they’re on a very simple level—an interval, a chord voicing, something like that. And then if I’m improvising with whatever structure that is, something will happen and I’m like, well, there needs to be further development here. That’s where the song comes out of.

So it’s not like a long trance where I’m improvising and then all of a sudden I’m like, “Aha.” It’s more like I’m solving some other musical problem through improvising, and then I’m like, well actually this is speaking to a feeling on a much more emotional level. So let’s just hang out with the feeling that the improvisation or the practice brought forth.

We both came out of the Contemporary Improvisation program at New England Conservatory, and I’m wondering how that experience continues to shape your music in all forms.

It’s amazing you’re asking that because just this morning I finally read Ted Reichman’s piece about being influenced by Anthony Braxton and being taken into his orbit. He was kind of writing about the strange place those teachers occupied. Like, the future of the universe depends on whether or not you play accordion with me. There was this openness of approach where songs were taken just as seriously as more strictly improvisational, Derek Bailey-ish, Tony Oxley-ish places. They just took creative music seriously.

My undergraduate program [at the Eastman School of Music] was incredible and rigorous, but they didn’t really take these newer and far less potentially lucrative forms seriously. So when I think about the shifts I’ve been able to make in my career—from improviser to songwriter to whatever, sometimes within the span of a week—that paradigm wouldn’t have felt as supported anywhere else.

And also you just see people from the program all the time. There’s definitely an NEC mafia in New York that I’m kind of tangential to. But really, on a practical level, the openness of approach from people like Anthony Coleman and especially Joe Morris—who as far as I know doesn’t really write songs—made my life conceivable to me. And that’s paid off pretty handily. So I’m very indebted.

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I first met Sean McGowan some years ago in the Bay Area video studio at Acoustic Guitar magazine, where he was filming a review of a Collings OM built in collaboration with Julian Lage. Before the cameras were fully set, he sat with the instrument for a few minutes, just long enough to get his bearings, and the room shifted in that subtle way it sometimes does when a player settles in. The guitar was already familiar to me—clear, balanced, impeccably made—but in his hands it seemed to open up, the lines taking on more heft, the sound traveling further than expected.

I’ve since worked with McGowan in a number of contexts—lessons and features for the magazine and its Patreon page, transcriptions for his publications, and, more recently, editing and engraving his book The Holistic Guitarist: A Complete Guide to Musical Well-Being, a project that stands a little apart in the guitar world in the way it treats playing as something inseparable from the physical and mental habits that support it.

In the course of that work, I’ve gotten a clearer sense of how his music fits together. The extended techniques that can look on paper like tricky feats of coordination tend to come across in practice as straightforward musical choices—ways of getting at a sound or a line that wouldn’t be available otherwise, and that don’t call attention to themselves once they’re in place.

Based in Colorado, McGowan works across performing, teaching, and recording, and that mix of experiences feeds directly into his latest album, All Blues, available now on Bandcamp or for preorder in a deluxe vinyl edition. The project grew out of extended access to a group of instruments from the Blue Guitar Collection—large, cerulean-finished archtops commissioned mostly in the 1990s by collector Scott Chinery, each built by a different luthier within a shared set of parameters. Given more than a few minutes with them—time to actually live with the instruments rather than sample them—McGowan set about figuring out what each one had to say.

Recorded under controlled conditions—same player, same room, same microphones—the album ends up documenting those differences in a direct way. The shifts in feel and response from one guitar to the next are easy to hear, and they shape the music accordingly, whether in solo settings or in the duo and trio pieces that round out the program. I spoke with McGowan about that process—what surprised him once the novelty wore off, how the guitars influenced his choices, and what it means to spend real time with instruments that most players only encounter in photographs or in passing.

You’ve recently spent time with a number of guitars from the Blue Guitar Collection, and I’m curious what surprised you once you got past the idea of them and started living with them day to day.

Yeah, that’s a great question. Just for a brief backdrop, I became aware of them peripherally through a very dear friend of mine, Brad Nickerson, who’s one of the original Chinery collection luthiers. I remember him working on getting that commission back in the ’90s, so it’s always kind of been there.

Then I had the opportunity a few years back, when the Archtop Foundation purchased the collection and started bringing them to shows—that was really cool. That was my first opportunity to play them, but it was more like playing them for a couple of minutes in a noisy room at a guitar show, or something like that. I even did a couple of performances at shows on a few of the guitars—I played a gig with Paul Asbell on the Benedetto—but even after having the opportunity to perform with them, it wasn’t the same as, like you say, living with them.

That’s when I started really appreciating them on a very deep level—the craftsmanship, the unbelievable attention to detail, and also being able to see the stylistic differences and choices between all of these master luthiers. If you have a minute by yourself, or hours by yourself, or days, to look at these guitars side by side—to look at the tailpiece, the way the bridge is designed and structured, all of these little details—it feels like you’re just going deeper and deeper into the mind and the heart and soul of the builder, which I think is a wonderful thing to observe.

And then sonically, I think that also really surprised me. Part of the fun of doing this record was that the equation was the same player, same engineer, same microphones—same everything—except for the guitars. The more I listened to the recordings through the mixing process and then mastering, the more I was really able to discern these subtle—and now, to me, not so subtle—differences in the sound between these guitars. They all have their own personalities, visually and sonically.

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Sometime in the mid-2010s, I opened the case containing a Brazilian rosewood Martin orchestra model—my most prized instrument at the time—and was dismayed to find that its ivoroid binding, once a pristine, uniform crème, had taken on a series of faint green splotches throughout.

I brought the guitar to Westwood Music in Los Angeles, the nearest authorized Martin repair shop. The repair tech on duty, Isaac Jang, looked improbably young, but spoke about the instrument with a kind of ease and authority that suggested long familiarity. He quickly identified the issue as pigment transfer from the lining of the case.

There was no simple remedy—the guitar would need to be re-bound, and was better left as is. But I left it with him anyway for a setup, and when I picked it up a week later, it felt subtly different, but in important ways: more responsive, more coherent, as if some small internal resistance had been removed.

I began returning to Westwood from time to time, often without a specific reason, just to chat with him. One afternoon he showed me a photo on his phone of a guitar he was building. Not long after, he mentioned that he was opening a shop of his own in Hollywood. When I visited, what struck me was not just its size—barely more than a single room—but the degree of order. Everything seemed considered. Sets of spruce, rosewood, and mahogany were stacked with care, already matched and waiting; the guitars in progress had a clarity to their lines, a restraint in their detailing, that suggested a sensibility already formed.

It was hard not to feel that he had arrived at something early.

In the years since, Jang has become one of the more closely followed steel-string builders of his generation. His instruments surface in a small number of boutique shops and, increasingly, circulate on the secondary market at prices that exceed his original ones—an outcome that reflects both demand and a certain scarcity of output.

I no longer live in Los Angeles, but we have stayed in touch—occasionally running into each other at trade shows, or exchanging messages that pick up where things left off. When we spoke recently, I was curious how those early conditions—the small shop, the years in repair, the apprenticeship with luthier Kathy Wingert—read to him now, and how his work has changed as the context around it has grown.

As with these pieces, I’ve included a transcription. I was also glad to come across a series of video demos on Jang’s YouTube page by guitarist Harrison Whitford, best known for his work with the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, whose playing I first encountered on social media in a beautiful interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “The Single Petal of a Rose.” A transcription of one of Whitford’s harmonically searching improvisations on a Jang OM follows.

When I first visited your shop, it was maybe 200 square feet and almost monastic in its order. How does working in a larger space now change your day-to-day thinking and pace?

It’s been an interesting development. That old Hollywood shop was an amazing place to start my career. Part of it was just being there—the energy, the surroundings, something about that really pushed me forward. But after about five years, I felt like I had outgrown it. I had used every square inch, and even though I was maximizing it, I started to feel the limitations.

I would be working on one stage of a guitar, and then to move forward I had to reset everything—clear the bench, reorganize, set up again. So I thought, if I had more space, I could keep different stations going at once: one for binding, one for sanding, one for assembly. The idea was maybe I could build more guitars, maybe one or two more a year.

But that didn’t really happen. What actually changed was the level of refinement. I’m still making about five or six guitars a year, but I’m able to slow down in a different way, be more thorough, really dial things in.

Now the shop is about 1,300 square feet. I’ve got about 700 for the main woodworking, 200 for finishing and buffing, and another 400 that’s more like a dry room and office. It’s on a second floor, but it almost feels like a third-floor height, with light coming in from all sides. I can look out over Main Street in Downtown Alhambra. It feels open, calmer. I feel very fortunate to be there.

When you first approached Kathy Wingert to apprentice with her, you had no skills, just the willingness to sweep the floor. What do you think she saw the second time around that made her say yes?

I think about that a lot now, especially because I get those same kinds of inquiries. When I first reached out to her, I was 18, right out of high school, and she said no. She didn’t have the space, and she didn’t want another person in the shop. But she didn’t just shut the door—she gave me direction. She said, if you really want to do this, go to guitar-making school, build a couple of instruments, work in repair, and go back to college. She told me I was too young to not have options.

So I took that seriously. I took a semester off, worked at a restaurant to save up, went to the Galloup School of Lutherie, built two guitars—one acoustic, one electric—came back to L.A., got a job in a repair shop, and re-enrolled in college for business management.

When I reached out to Kathy again, I wasn’t even asking to be an apprentice. I just wanted her to look at the guitars and give me feedback. But when she saw them, she asked if I had time to work for her.

Looking back, I think it was persistence. I kept showing up. And at that point my best ability was just availability—I was ready to do whatever it took. I was also young enough that I could unlearn things and learn her way. I later heard that after that call, before I even came in, she told her daughter, “I think we just got an apprentice.” So I think she saw something forming there.

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I’ve been thinking lately about how much I’ve enjoyed hearing musicians I’ve followed for years in new settings, especially alongside a younger generation of players. For me, the drummer and percussionist Kenny Wollesen has long been tied to a downtown New York lineage I was listening closely to years ago. Seeing him more recently with Julian Lage, I was struck by how easily he fit into a different context, without losing any of what drew me to his playing in the first place.

I came across Dida Pelled through that same orbit—Wollesen, along with bassist Tony Scherr—but what kept me listening was something more specific.

Pelled plays a 1970s Gibson Howard Roberts, straight into the amp, no effects. Her sound is clean and unforced, and it leaves very little to hide behind. Her time sits in a slightly elastic place, the phrasing feels conversational, and the lines tend toward what’s necessary rather than what’s possible. It’s understated, but after a few minutes you start to hear how much is going on.

She moved to New York at 20, studied at The New School, and worked her way into the club circuit. Over time, her music has widened to include blues, folk, and song-based material alongside a deep grounding in jazz. Projects like “The Lost Women of Song,” built around writers such as Connie Converse and Molly Drake, point to that broader curiosity, as does her weekly Radio Free Brooklyn program, “The Dida Show,” where she talks with musicians and follows those same threads of listening and influence. On her upcoming album, I Wish You Would (out May 1), she works with Wollesen, Scherr, and pianist Sullivan Fortner in a blues-centered setting that feels like a natural extension of what she’s been doing.

I recently spoke about with Pelled about her early listening, how her relationship to the blues developed over time, her approach to time and phrasing, and the process of arriving at a sound this direct. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Growing up in Tel Aviv, what did your listening world sound like before you found your way to jazz and blues?

When I was very young, I liked random stuff—Spice Girls and really shitty music that kids listen to—but I was a mega fan. My parents had a media company, like newspapers, so they could print things for me. They made me a business card, and on the back it said something like “Number One Spice Girls Fan in the World.” My dad used to travel a lot to America, and he always brought me Spice Girls stuff. I was like a collector. I was very invested in what I loved.

So I loved pop—Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls—and also hip-hop. I remember people made fun of me because I would memorize all the words to rap songs and know how to do the rap parts.

Then when I started playing guitar, around 11, I really loved Nirvana Unplugged. I played a lot of acoustic rock—Nirvana and also Israeli rock from the ’90s that I still love. Those were my first musical loves that I remember.

Then I went to a really amazing high school in Tel Aviv, Thelma Yellin. I don’t know if you know other Israeli musicians, but a lot of them probably went there. It has a great jazz department. There was an incredible teacher, Amit Golan, who passed away, and he taught jazz history in the first year.

I remember the first lesson—he said all these names, and it sounded like Chinese to me. Bud Powell, Sonny Clark, Erroll Garner, Kenny Dorham. Nothing made sense. It sounded really foreign. And then three months in, I couldn’t care about anything else but bebop. Every time my dad went to America, I would ask him to bring me CDs—Peter Bernstein, Grant Green.

So from 15 to 18, that was all I cared about. I loved that Grant Green double record with Sonny Clark. I loved Monk, the record with Monk and Coltrane, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery. I was obsessed. I think those were really meaningful years because I was practicing a lot and really trying to learn the language. And I feel like it served me until today—that’s my core.

But then at 18, I started singing. Secretly. I wanted to sing, and it came all of a sudden, like coming out of the closet. I was like, oh my god, I have to do this. But I was kind of shy, because I was already playing professional gigs on guitar, and it didn’t feel like my singing would be at that level.

So I took lessons with this weird voice teacher. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to voice lessons, but it can get really strange with all the exercises. He was extra strange.

For like two years, I secretly went to him. I started maybe calling one song at a gig. But when I moved to New York, for some reason I wasn’t scared anymore, because no one knew me. So I could just say, “Hey, I play guitar and sing,” and show up to gigs as that person, without having to tell my friends, “Now I’m also singing.”

And singing reconnected me to more music. I still loved jazz and learned standards and started singing them, but I also started singing Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Lou Reed. I remember calling those songs at gigs and kind of treating them as jazz—sing it, play a little solo, sing it out. And then I started messing with songwriting pretty early, too.

I Wish You Would came out of repertoire you’d been performing for years. At what point did you start to hear this particular collection of tunes as an album?

Those tunes were with me, I guess, since I moved to New York. I talked about the history of my taste, but when I moved to New York, I started diving more into blues—not consciously. I didn’t tell myself it was happening. Those things take time. It’s kind of instinct.

I started being drawn to more of that. I started going to Sunny’s every Wednesday—Smokey Hormel plays there—and I was like, oh my god, I love this Western swing repertoire. That’s kind of where something like I Wish You Would comes from—this bluesy, dancing kind of song you can imagine there, with people dancing.

Then I found Tony Scherr playing every Monday at the Living Room—just singing and playing guitar. That was the best thing in New York. A lot of musicians would show up just to see him. His playing and singing felt like Jimi Hendrix—the best thing you’ve ever seen—but bluesy, jazzy, also rock. So when I discovered that, I was like, oh my god, this is actually how I want to play and sing.

That influenced a lot. One of the songs on the record, “Trouble,” I learned from hearing Tony play it live. There’s not really a recording of it online. He learned it from Dakota Staton, who recorded it, and it was written by Gladys Shelley. I asked Tony to play it with me on the record, and we did a duo—he plays guitar and I sing.

So the repertoire came from just living in New York, finding different scenes, collecting things. At first I didn’t think of it as a record. I got distracted with other things—I started writing songs, making albums of original music, doing different projects.

Then I started playing at Ornithology. They gave me a residency, and I brought back a lot of these tunes that came from years of collecting. I also had a project called “The Lost Women of Song,” where I found songs written by women who never really had careers—like Connie Converse or Molly Drake, who was Nick Drake’s mother.

I would do shows with that material, tell whatever stories I could find, and play the songs. Some of those ended up on the record. Like “Rosa Mae” by Mary Lou Williams—I found a clip where she sings it at the end of an interview and learned the words from that.

So all these things came from different phases, and at Ornithology I started calling them because they were fun—for the band, for the audience. People could dance, or just connect. It felt easy, emotionally connecting.

And the way people responded made me feel like, actually, this makes sense to record. Before, I thought it was too easy for me—that I should make something more challenging or more original. But then I realized maybe the thing that’s easy for me is actually what works the most.

So I wanted to make an album that feels natural—just performance and interaction, making it sound like myself, not trying too hard. Meeting [producer] Matt Pierson helped a lot. He came to see me live many times and wanted to make the album that sounds like me in the most natural way. So that helped me decide.

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I’ve seen Bill Frisell many times over the years, but a concert last Saturday night at SFJAZZ—presented in honor of his 75th birthday—was among the most memorable. I had bought the ticket months earlier without paying much attention to the lineup. Only when the musicians began to take the stage did it become clear that this would be something different.

I had also spoken with Frisell previously for this Substack, and over the years I’ve most often heard him live in lean settings: trios with Ron Carter and Paul Motian or with Joe Lovano and Motian, and in duo with Julian Lage. This ensemble was something else entirely. Alongside a rhythm section of bassist Luke Bergman and drummer Timothy Angulo were a string trio—violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang, and cellist Hank Roberts—plus trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and vocalist Petra Haden.

The program unfolded almost like a musical autobiography, touching on many of the traditions that have long animated Frisell’s work. Traditional American songs such as Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” appeared alongside Duke Ellington tunes and, unexpectedly, a James Bond theme. Over the course of the evening, Frisell drew lines between eras, styles, composers, and songwriters, and among the musicians onstage, who themselves spanned several generations.

Just as striking were the connections within the songs themselves—the sense that these melodies are pieces Frisell has lived with for decades, returning to them until their inner relationships gradually reveal themselves, each revisit turning up some small new inflection or harmonic turn. Watching him play, you could hear the way he links fragments of melody and harmony across the fretboard—small gestures that connect pieces of musical history in ways that feel thoughtful and unforced. Equally compelling was the way he handled the ensemble, drawing out the distinct personalities of the players and subtly reshaping the group from piece to piece so that the music continually opened onto new textures and combinations.

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I’ve long admired the work and thinking of Adam Levy, one of the first guitarists I covered on this Substack. In the past year or so, I’ve had the pleasure of becoming even more closely acquainted with his music while transcribing it for a songbook whose release date is still to be determined. Just when it begins to feel complete, another overlooked selection—unlike anything else—seems to surface and demand inclusion.

In recent weeks, a series of miniature compositions has been appearing in Levy’s Instagram, one each day, presented without explanation. The etudes feel accessible but deep and almost aphoristic. Though they explore many techniques, approaches, and regions of the fretboard, they are all centered on the same idea: a kind of Sunday drive, with unexpected detours, traveling between two chords, whether diatonic neighbors or distantly related harmonies.

Seeing these videos appear in my feed with such regularity felt like an invitation to explore them more fully, so I asked Levy if he would be open to sharing a few here in notation. (He has posted some charts on his excellent Patreon page, Guitar Tips Pro.) Levy selected three of the etudes for me to include. My transcriptions, shown at the end of this post, capture the way they are played in the videos and include harmonic analysis, which Levy intentionally avoided in his own notation.

In many of the etudes, Levy plays a beautiful new Collings guitar—the 1930s-style C-00—that I first saw him bonding with in the Austin maker’s booth at the NAMM Show in January. Most of his Instagram videos are recorded informally. But in one post he offers a more faithful sense of how the instrument—with its dry, midrange bark—actually sounds: an arrangement of the traditional spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Because it is so striking, I’ve included my transcription of that piece here as well, along with jazz great Grant Green’s early-1960s interpretation, which Levy mentioned as a touchstone in a recent phone call.

In that conversation, Levy also talked about living between coasts, reflected on the etudes and what they’ve meant for him as a guitarist-composer, and shared his impressions of the new Collings. A lightly edited version appears below.

You’ve moved between California and New York a few times, and now you’re back in L.A. What has that movement between coasts meant for you—professionally, creatively, and personally?

Creatively, it’s been great. I get to play with a wider variety of people and hear a wider variety of people. There are players in L.A. or New York who don’t really go back and forth, so you get to hear things on their home turf. Like last night I saw Anthony Wilson with his Nonet band. Most people aren’t going to take a nine-piece group on the road, so being in the right place matters. Same with residencies—Jeff Parker at ETA, or the people in New York you can go hear regularly.

Professionally, as somebody who writes music and hires musicians, it broadens the pool. But I think the jury is still out, because if people aren’t sure where you live, they may not think to call you for a gig or a recording. I don’t really know what people are thinking, but I know from my side that if I’m not sure someone’s in town, I might hesitate.

Personally, I put it in the plus column, but the biggest challenge is the human stuff—packing and unpacking, all of that.

And one other thing: a real advantage to being in L.A. right now is that the Bay Area isn’t that far. I was up there last weekend for three shows and a recording session. It’s like a 45-minute flight. It makes the whole state feel available, and even Portland isn’t that far. In New York it was easy to feel like, this is the whole enchilada.

That brings me to the etudes. Listening to them, I keep thinking about cities—learning a place by walking it over time, finding less obvious routes between familiar points. Each piece is centered on two chords, and how you travel between them. What constraints did you set for yourself besides getting from one chord to another?

This started as a challenge from a friend of mine, the composer Dan Loomis—he threw it out to a bunch of friends: compose for 100 days. No frame around it. And I could have taken that as, great, I’ll write the next record. But I wanted it to be about growth as a guitarist, and maybe as a teacher too, because teaching is a big part of my musical life.

I wanted to see my habits—what comes easy, what’s more challenging technically or harmonically. So the main constraint is that they’re short: eight to ten measures, like a natural phrase. And then as I’ve written more—18 or 20 at this point—the constraint becomes, what haven’t I done? What register haven’t I explored, what right-hand approach haven’t I explored? There’s no form here beyond a phrase, so I want them to have a beginning and an ending, and to be mostly melodically driven.

Also, when people think about chords they often think bottom-up. I wanted these to be portable studies where melody is prioritized.

Did the process teach you anything new about your own playing—either technically, or in how you think about harmony and motion?

Yeah. My habit is to live in the middle of the guitar. Fifth position-ish is my happy place. But if the point is to convey mood or tell a story, why not have a wider range and vocabulary?

So I forced myself into other registers. I wrote one just on the low four strings—four-part harmony down there—and it sounded beautiful. Somebody even asked if it was an alternate tuning, but it wasn’t; it was just an unexpected register. And up high, past the ninth fret, I feel ungrounded, but I’ve made myself go there—this morning I was up around the 15th fret and kept returning to it. You paid for all those frets, you might as well use them.

And I’ve been focusing on fingerstyle, but if I’m going to do a lot of these, some need to be with a pick, so I’m making myself do that too.

The etudes are presented without explanation—just “trying to get from blank to blank.” What do you hope a listener or player takes from them without being told how to listen?

That “get from blank to blank” thing is kind of a gag. Even on my Patreon, I haven’t broken them down. It’s basically: here’s the PDF, good luck.

I hope they feel playable and approachable—that’s why they’re short. But the bigger point isn’t that people should learn all my etudes. It’s that they should look at them and think, I could do that. I want to see my habits, grow my awareness of the fretboard, melody, harmony. I’ve taught week-long classes at guitar workshops on writing your own etudes—that’s the idea.

I don’t even put chord names on the notation, and that’s been meaningful for me, because my brain likes buckets: drop-two, major-seventh quality, three-note, five-note. I had a conversation with Joe Gore where I said “drop-two voicings” and he was like, what’s that? This is one of the smartest guitar players I know, but he didn’t go to jazz school. When I explained it, he knew the sound immediately—he just didn’t organize harmony with that label. So I’m hoping these etudes help me loosen my grip on categories and think more musically, melody-first.

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Over the last few years, some of the guitarists who have most caught my ear are players steeped in jazz—formally trained, composition-minded—but working through the looser edges of Americana, string-band music, and acoustic ensemble playing. Players like Cameron Knowler and Grant Gordy come to mind: musicians with a deep sense of harmony and impeccable technique, but uninterested in flattening that knowledge into displays of virtuosity. Instead, they seem drawn to environments—how music breathes, how parts interlock, and how a guitar can shape a room rather than dominate it.

I came to Ben Garnett’s music from that direction. What struck me right away wasn’t flash or novelty, but a sense of purpose—the feeling that the guitar was doing more than its usual chores. In Garnett’s hands, it functions less as a lead instrument than as something that organizes space, motion, and interaction.

For Garnett, the acoustic guitar is naturally cinematic. “It has this ability to build a world for other instruments to inhabit,” he told me. His recent sophomore album, Kite’s Keep, takes that idea seriously, pairing carefully shaped compositions with an extraordinary group of collaborators, including violinists Darol Anger and Brittany Haas, bassists Ethan Jodziewicz and Paul Kowert, and guitarist Chris Eldridge. Rather than settling into any one genre—bluegrass, folk, jazz, pop, or classical—the record moves easily among them, often lingering at their boundaries, where feel and structure matter more than taxonomy.

Each piece unfolds deliberately, with its own pacing and internal logic. Garnett, who frequents Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre, thinks carefully about how tension is built and released, how scenes transition, and how individual voices come forward and recede. Taking a cue from Andrés Segovia’s famous observation that the guitar is an orchestra, he often breaks ideas apart at the source and redistributes them across the ensemble. As he puts it, there are moments on Kite’s Keep when the fiddle or bass carries material to places “where the guitar can only point.”

Garnett’s musical path helps explain this outlook. He played tuba in school bands before picking up guitar, learned Green Day songs after class, and spent formative hours in the studio of his cousin Andy Timmons, absorbing a lesson that would stay with him: that songs matter more than virtuosity. Later, studying jazz and immersing himself in acoustic music through mentors like Julian Lage and, especially, Chris Eldridge—who produced Garnett’s debut, Imitation Fields (2023), and appears on Kite’s Keep—he began to imagine the guitar not as a spotlighted voice, but as an engine for collective expression.

I recently spoke with Garnett about that evolution, what it means to write for specific musicians, the tension between technique and restraint, and how empathy and honesty shape his musical life. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve described the acoustic guitar as world-building, almost like a cinematic device. When did you first start thinking about music in those terms, rather than just songs or tunes?

I definitely didn’t come to the guitar with that mindset. I think it started when Chris Eldridge produced my first record—hanging with him and hearing the way he talked about great string-band guitar players, mostly bluegrass, but string-band players in general. Especially Tony Rice, because Tony is Chris’s main mentor and influence.

We’d listen to records together, and he really keyed me into how powerful acoustic rhythm guitar can be, particularly in a bluegrass band or string band. More specifically, Tony’s way of shaping things—being the engine of the band, the energy bearer. Everyone is contributing, of course, but the guitar often has the most dynamic control in a string band. In that sense, it can really shape the music.

So it was spending time with Chris and going headfirst into that whole string-band world, realizing how effective the acoustic guitar can be in shaping a band. With Kite’s Keep, I wanted to honor that idea—to center the guitar as a world-building force, rather than just a solo instrument or a constant lead voice. You can feature the guitar in a more environmental way, if that makes sense.

It makes total sense. How did you first encounter Chris Eldridge?

We met at the Acoustic Music Seminar, which is part of the Savannah Music Festival. That was back in 2017, I think. Julian Lage was an instructor that year, and Chris and Julian played a set at the festival.

Chris came in for a day and gave a master class with Julian, Mike Marshall, Bryan Sutton, and some of the other instructors. I think I met him for the first time after their set at the festival. A few months later I moved to Nashville, and we had mutual friends. We’d see each other at picking parties and things like that. I think he was aware of me through the camp, and maybe through Julian.

When it came time to make my first record, I knew I wanted a producer, and Chris immediately came to mind. He was producing records then, so I asked him—and miraculously, he said yes.

That’s terrific. You’ve spent a lot of time watching arthouse films. Are there particular directors who’ve shaped the way you think about structure or composition?

It’s interesting—I don’t know how cine-literate I really am. I probably couldn’t name specific directors. But I’m very influenced by long-form storytelling, and by how films move from point A to point B.

I’m also drawn to the relationship between directors and actors—how directors inspire actors to inhabit their characters. There are a lot of parallels with what we were talking about earlier, with the guitar as an environmental force.

In a way, the guitar can act like a film director. I’m creating a stage or environment for others to inhabit—whether that’s through written music, asking people to do certain things, or offering improvisational prompts. So for me, it’s less about specific filmmakers and more about storytelling, and that director–actor relationship.

There are clear characters in your stories—Darol Anger, Brittany Haas, Chris Eldridge. When you’re composing, do you think of their personalities in that filmic way? Do they shape the music?

One hundred percent. Absolutely. They bring so much that I couldn’t imagine on my own. There’s one tune—“Sebastian’s Garden,” the fourth track. It’s me, Brittany, and Ethan Jodziewicz on bass. In the opening section there’s a very pretty, very specific arrangement: the fiddle and bass bowing a melody, and me playing a cross-picked guitar accompaniment. We got extremely detailed about bowings, rhythms, and articulation.

But even then, it still sounds like Brittany playing fiddle, and like Ethan playing bass. Even with very specific compositional direction, there’s an emergent quality—personality, inflection—that the players bring. That’s why you work with strong musical personalities: they take the music to places you couldn’t otherwise imagine.

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Sometime in the early 2000s, when I was an editor at the now-defunct Guitar One in New York, I interviewed Joel Harrison for the magazine’s jazz column. I don’t remember what we were technically talking about, but I do remember the scope of the conversation—it covered a lot of ground, from how he writes and improvises to how he’s managed to build a career that doesn’t sit neatly in one category. Harrison seemed less interested in defining his work than in keeping it open.

Over the years since, that openness has remained a constant. Harrison has released more than two dozen albums as a leader, writing for settings that include jazz orchestra, string ensemble, solo instruments, and small groups. Records like Free Country, The Music of Paul Motian, and America at War point in different directions, but they share a refusal to treat jazz, classical music, rock, country, or American roots traditions as separate concerns. His work has brought him a Guggenheim Fellowship, major composition commissions, and long-running recognition as a composer, while also placing him alongside musicians such as Norah Jones and Julian Lage.

Alongside his own music, Harrison has spent a significant part of the past 15 years bringing other guitarists into conversation. He founded the Alternative Guitar Summit in 2010, and it has since become a recurring meeting place for players working across generations and approaches to the instrument. The Summit’s concerts and camps tend to favor stripped-down situations—often just two guitars—where listening and interaction matter more than stylistic alignment. Over the years, it has featured musicians including Bill Frisell, Mary Halvorson, and Nels Cline, among many others.

More recently, Harrison has been doing a version of the same work through writing and conversation. A pair of books, a Substack, and a podcast have given him room to talk with other musicians at length—not just about technique, but about how they think, work, and stay engaged with the instrument over time.

The latest album that Harrison worked on, Don’t Forget Your Guitar, fits squarely into that trajectory. Built around first-take guitar duos that span generations and musical backgrounds, the record documents what happens when players meet with minimal setup and no attempt to smooth things over.

We recently caught up to talk about the album, the Summit, instruments, and the questions that keep the guitar from ever feeling settled.

Don’t Forget Your Guitar feels less like a producer’s showcase than a snapshot of a living guitar community. What does it tell you about where the instrument is right now—artistically and culturally, even if it’s outside the mainstream?

I agree with that framing. In the sense that I produced it, that really just meant I called in different duos to contribute. But once they were there, I didn’t tell anybody what to do. I just let them do what they wanted, which felt essential—because it lets them be themselves.

I don’t feel like I have a privileged viewpoint, although I do try to pay attention to the broader landscape. My contention is that the guitar, more than any other instrument, is capable of an infinity of sounds.

This record, I hope, showcases that spectrum. It was put together so there’s acoustic music, really freaky, out-there electronic sounds, and beautiful inside harmonic playing. I think that outside of the pop world, the guitar is really flourishing. There’s an amazing number of younger players who are quite good.

For me, it also feels inseparable from the Alternative Guitar Summit’s larger mission. Do you see the record as a distilled extension of the Summit—this thing you’ve been developing for the last 15 or so years?

Yes—but it also sits on top of other records I’ve done that were aiming at something similar. There was a solos record a couple of years ago that was quite diverse, and my own duos record from last year featured something like 12 different guitarists.

This one, maybe more than the others, represents an ethos I’ve been cultivating for years: that the guitar duo is a unique and special musical presentation. So much of what happens at the camp and in our concerts is two people—often without a rhythm section—having an intimate dialog. They can come from very different places and still make a conversation happen.

That’s fascinating to me. Watching people converse musically and make something together feels like a lesson in how we might act as human beings.

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I first came across Margaret Glaspy years ago in a YouTube clip of her and guitarist Julian Lage (covered elsewhere on this Substack) playing her song “Look at Me” at a small club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Watching it now, they look impossibly young, but what registers most clearly is how fully her musical identity is already present. Glaspy sings and plays with an idiosyncratic, rhythmically elastic feel, her phrasing shaded with hints of jazz, and she moves around the guitar with a deep fluency. Not long after that I came across another video of the pair performing Johnny Mercer’s “Lazy Bones” at what appeared to be a house concert—a modest, close-quarters performance that rewards careful listening. From there I began following Glaspy’s solo work, from her early EPs through albums like Emotions and Math and Devotion, drawn to the way her songs pair a rock songwriter’s directness with guitar parts that are structural to the writing itself.

That breadth came back to mind when I saw the singer-songwriter join her now-husband Lage during his 2024 residency at SFJAZZ, alongside bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, in a project called Rude Ruth—the name of their duo from those earlier years. Her indie rock–rooted songs, for lack of a better term, including “Best Behavior” and “My Body My Choice,” adapted easily to the quartet’s elastic setting. At the same time, what lingered most was a quieter stretch with just Glaspy singing and Lage on his signature model Collings OM. Nothing about it felt demonstrative. The music unfolded with the unforced ease of two musicians listening closely to one another, moving through lesser-known Bob Dylan songs—“Mississippi” and “Positively Fourth Street”—a jazz standard (“Lover Come Back to Me”), and other wide-ranging material with the same attentive ease that first drew me in through those early clips.

Having spoken with Glaspy for the September/October 2024 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine, which includes a video lesson on her approach to the instrument, I was glad to catch up with her again recently by phone at her home in New Jersey. We talked about her latest duo album, The Golden Heart Protector—a covers project with close musical friends including Madison Cunningham, Norah Jones, and Andrew Bird—her background in fiddle music and how it continues to inform her guitar playing, her evolving relationship to acoustic and electric instruments, and the old Gibson L-0 she and Lage share, though they use in very different ways. We also discussed her growing interest in musical lineage; her own Substack, Born Yesterday; and the sense that songs emerge from an ongoing conversation with the music that came before them.

Being recently honored at NAMM’s She Rocks Awards places you among a wide lineage of women recognized across the music industry. What did that acknowledgment mean to you, and how do you see your place within that broader community?

I felt humbled to receive an award like that, and also learning about the people who had gotten it before. It was humbling, and it was really sweet. I think I feel awkward around recognition sometimes. I don’t really know what to say around it. But I hadn’t given as much thought to who I was in a community before getting it, to be honest with you. After receiving the award, it made me consider my place in the musical world and among all these women who are so cool and inspiring.

It felt inspiring to receive an award like that, and it made me want to work hard on behalf of music. I feel like I work for music, so I want to do my best for it. It made me think about what I fly a flag for. I like there being an element of risk in music. I see that risk dwindling the more evolved things get in a way, so I like factoring in as much opportunity for risk as possible.

Receiving the award felt like a punctuation in time. It made me think about young people coming up now who, in my opinion, need that level of risk in music. How do we give that to them? How do we push the envelope and make sure they’re getting music that isn’t quantized all the time or auto-tuned—something they can rely on that shows what humanity looks like through music? It made me think about the lineage I’m part of, what kind of lineage I’m following and helping to lead, and how to do my best within that.

On your Substack you wrote about how indie culture can erase lineage, as if music were “hatched out of an egg with no mother or father in sight.” As you’ve been digging more deeply into your influences, how has that awareness changed the way you hear your own work?

It’s changed a lot. I love artists who feel ahead of their time, spinning in their own orbit where it’s hard to trace the lineage. People like Björk—I hear her and think, Where did you come from? That’s exciting. So it’s not to be dogmatic about lineage. Music that feels like it defies lineage can be wonderful.

But sometimes there can be a sense of trying to pretend lineage doesn’t exist so you can exist in a vacuum and say, “This was my idea.” And that’s not how music works. There’s a lot that happens to get us anywhere.

For me it’s become very personal. I used to think I was just hatched into the world like this. The older I get, the more I see how much I’m pulling from what came before me, and I’m delighting in that. I’m excited to pay tribute to artists in my music and make it obvious who I’m listening to and inspired by—not by being derivative, but by acknowledging influence. There’s a fine line between inspiration and imitation. I don’t really know exactly where it is, but that’s what’s on my mind: seeing what someone has given me and making it my own while making it clear it came from somewhere.

You grew up in a musical household in Northern California and were steeped in the fiddle tradition. How did that environment shape your ear—and the way you move around the guitar today?

It shaped it a lot. I started playing fiddle when I was about eight and continued until I was about 16 or 17. My segue out of fiddle music was songwriting and singing, and learning more jazz as a singer. I had a little period of singing standards. When I was coming up on fiddle, I had the luck of going through an amazing acoustic community that was really good at what they did.

My peers and teachers were people like Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins. Mike Marshall and Darol Anger were around. Chris Thile was around a lot when I was young. Edgar Meyer was teaching at some of the camps I went to. Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn—all these incredible players I was around when I was really young. How could that not leave a huge imprint?

It taught me a sensibility about being a musician that was about listening. Nobody was plugged into anything, so you had to lean in to hear. A lot of that music existed in a circle, facing one another. I would fall asleep as a twelve-year-old in my sleeping bag at the feet of an old-time jam and wake up three hours later and they’d still be playing. That sense of resonance was really pronounced to me—the fact that you could push air in a room and make something immediate and resonant.

Playing a fretless instrument taught my hands a lot. Going to guitar felt easier in some ways. There’s always so much to learn on guitar—I still feel like a primary guitar player in many ways—but having frets meant you weren’t constantly practicing intonation the way you are on violin, which is a lifelong pursuit. The learning curve on fiddle is intense. It takes a while to sound good.

On guitar, you learn three chords and suddenly you’re in the world. You can deal in popular music in a way I hadn’t gotten to before. It was really gratifying going from fiddle to guitar. It greased the wheels for me to dive deep. I remember thinking, Wait, you can do anything on guitar. Fiddle felt more pigeonholed. Guitar felt like the instrument of the people. It got me really excited—honestly excited to not play fiddle at the time, which is funny. I miss it now and crave playing it more often, but back then I was really into songs, and I still am.

When you moved from fiddle competitions into songwriting, what instincts carried over intact, and what did you have to deliberately unlearn?

The biggest thing that carried over was listening—being sensitive to resonance and phrasing, and to how music sits in a room. What I had to unlearn was some of the rigidity that comes with tradition. Fiddle music is amazing, but it can be very codified. Songwriting felt like stepping into a more open field. Vocally especially, it gave me permission to explore popular music and find my own voice.

On The Golden Heart Protector, you’re inhabiting other writers’ songs in collaboration. Does working inside someone else’s material sharpen your sense of what’s essential in a song?

Interpretation is one of my favorite things, second only to writing my own songs. When I believe in the material, it feels like endless opportunity. I discovered how much I loved interpretation doing a Bob Dylan tribute produced by T Bone Burnett. Singing those songs gave me a chance to highlight elements audiences might not have fully metabolized before.

It feels like a puzzle. You rediscover familiar material and try to show people something new inside it. I love word-driven songs and dense lyrics because they let you build a world and tell a story. Collaborating with friends like Madison and Julian was a dream—swimming in music I didn’t write but deeply love.

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I’ve encountered Hiroya Tsukamoto a few times over the years through Acoustic Guitar magazine, mostly by editing pieces about his playing and his music. On two occasions I’ve worked more directly with him, once on a lesson about how he uses looping pedals in smartly compositional ways, and more recently transcribing his modern DADGAD arrangement of the traditional song “The Water Is Wide” and preparing it for publication. So I came into this exchange with a fairly close, practical sense of how his music actually works on the page, not just how it sounds.

Tsukamoto, who is based in New York and originally from Japan, makes music that feels connected to the fingerstyle scene, but never entirely inside it. His music pulls together a lot of different strands—unpredictable picking patterns (some of them clearly coming from his formative years playing five-string banjo), open tunings that are at times more exploratory than idiomatic, South American rhythmic ideas, modern jazz harmony, and a strong melodic through-line that treats the guitar more as a voice than as a vehicle for technique. It doesn’t line up cleanly with any one scene. It just kind of sits in a place of its own.

When Tsukamoto recently reached out to share his new solo album, Rainshadow, it occurred to me that despite having exchanged many emails, we’d never actually spoken. That felt like a good excuse to finally have a real conversation.

We talked about his early relationship with the banjo, working on jazz and composition at Berklee, what he took from studying with Mick Goodrick and Wayne Krantz, how he approaches form and voicing when he writes, and the practical challenges of recording layered acoustic music using open tunings and looping pedals. Our interview below is edited for clarity.

You started on five-string banjo in Japan, then moved to guitar and eventually toward a very personal compositional voice. Looking back, what do you think the banjo gave you, and what was it like starting on that instrument in Japan in the ’90s?

I think the right hand. I’m a righty, so as you know, banjo requires three-finger rolls, and that’s what I practiced a lot when I was a teenager. So I think that still sticks with me. I came from a small town, so I was the only kid in town playing banjo. That was in the ’90s.

I also started playing guitar because my friends were playing, too. It was a mix of music my parents listened to—a Simon & Garfunkel kind of thing—but also in the ’90s American rock was very big in Japan, so I was playing hard rock and ’70s rock too, a mix of acoustic and electric.

You’ve said that Berklee was really the point where things shifted for you. How did you end up there, and what did that time actually open up for you musically?

I came to study at Berklee in Boston, and then I ended up staying. My plan was to go back to Japan, but it’s been 20-plus years now. I studied jazz composition and also performance—lots of jazz, mostly.

Back in Japan I never did formal study at school, so Berklee was where I started studying more seriously with teachers. It was a great experience, but there were so many teachers with different approaches, which was a little confusing. But there was one great teacher, Mick Goodrick, and he taught me in almost a mathematical way. That opened my mind—looking at music almost like a map, which I’d never thought about before. Intervallic structures, voicings—just a new way of seeing sounds I already knew.

At Berklee I was playing mostly electric, but also nylon-string. When I was in Japan I was already playing lots of South American music, and at Berklee I met many musicians from South America, so I was playing folkloric music—Brazilian, Argentinian—using nylon-string.

You’ve lived between cultures—Japan, Boston, New York—and toured internationally. Do you feel your music reflects that in any conscious way? And what has New York meant to you musically?

I grew up in Kyoto, which is very influenced by Zen Buddhism, so I think that’s still in me. But I’ve lived in New York for a long time now, so I don’t think about it much. Music is personal—I just try to be honest and natural in presenting myself.

Originally I wanted to become a jazz guitarist, so that’s why I moved to New York. I played lots of jazz in my early years, but there are so many great jazz guitarists, so I had to rethink what I could do. That’s when I moved toward solo acoustic. But I still go hear jazz—it’s inspiring.

I used to go to 55 Bar a lot. David Binney, Wayne Krantz—I studied a little with Wayne and saw him play often. Wayne is very unique and original. What he told me was not to copy other players. When I played voicings I thought were cool, he said, “Tons of guitar players already know those.” So think about alternative ways. That led me to open tunings and different voicings.

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Sometime in late 2024, I got to chatting with Julian Lage about Sibelius—not the Finnish composer, but the notation software I use to engrave music for this Substack and elsewhere. Lage had long written his lead sheets the old-school way, with pen and paper, and wanted to explore notation software as a way to streamline his workflow. We ended up building a Sibelius template together based on the look and feel of his handwritten charts.

I’d largely forgotten about that exchange until last spring, when Lage reached out to ask if we could meet on Zoom so I could walk him through how I input music in Sibelius. He was preparing lead sheets for an upcoming session, and with the deadline fast approaching, I ended up offering to help with some of the engraving. It became a chance to assist with a very practical task—and, in the process, to see how his compositions take shape at close range.

Those charts turned out to be for Scenes From Above (Blue Note), Lage’s most recent album with producer Joe Henry. Recorded with a new quartet featuring keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer Kenny Wollesen, the music is organized around a set of clearly defined pieces, many of which avoid the usual open-ended stretches of a jazz record. The melodies do most of the storytelling, and improvisation—when it appears—doesn’t venture too far from the written material. That sensibility is especially clear on the opening track, “Opal.”

Here I’ve transcribed the main electric guitar part from the album version of “Opal,” originally titled “Follow the Eye,” and placed it alongside the earlier lead sheet to show how the piece took shape in performance. There’s also a video of the quartet performing the composition, which differs only slightly from the studio recording. I recently spoke with Lage about how the piece came together.

“Opal” sits in G-flat, which is obviously uncommon for guitar-based music in standard tuning. What drew you to that key, and what did it open up for you?

It’s funny you ask that, because I was literally playing around with keys before I called you. I’ve become really aware that the key a song is in really affects how it speaks—the way the overtones resonate is completely different depending on the key. And on the guitar, like you’re implying, there are big timbral considerations. A song in E or G, with open strings, behaves very differently than something in G-flat, or A-flat, or B-flat.

I started to realize that I was putting songs aside—songs that were actually strong—because I didn’t like the key or the timbre. And that felt like a mistake. So I began using a capo to move pieces into different keys, just to hear them differently. I think I did that with this one. My guess is that it was originally up a whole step—maybe in A-flat—and then I tuned it down and landed in G-flat. I remember thinking, Wow, this is really unusual—it speaks in kind of a strange way.

With this song, and with many on the record, the keys changed a lot very late in the process—like, 11th-hour decisions. But G-flat, in particular, didn’t feel strident, or fluorescent. There’s something beautiful about it. It’s a little more subdued.

I don’t have perfect pitch, and I don’t really experience keys in a synesthetic way. So for me, this was more about stumbling around and trying to get educated about how key affects the emotional content of the music. I was actually just doing this again right before the call—thinking a song wasn’t interesting enough, moving it to C-sharp, and suddenly thinking, This is great. I can hear the story now.

There’s a hymn-like quality to the piece. Did it carry any kind of spiritual or contemplative feeling for you while you were composing it?

That’s a great question. I’ve been drawn to songs that feel like hymns for a while—not literal hymns, necessarily, but pieces that move with that kind of cadence. “Maraba Blue” by Abdullah Ibrahim is a good example. It’s not a hymn, but it kind of moves like one. There’s an implied spiritual underpinning that you can’t quite put your finger on.

Those kinds of songs don’t feel like vehicles for soloing—they invite you to sit in the spirit of the music. “Opal” definitely came from that place. I tried it a lot of different ways at first—as a rubato piece, as something more rolling and motion-based, almost like an Alice Coltrane thing, over a pedal. It was beautiful and thunderous.

What shifted it more firmly into that hymnal space was rhythm. There’s this groove on a calypso tune by Lord Kitchener called “Love in the Cemetery”—I don’t remember the exact decade, maybe the ’50s or ’60s—but I love that beat. I showed it to Kenny and said, “Can you play this while we play ‘Opal’?” That moved it out of the Alice Coltrane world a little bit, but it still felt very much like a hymn to me. That spirit stayed central.

On the lead sheet, there’s an indication to return to A1 for solos, but the recorded version is essentially through-composed, matching the form of the chart exactly. What led you to make that decision in the studio?

I don’t remember every detail of how it went down, but I do remember having a bias going in. I didn’t want to make a record where soloing was always the main event. I was curious how far we could go without it becoming a jam record.

There was a tune that didn’t make the album partly because it relied so heavily on soloing. It was cool, but it felt like the water was boiling over—it wasn’t as focused as what I was craving, or learning to crave. So with “Opal,” when it became clear that the piece worked beautifully without repeating for solos, I think I was pretty eager to take that option.

It felt like proof that you could have an organ-band record that wasn’t about blowing. That’s not really what I do anyway—at least not on a record. And of course, any agenda you bring in isn’t really the point. The sooner you can drop it and listen to what the music wants, and what the band wants, the better. I’m grateful the song had the grace to tell us not to repeat it.

In the official video, you’re playing a Gibson ES-225, which surprised me—I expected your usual Collings signature model or Tele. How did that guitar come into your life, and why did it feel right here?

That guitar is special—and you, especially, would love it. I don’t own it; I’m more like its caretaker. It belongs to Lynn Wheelwright, who lives in Utah. He was Alvino Rey’s guitar tech and has accumulated some of the most incredible early electric guitars—Charlie Christian’s guitar that he played on “Solo Flight,” early Doc Kauffman Fender amps, truly prototypical stuff from the early ’40s.

The record itself was actually tracked on a Les Paul—not by choice. The studio was extremely noisy, near the Empire State Building, and the only guitar quiet enough was this modern Les Paul with humbuckers. It was fine, but when I heard the mixes, I missed a certain quality—air, openness.

Recreating that sound live felt impossible because the recording relied so heavily on a complex amp setup. So I asked Lynn if he had something with P-90s but more air—something darker than a Tele, but not a Les Paul. He said, “I have a 225 you need to try.” I stopped by his shop for 15 minutes before a flight, played one note through a Princeton, and immediately thought, This sounds like the entire record—but just plugged straight in.

It has the P-90 punch I love, but the air of a fully hollow body. Not all 225s are like this one—it’s unusually stable, the bridge is screwed into the top, it feels sturdy. It’s just a magical instrument.

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Buck Curran is a rare kind of musician—someone who understands the guitar not only as a player, but as a luthier and repairer, with a hands-on sense of how sound is shaped long before it reaches the air. That knowledge comes from years spent inside instruments themselves, and it runs through his music: in the care and attention he gives to tone, in the way notes are allowed to open up and fade, and in how composition and improvisation often blur together.

I’ve known Curran for years through covering his work in Acoustic Guitar magazine, and through transcribing and engraving some of his music for private use—an experience that’s given me an unusually close view of his sound world. Spending time with those compositions on the page, accounting for their tunings, durations, and fretboard logic, has sharpened my sense of how deliberately he listens.

Over the past three decades, Curran’s musical life has unfolded along several overlapping paths. He first came to wider attention through Arborea, the experimental folk duo he co-founded in the mid-2000s with his then partner, Shanti Deschaine, blending Appalachian and British folk traditions with drone and improvisation. Alongside that work, he has collaborated widely and developed a distinct solo voice—one rooted in alternate tunings, long tones, and a sensitivity to place. His creative life also extends beyond music, into painting and poetry, practices that share the same patience and attention to texture that shape his playing.

We recently spoke by phone while he was at home in Bergamo, Italy, where he has lived since 2016 with his wife, the singer-songwriter Adele Pappalardo, and their children. Our conversation moved between instruments and landscape: from his early focus on tone and sustain, to his long relationship with particular fine guitars, to the influence of memory and environment on his ninth solo album, Far Driven Sun. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’ve always been struck by how much time you’ve spent inside guitars—not just as a player, but through years of repair and building. How did that shape the way you listen, and then the way you play?
I think I was focused on sound long before I ever thought about guitar making. My parents had this really eclectic vinyl collection—John Williams playing Bach, Chuck Berry, R&B, Tim Buckley—and hearing that John Williams recording for the first time was a huge moment for me. That defined sound of the acoustic guitar—the sustain, the clarity—was really incredible.

At some point my father got a classical guitar and took lessons. He didn’t really stick with it, and the guitar ended up under the bed. I’d go get it and just play single notes, trying to make them ring, trying to sustain them and produce bell-like tones. I wasn’t thinking about chords at all at first—just tone, just listening.

Later, in high school, partly through listening to Hendrix, I became fascinated with Stratocasters and with the idea of building a guitar. I’ve always drawn—my father was a cartoonist, my grandfather too—so I started drawing my own body shapes and thinking about building instruments. It became this simultaneous obsession with playing and with the guitar itself.

After the Navy, I went to work at Ramblin’ Conrad Folklore Center in Norfolk, Virginia. That’s when I really started meeting and hearing all these great players. I’d saved money and bought what I thought was the best guitar I could afford at the time—a Martin herringbone HD-28—but then Martin Simpson came through with the Sobell Butterfly. After the show he showed it to me and Barry, the manager, and talked about its voice—especially the sustain and overtones, like a choir of angels. That guitar completely blew me away. I put my Martin up for sale right away and ordered my first guitar from Stefan Sobell.

Once you start building instruments, listening becomes very physical. You start to understand how sound moves through wood—how stiffness and thickness affect fundamentals and overtones. At Bourgeois, [company founder] Dana’s focus was always on a strong fundamental—stiffer tops, big projection. Sobell’s tops are thinner, with more shimmer and overtone content. When I started building, I settled around .115 to .120 thousandths for tops—thin enough to open up, but not so thin that you lose the fundamental. That obsession with tone, sustain, and especially midrange goes straight into how I play.

A lot of the time I’m not really thinking in terms of harmony at all. When I’m in alternate tunings, I’m not thinking about theory—I’m just listening. I’ll stumble onto a shape or a sound, and I can immediately hear what needs to happen next. It’s not planned out—it’s responding to what the instrument is giving me in that moment.

Are there specific things you learned earlier on that still show up in your playing now?
Yeah—there’s actually a very specific interval shape that shows up on “Far Driven Sun” that comes from one lesson I had with Martin Simpson back in the ’90s. He was showing me a song by Robert Johnson—“Stones in My Passway,”—so that interval originated directly out of that. [Plays the figure below, the backbone of “Far Driven Sun.”]

I’ve always loved that shape. It’s incredibly useful, and it works across so many strings. I don’t think of it as quoting anything—it’s more like a piece of vocabulary that’s lodged itself in my hands. When I’m in alternate tunings and not thinking about harmony or theory, those kinds of shapes just emerge naturally.

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Among the many fine guitar releases of 2025, two stood out for me that also appeared on NPR’s list of the year’s best albums: About Ghosts by Mary Halvorson and Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark by Gwenifer Raymond. I’ve spoken with both artists here previously, and returning to their music in this way felt like a natural extension of those conversations.

Halvorson, a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, is known for a highly individual approach to jazz guitar—marked by a percussive attack, an elastic sense of harmony, and a personal, integrated use of effects. On About Ghosts, she writes for a jazz ensemble, with her electric archtop moving among horns, vibraphone, bass, and drums. Raymond’s work, by contrast, is rooted in solo performances for fingerstyle guitar and banjo; Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark draws on older vernacular forms while reshaping them through her own approach to tuning, phrasing, and form.

The two musicians come from markedly different musical and geographic backgrounds—Halvorson from the contemporary U.S. jazz scene, Raymond originally from Wales and now based in Brighton, United Kingdom—and work within distinct traditions of the instrument, yet both stand out for how clearly they’ve defined their own musical language within those traditions.

Spending time with these records—especially putting the music under the microscope while transcribing—I was struck by how much they share once you get inside the details.

The pieces from the albums I’ve chosen to notate for this post, Halvorson’s “Carved From” and Raymond’s “Jack Parsons Blues,” both circle loosely around C major, though they approach that center from very different directions. In both cases, form is carefully considered. Even when the music feels exploratory, lines and gestures sound deliberate rather than incidental.

In “Carved From,” the head is built from shifting major triads that move in unexpected ways, outlining a harmonic space without a fixed functional hierarchy. The guitar moves between a simple, palm-muted triadic figure and a twisting, altered line doubled with the horns, before Halvorson launches into a characteristically off-kilter but grounded solo, punctuated occasionally by her strategic use of a pitch-shifting pedal.

“Jack Parsons Blues,” by contrast, is played in open C minor tuning and grows out of an ostinato built around the root in octaves and the fifth—an idea that is subtly adjusted throughout rather than repeated verbatim. Over the course of the piece, Raymond moves back and forth between C major and minor, with brief departures that reframe the harmony before returning to it.

Below are full transcriptions of the studio recordings, along with brief thoughts from each guitarist about the pieces, and videos of separate live performances that offer a glimpse of how the music continues to evolve outside the studio.

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