My Jazz / Blues Guitar Inspiration

Over the last 25 years, I had the luck to take lessons from amazing guitar teachers (some of them being far more than just guitar teachers!) and legendary music educators with the broadest range of backgrounds. While I was studying performance and arrangement at Berklee College of Music, I had the honor of taking lessons with Mick Goodrick and study composition with the legendary Charlie Banacos. I remember the tapes exchange with Charlie over the steamy summer of 2001, and the one-string scales exercises with Mick towards the end of my journey at Berklee College. John Finn and Scott Tarulli exposed me to the work of Barney Kessel, Freddie King, and Kenny Burrell, while Charlie Banacos introduced me to the fantastic world of chords chemistry pioneered by Ted Greene.

I have started my journey into music as pop/rock guitar and bass guitar player with a classical music background ... and ended up falling in love with the (almost sci-fi!) concepts of Charlie (stuff like tonal paralypsis, bitonal pendulums (double mambos), hemiola substratum elisions, 23rd chords, intervallics, 9-Basic Rhythm Systems and Sprays for sight-reading), and the Ted Greene studies on Baroque harmonies progressions. A journey is still happening nowadays!

For some of you, the above names (and concepts) are already familiar, but for those of you who are new to them. Here is a list of guitar players, which in my opinion, you must at least listen to once in your lifetime! Go copy and paste the names on YouTube and enjoy!

Ted Greene
Mick Goodrick
Kenny Burrell
Baden Powell
Bruce Arnold
Yamandu Costa
Wayne Krantz

... and (honorable mention, even he's not exactly a guitar player!): Charlie Banacos! Below is an excerpt from one of the notes in his "correspondence courses":

Below are excerpts from the 'holy grail' of chords from Ted Greene, notice his unique way of noting chords in diagrams and numbers: