Guitarists, musicians, students, teachers, and all the musically curious of the world, welcome to Art of Guitar!
To find out more abut me, visit my website, jaykauffman.com
As a guitarist, I’m “classically” trained. You could even call me a classical guitarist, and you wouldn’t be wrong, even if that’s not exactly how I think of myself. More on this later, but basically being classically trained means that I’ve spent a lot of my life fiddling with my fingernails, listening to people like Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams , practicing J.S. Bach and Fernando Sor and Federico Moreno Torroba in stuffy green-carpeted conservatory practice rooms at places like Juilliard, and reading, (writing) and memorizing scores that bristle with dense notation. And calling my concerts “recitals.”
But for me, simply playing the guitar has always come before playing “classical” guitar. And playing music has always come before playing guitar.
Still, the instrument through which the music is filtered is important; as much as I try to transcend the guitar (a common theme among classical guitarists, but more on that later as well), its strengths and limitations define and color whatever music it allows to spring forth.
Look at the top of the page. On the left of my blog header, you’ll notice a picture of a hand holding a guitar-shaped key-chain. As a guitar player of more than 30 years, and as a professional guitar teacher with students of all ages and levels learning many different styles of music from me, I plan to provide the reader with as many keys as possible, with all kinds of insight into the hows, why’s, and possibilities of guitar playing. There will be information, links, reviews and suggestions, both the practical and the esoteric, but always with a singular goal in mind: sharing my thoughts on how to become a better guitarist and a better musician.
On the right side of my header, you’ll notice a picture of a man hanging out some notes, chords, scales and other musical figurations to dry on a clothesline. As a composer and as someone who listens to more kinds of music than most “normal” people can probably stand to even think about …and as someone who spends far too much time just thinking (and reading) about music and its place in society and in the universe, I will hang some of my thoughts and musings out to dry on this blog. Along with links, pictures, videos, anything of interest that I feel will stoke your interest, excite your musical imagination, or give you a moment of musical zen.
I’ll try to get this musical laundry as clean as possible before hanging it out for the world to see, but I can’t make any promises….
And in the center, you’ll notice…me, promising to make this the best guitar blog in the world.
