Guitar with Cole B.

I am active as a guitarist, a singer-songwriter/producer, and a composer. I graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in May 2019 (B.M., Contemporary Improvisation - minor in Music Theory - Pi Kappa Lambda Honors Society). I also attended Oberlin College for two years, where I took courses on jazz improvisation, South Indian percussion, electronic music, and ethnomusicology. I am comfortable teaching any combination of guitar and/or music-writing (songwriting, composing) that the student desires. As a guitarist, I have extensive experience performing jazz, rock, folk, and improvised musics. My teachers have included Joe Morris, Vic Juris, Bob Thompson (a disciple of late jazz guitarist Lenny Breau), and, briefly, Julian Lage. My approach to both playing and teaching the guitar is grounded in aural training - that is to say, using our ears to learn what it is we like most about our favorite music, and then learning how to make those sounds ourselves. I am interested in helping people learn how to ‘sound like themselves’ - to pursue their own musical interests, select their own repertoire and maybe write their own material, eventually. I am as comfortable exploring advanced questions of fretboard harmony, technique, and music theories as I am sharing the first joyous chords a beginning guitarist will learn. Lately, as a guitarist, I have been exploring tonal, long-form solo guitar improvisations in alternate tunings; free-improvised experimental music with my arts collective, Team of Creative Associates; and weird rock music with a few friends/songwriters I admire and trust very much. My practice as a singer-songwriter largely rejects surface-level complexity, seeking out instead some special connection between lyricism, mood, sound, and shape. For several years in my early 20’s I had a rabid obsession for the music of Joanna Newsom. Somewhere along the line that became an obsession with the music of Frank Ocean. Now I’m trying to make sense of the space between those influences. As a producer, I have 700+ hours of experience working in REAPER; I have produced and mixed my own forthcoming EP, Four Early Songs (under the project name Clouds, Happening). My practice as a composer involves alternately the creation of highly complex, precise scores for specific performers (currently at work on a 30-minute solo saxophone piece for my friend and collaborator, Thomas A Giles), and open-form, intuitive, extended-duration drone pieces. I have studied composition with Trevor Baca, Stratis Minakakis, and Anthony Coleman, among others. Past works include a string trio, a wind quintet, a piece for five electric pianos, and a piece for nine musicians. Feel free to reach out here, via email, or via text. I feel lucky to be filled with a deeply-rooted love of music and welcome any questions.