i'm taking lessons again

First, before explaining why I'm taking lessons again, here's a shout out for my teacher, Arlyn Anderson - http://www.arlynanderson.com - check his website out and make sure you go see him play. Not only is he a great player, he's a super nice guy.

Arlyn is the 5th person I've taken lessons from in the almost 35 years that I've been playing guitar.

I started playing guitar when I was 14. I had played Bb clarinet starting in 4rd grade or so - that choice being influenced by my mother, who every summer would go watch her Dad, Nevin Barclay, play in Chicago where he was a local jazz musician.

His main instrument was piano, but "Pops" also played guitar and banjo, and a lot of Dixieland jazz. Mom loved Dixieland jazz, so she thought that if I wanted to play an instrument, the greatest idea in the world would be for me to play clarinet.

I got good enough on clarinet to be 1st chair in junior high concert band. Then an odd thing happened - puberty! I starting growing a lot and my armature changed, and my beautiful clarinet tone just went kaput. I figured I needed a cooler instrument, because 3rd chair clarinet sucked when you *used* to be 1st chair clarinet. Later on, after I started playing guitar, I switched to bass clarinet for concert band and orchestra in high school.

I was listening to ELP a lot when I was 14, and I bugged my parents, without success, for a Moog synthesizer and then a set of drums. Finally, I moved "down" to guitar. For Christmas 1975, I got a Yamaha acoustic folk guitar that Dad paid $200 for. I already knew how to read music (and that has been a vital skill that I encourage all young musicians to learn before anything else, regardless of what instrument you play - the more you know about reading music, the better of a musician you will become, and faster).

It didn't take me long over that Christmas break to rip though the instructional booklet that came with the guitar, so Dad found a teacher for me, a local jazz guy named Ben Harrison.

Ben was the guy I studied with the longest - almost two years or so - and he was a straight ahead jazz player who taught me all the basic chord forms. He was impressed by how quickly I picked up and played the various chord forms well. He noted that in 20+ years of teaching, he'd only had a few students that mastered chords so quickly. It certainly helped that I would practice for hours and hours until my fingers were too sore to practice anymore.

Ben taught me enough that I was able to win a spot in my junior high jazz band. For a while, I borrowed an amp from one of the other kids at school and I was a member of a basement band called The Echoes that played two gigs at Franklin Junior High - a mixer and a talent show.

Shortly after that, the amp was no longer available, and Dad took out a loan for $600 to get me a Fender Stratocaster and a Peavey amp at probably 17-18 percent interest (it was the 70s and welcome to hyperinflation). The junior high band director went onto to become the band director at my high school, and I made it into the Roosevelt High School jazz band because I could sight read and actually play chord charts.

That was three fun years! Jazz festivals, kicking butt, and I learned to solo well enough (but hey, it was Iowa, and I was a big fish in a very small pond of jazz guitar players) to pick up 15 solo awards in 3 years. I later bought a Gibson ES-335 and I was one of the first guitarists in Iowa to drag two guitars on stage. Shortly after the first couple of festivals my senior year, *other* guitarists started dragging out two at a time. Ah, to be a trendsetter.

At that time, since I needed to read single lines on guitar better - a lot of our big band charts had a ton of single lines you needed to be able to play on guitar - I started taking lessons from Bill Swick, who was the director of jazz studies at Drake University in Des Moines. Bill taught me to read on the guitar... but that was about all I got out of him, the guy had a terribly abrasive ego, as did another guy I took two lessons from - Don Archer. I also took a couple of lessons from a local rock guitarist whose name I cannot recall.

But I learned enough in 3 years of intensive study to play in a decent high school jazz band that's still considered one of the best from 77-81 in Iowa high school festival history, and I was good enough to play in Jazz II at Northern Iowa and the University of Iowa.

Fast forward past graduate school and two marriages, where, other than some gigs with the Jerry Tolson's quintet during summer 1985 - the highlight of which was playing Seniom Sed at Nollen Plaza in downtown Des Moines - I spent the next 25 years playing for the Four Walls band at home.

In December 2008, I discovered the Tuesday night jam sessions run by Sac State students at Capitol Garage in downtown Sacramento, and I've not missed many Tuesdays since then. I've taken my 8 year old daughter with me to watch Dad play twice, and I've made a lot of great friends. Arlyn is the house band guitarist (when he's not gigging elsewhere) on Tuesday. I'm really jacked about taking lessons from him, he's got a lot of great guitar knowledge to share... and I just simply want to get better!