Teacher Bio

I teach mandolin and banjo. On the mandolin I work in a number of styles - folk, Irish, classical - with an emphasis on folk music theory. On the banjo I primarily teach frailing, with work also in ragtime/blues finger styles. I take students at all levels. For my background information see the Lewis & Clark music faculty web page.

For the mandolin I have developed a teaching method (nearing publication) that explores the structural relationships of harmony, melody, and rhythm in several vernacular styles - traditional American folk (Appalachian, bluegrass, blues, ragtime, swing) and more recently Latin and Gypsy musics. Included here is also contemporary folk, based on my duet work with local singers and songwriters. As the elemental idioms of each of these styles are very simple in shape and size, technique grows right along with the theory governing them. Through harmonic mappings of fingerboard positions, the student learns how to expand these young melodic ideas into longer and more interesting lines. This process is coupled with playing and analyzing my compositions and transcriptions of solos of our mandolin masters. Throughout I attend carefully to hand mechanics and ear-training with vocalization and rhythmics.

In my banjo classes we learn how to craft our own frailing settings of American folksong material. We draw from classic Appalachian repertoire and technique to manage the full spectrum, from deep folkloric to Dylan and beyond. My inspirational models are Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Taj Mahal, and Dave Van Ronk, whose finger styles I learned as a young guitarist. They would have been banjoists a generation or two earlier, when African and Celtic/European roots entwined to create blues, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, and early popular song. As with the mandolin, I map chord/scale relationships across the fingerboard to maximize textures and rhythms, and also teach counter-melodic principles for duet playing.