Your influences?

[anders]

Who are your biggest influences? What/Who got you started? What keeps you going? What do you listen to, to get inspired? Other thing besides music that influences you?

[mahayana]

I'll take a crack at this, at least the how you got started part. May make me sound old, guess I am!

I grew up singing church music and folk music (Brothers Four, Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary were on the radio, along with crooners like Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, Bobby Darin,etc). I was into the Greenwich Village beatnik stuff, walked around Washington Square when it was full of kids playing guitars. I had all of Bob Dylan's first albums, when he was styled after Woody Guthrie.

There was a jazz combo on the (black and white) TV morning news show that I watched every day before school. Kind of a smaller version of Letterman's studio band, trying to think what they called themselves.

My garage band played top 40 rock and roll, learned by taping it off of WLS in Chicago, then the "british invasion" (mainly the Beatles and Stones) changed it all. I learned all their tunes as they came out, bought the albums. Probably the first jazz chords I played were in "Till there Was You" on Meet the Beatles, and "Julia" on the White album.

A friend gave me Mickey Baker's "Complete Course in Jazz Guitar" back in the 70s, also a beat-up copy of Guitar Player mag with Micheal Bloomfield on the cover. Those things probably changed the way I play more than anything, but my head's still full of old love songs and ballads. Is that enough, too much? I've always loved horn music, jazz is most of what I buy, listen to, and play now.

[jazzalta]

Where to start? Like a lot of folks, it was the Beatle's Ed Sullivan show. Piano for 5 years then guitar.

Turned on to jazz when a friend taught me "Girl from Ipanema" and got me into Mickey Baker.

My brother's tape of Joe Pass Virtuoso 1 changed my life forever. That was 30 years ago.

Main influences (far too many to list them all):

Beatles
Gordon Lightfoot
Allman Brothers
Carlos Santana
Bruce Cockburn
Chet Atkins
Lenny Breau
Joe Pass
Charlie Parker
Dizzy
Miles Davis
Herb Ellis
Django Reinhardt
Charlie Christian
Benny Goodman

I've played in all kinds of groups (country, rock, jazz, blues) and done theatre and tours. But I always return to jazz and those great jazz artists that continue to teach and influence me.

[anders]

I grew up listening to jazz and classical music. My father had a lot of records that I used to listen to. My earliest influences were pianists, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Oscar Peterson, Fats Waller, among others, and classical composers such as Bach, Chopin, Dvorak and Beethoven.

I started playing guitar at 12 (in the early eighties). I began to learn to play the guitar together with a friend. We were going to start a band, which we eventually did. A major reason that I wanted to play the guitar was because I had heard the Friday Night in San Francisco album by the guitar trio (Di Meola/McLaughlin/De Lucia).

I’ve played with several bands over the last 20 years. Mostly rock bands, but also some blues and jazz. Since I quit the last band I was in, I’ve been concentrating on practicing and recording at home. I’m also been focusing on my jazz playing since that’s the music I love to play.

My main influences these days are, as jazzalta said, too many to list them all. But only to mention a few:
Peter Gabriel
King Crimson
Beatles
Andres Segovia
Glenn Gould
Blind Willie Johnson
Oscar Peterson
Miles Davis
Johnny Smith
Herb Ellis

[mahayana]

I may have mentioned earlier that I am a big fan of Stanley Turrentine (who just recently died). He's a tenor sax player who mainly did ballads, really excellent performances, mostly small combos. A few CDs feature guitar (Up at Minton's) but mostly not. I love playing along with this music, it moves me, what can I say.

Big and continuing influence, check him out if you get the chance.

[Professor1]

I've always wanted to be involved in music.

Art also comes natural to me. I draw, sketch, paint, sculpt, etc. This has come in handy while designing and fabricating parts for racing cars. To me, it was fun and seemed like creating pieces of art. It was creating things.

I got my first guitar at 12. Not long after, a saxophone player who lived on my block started to teach me how to play blues rhythm and solos. He also played guitar and bass, so he wanted someone to be able to play rhythm while he soloed, and he let me do the same. We also listened to alot of music together. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Mahivishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Traffic, Zappa, Yes, and others.

Soon after, I started taking formal classical guitar lessons. Today, I play all styles of guitar. I teach private lessons, and public guitar classes.

I also compose. Actually, I compose all the time. Music plays in my mind like an endless soundtrack. ( Beats voices, anyway.) Some is stuff I've heard, most is not. It's all multi-part, if not fully orchestrated. I've learned to write it down so that others can play my music. It's tremendously personally rewarding. Which is good, because there's no money in composition unless you're a moldy dead guy in a powdered wig. It's also very time consuming.

I like listening to all sorts of music, but I find Medieval polyphony to be very relaxing and enjoyable. Tonality wears thin sometimes. Modern electronic music is something I find less enjoyable. To me, it seems that a medium with this much potential and variety of possibilities is being used by mostly totally unimaginative people. You can tell when the composer has drawn a blank when the volume gets very high; in live performance, even painfully so.

I try to be open minded about music. I play in a jazz big band with a bunch of ancient guys for fun. Some of them have toured with Tommy Dorsey and Stan Kenton. About the only thing I won't listen to is new "modern" rock and metal -- white noise, with distortion. Also, I find Rap and/or hip-hop to be totally devoid of redeeming characteristics. So, maybe I'm not so open-minded after all. Oh well, like they say, Middle Age is when your broad mind and narrow waist exchange places. ;D