I’ve been listening to your music, and I think New England is probably about the last place I think of when I hear it. How long have you actually lived in this area?

I’ve been here for a while – more than 20 years, actually. I grew up in Delaware, and I spent a lot of time touring with Chicago and New Orleans blues people, and that had a big effect on my music. My way of storytelling is in more of a Southern style, and the writers I like are more Southern American writers.

I had read that you grew up outside of Philadelphia. Would you say that your music hearkens back to your roots there?

Definitely. I grew up listening to Philly soul on the radio, and the vocal harmony styles and the arrangement styles of that particular era had a huge effect on me. I’m very moved by soul music, and there was a time when the best jazz musicians around were playing well-written and well-arranged pop tunes with amazing singers straight out of the gospel church. That combination was pretty amazing at the time.

Were there any specific artists from that era and from Philly that you were really influenced by?

Not specifically, because there was so much stuff. I’ve gone through periods where I’ve really liked specific people, but the people I’ve idolized the most have been jazz musicians. I went through a very heavy Miles Davis stage where I learned everything that he did, and I idolized the fact that he was able to create a new genre with every album he created, and that he was able to reinvent himself that way. He always had the blues in everything he did, although he would combine it with flamenco music, and 20th century classical music, and be-bop, and straight up jazz, and rock and roll, and funk, and soul music. He was able to do that, and never lose his identity. To me, that’s what it’s all about as far as being an artist in music.

Obviously you were influenced by jazz artists, but what else influenced your style?

When I first picked up the guitar, I immediately started writing songs, and it’s always been that way for me. I’ve always liked vocal songs as well. For the longest time, I felt like I couldn’t sing, but I would write these songs, and it was always frustrating, so I started working on my vocals, because I like to write lyrics, too. It took a while, because I was shooting in different directions. I wanted to be a great jazz/blues/rock guitar player, and I was always writing these songs, but the two never seemed to meet for the longest time. And finally at one point, they did, which was when I did my first CD in 1995.

Where did you get your music education, and have you always played the guitar?

Well, it’s my main instrument. I play other instruments as well. On my last CD, I played a lot of keyboards, and a lot of bass and drums, and several other instruments. I also had amazing musicians playing with me. But I did a lot of overdubs playing other instruments. Guitar has always been my main thing.

Did you get a formal music education?

Yeah, I went to Berklee. I graduated in 1984, I think it was. It’s a great atmosphere there. I teach guitar in the five-week session in the summers. It really is a great atmosphere. It’s nice to go back and to just be around so many talented and inspired people who are just living it every day.

What’s it like now versus in the 1980s?

It’s a totally different thing. For one thing, it was just two buildings when I went there. Now there are about five or six buildings. They had one recording studio that was okay, and the ensemble rooms had one crappy amplifier that everybody shared. But now they are so hooked up. Every room is full of nice amps.

So what effect did touring with blues artists have on your own songwriting and performing?

An awful lot, because I had already graduated from Berklee and been playing with a lot of people, and toured with some rock bands and stuff. But in the early to late 90s, there was a blues explosion where all these clubs opened up, and there were tons of bands around, and all the blues artists were making a good living. So I was able to get hired as a guitar player for a lot of these guys. It was a better education than I ever could have gotten from any school. Going out and playing five nights a week for hours, like three sets.

I remember one night – the first time I’d ever done this, but I’ve done it several times since – I remember the second night being on the road with Eddie Kirkland. We did this show on Long Island in the Hamptons, and we started at 10 at night and ended at seven in the morning. I remember falling asleep on a stool while playing this Jimmy Reed style groove. Eddie was trying to stretch it out and make it last – do a harmonica solo, guitar solo, and sing the verses, then I’d do a solo. I remember sitting there and I fell asleep while playing. And when I woke up, my fingers were still keeping time. And Eddie knew I fell asleep, too. But I was still playing. I didn’t know it was possible, first of all, but that had a huge effect on my ability to just keep time.

Keeping time and being able to groove is such a deep thing. It’s the interpretation of the millisecond of the moment. It’s like pixels, when time is broken down to the point where it’s pixels, and everyone’s picking and choosing and setting things slightly behind the beat, or slightly ahead of the beat. That’s what makes us all different. Our DNA makes us play and feel music a certain way, and it also depends on where you’re from. If you get really good at it, then you know how to put it wherever you want it. It’s a matter of keeping exact perfect time all the time.

If you listen to a great jazz musician like John Coltrane, he’s playing over the bar line, and behind the beat and ahead of the beat, and just throwing in tons of notes and rhythms, but he knows exactly where he’s at, and he’s in complete control. You can’t get that from an education. You gotta’ get it from being on the road and playing with people who can really do it. I was lucky enough to play with some people who really can groove. That had the biggest effect on my playing. And then there are the other things like learning how to be on the road and maintain yourself. The three most important things about being on the road is eating right, sleeping right, and getting on stage on time. So then, if you have a clean pair of socks, it’s cake [laughs].

Once you came back and started putting together your own music and your own band, was it difficult to find artists in New England that enjoyed the same style of music that you did?

I actually find most of the blues musicians or blues style musicians in this area very stiff [laughs]. I don’t mean stiff in feel, but in interpretation, and sometimes that’s cool. The whole idea of blues is not to copy how it sounded in 1962, or the 50s – Chess Records – but to take that genre and get down to the basic elements of what that music is about, which is truth. You have to express the truth of who you are in that art form in order to make it believable. If you’re just copying a style in a historic way, then it no longer has the truth of who you are. You’re paying tribute, and there are a lot of people who’ve made a great living paying tribute, and doing a good job of it, but to me, that’s not what it’s about.

I need to express something fresh, and when I listen to music, if it’s not really fresh and something new, it just goes in one ear and out the other. I can’t listen to much music that doesn’t have true originality to it, and so that’s what I want to try and do in mine. It’s hard to find people that have the guts to put themselves out there completely, and understand that you can take just a germ of an idea, and put yourself into it, and make it totally yours. Then it’s a matter of genre. I hate using genre terms like blues, or jazz, or rock, or funk, because it generalizes the music specifically for the sake of marketing, and marketing tends to lose the whole purpose of music. Because think about it – the purpose of music from the beginning has not been to go out and create that million dollar sound. Each musician has a place in society to soothe people and to help them interpret their own lives.

Tell me a little about the people who make up your band in a live setting – who are they and how did you recruit them?

I mix it up. I have guys in New York that I play with, and then guys in New England that I play with. And I have guys in Bulgaria that I’m going over to play with this summer, and I have some guys in Latvia that I go over to play with. We play Latvia and Poland over there. I’m going to Bulgaria, and we’ll be going to Serbia, and possibly Milan. But the guys in New York that I play with, like Marko Djordjevic on drums, he’s been with me since my first CD. He’s actually Serbian, so he’ll be going over with me to play in Bulgaria. We’ll be playing with guys in Bulgaria that played on my first and second CD. That’s really interesting, because their interpretation of the blues is nothing like any American would play, which is really cool because I really like a lot of Eastern European music. I’m a big fan of gypsy music, and that definitely comes out more in my playing these days.

So you’ve got your New York guys, and your New England guys. Tell me a little more about the backup band that’ll be playing at the May 7 show.

Marko will be coming up to play drums. He’s been playing with me since he was about 18. He is living in New York now, and he’s getting extremely well known as a great drummer. Modern Drummer just wrote him up as a world class drummer – one of the most exciting energies in drumming today. That’s a pretty big deal to be written up in Modern Drummer like that. He’s got a new instructional DVD out, and he’s been touring with Jonah Smith – a lot of the bigger names in jazz like Bill Frisell and Wayne Krantz. He plays with me every time I play down in New York, and he’s amazing – there’s no other drummer I’ve ever heard who has the energy that he has, and it’s very controlled energy, too. There’s a special conversation that happens musically every time he and I play together.

Lenny Bradford will be playing with me on bass. He actually plays in a band called Entrain as well. He’s been playing with me for about 18 years. I’m bringing a trumpet player up, but the trumpet player I was going to bring just called and told me he’s going on the road with John Mayer that day. So I will have a trumpet player, but Brad can’t make it, so I’m not sure who’s going to be with me.

Anyone else?

No – just guitar, bass, drums and trumpet.

Do you ever share any songwriting responsibilities, or do you usually handle it yourself?

I write and produce everything that I do. I’m always open to input from people that I play with, because it makes for better music. There’s one song on my most recent CD that I co-wrote with a friend of mine who lives down in Florida. That was actually for a different project, but that particular tune never made it onto that project, so I did a new interpretation of it. I co-write with other people, but usually for specific projects.

Do you usually bring in people as needed to record for your albums?

It depends on the project, but for my last CD, I had Clyde Stubblefield play drums, and that was something that I specifically thought about when I was putting together the CD – I wanted it to be played, recorded, and arranged like the Philly soul stuff that I really love. Clyde played on a lot of that stuff, and he’s royalty as far as American music goes. He’s one of the guys responsible for what we now call the backbeat. His tone and his feel is so copied that we just basically take it for granted. And another thing I love about him is that he hardly ever plays cymbals. Those are to me one of the most misunderstood instruments in music that just constantly cover up so much. For me, they cover up a lot of the articulation of guitar. Playing acoustic guitar on that album on all but one tune, I wanted everything to come out a certain way. So I hired Clyde for that, and I hired someone else to specifically play a Hammond B-3 for the entire CD. And I brought in people I’ve worked with because I love what they do.

Let’s talk a little bit more about that album. You said you played acoustic on all but one song, and you wanted to have a specific sound. Tell me a little about what you were going for with the guitar sound.

Well, it’s basically what I’ve been doing a lot of lately - just playing a very aggressive style of acoustic guitar that you hear more in gypsy music, but doing it in relation to soul and blues grooves. And trying not to sound like George Benson [laughs]. Although I love George Benson, and it was funny that Grant Green, Jr. was there helping me co-produce, and Grant is very much coming from that Blue Note school. Grant Green, Sr. was George Benson’s biggest inspiration outside of Wes Montgomery, and he works with George also. So I was trying not to go in that direction but keep the blues in there. It’s hard not to sound like those guys when you do that, because you play a certain way over a certain groove, and it’s going to sound like Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, Wes Montgomery George Benson – that whole Blue Note thing.

I was trying to stay away from that, so it was a matter of bringing out a little of the rawness in the acoustic guitar. And I also play in a more rhythmic, funkier way than those guys, too. I tend to go for a bit more nastiness, but I was trying to do it with my fingers instead of distortion. I don’t use much distortion, even when I play electric – I use the natural distortion of an amp to create my tone. So it was more about being in the fingers, and that creates a certain sound. It’s a certain texture, and it’s more of a rhythmic thing, which is what I’m all about. And I like the way that the acoustic guitar will mix with the Hammond B-3, and drums, and bass, and it has a certain sweetness to it, but it can also sound really rhythmic and really groove like in a more complex way than electric guitar can, because electric guitar tends to fill up a lot more sonic space.

There’s a lot of music on Radio Ghosts. Were those songs that you’d had in your head for a long time and had been playing live before recording them?

More than half of them were, yes. In fact, I’d even recorded three or four of them previously but never released them. The idea was that with this CD, I wanted to take everything I had, as well as some new stuff that I was writing specifically for this, and that fit into this thread of soul music. Whether it was loose or not, it all connected in that respect.

Obviously there’s a nice blend of really different styles. Where do you think that comes from?

There really is, and I consider myself a real student of music. I’ve spent a lot of time basically learning every cultural style of music there is, and I continue to. You can definitely hear some Moroccan music. You can hear flamenco, and Brazilian music, and mostly the American funk/soul/blues stuff. Then there’s the gypsy thing combined in that, and there’s some straight ahead jazz combined in it. It’s all stuff that I do, and to me it just naturally comes out that way. It’s just part of my natural language, and I don’t feel like I’m shifting gears when I do it. It kind of bothers me when I say that, and people say it all the time, but I never really think about it that way. When I put on a CD that all has the same sound to it, I get bored with it. This CD was designed more to tell a story, and to play a certain way from beginning to end.

What benefit do you think being your own producer adds to your music?

Well, for me, it means that the focus is complete. I basically know what I want, and I can drive people crazy because if it’s not what I want, I want to keep going until it’s there. It can get to a point in a recording studio that it’s uncomfortable, because I know what I want, but other people don’t understand and they think it’s good enough. Then I have to make the decision of whether I’m gonna’ go with what other people in the room think, or go with what I know in my heart that it should be. There were a couple of things with vocals on the last album that I ended up just loading everything onto my own recording gear, taking it home, and recording a lot of the vocals at home. I ended up having to recreate the melodies because I didn’t like the melodies. So producing my own music can be pretty stressful. It’s nice sometimes to just be a player, and just show up and leave everything to everyone else, but I like the learning process of it. Through the years I’ve learned a lot, and it’s really helped me solidify my focus.

Where do you usually record?

I recorded a lot of the basic tracks on the last CD at Neil Ward’s recording studio in Groton called Silvertone. I’ve recorded a lot of stuff there over the last 5-6 years. I enjoy working there with Neil because he’s got great vintage gear.

What’s coming up in the future?

I’m trying to finish a CD that I recorded in Latvia about four years ago, and I just haven’t had the time to finish it. They finally sent me all the basic tracks, and I basically have to finish a couple of guitar things and a couple of vocal things, and then mix it. I’ve been so busy that I couldn’t get it done, so I’ve been trying to make that a priority. I just finished producing a CD for an acoustic folk band in Groton called the Contra Banditos. I’m in the process of finishing that up. Then I’ve got a project that I’ve just started working on that I’m going to do in 5.1 surround sound. I’m composing specifically for surround sound, so there will be four different voices, and all the possibilities that you have are amazing. You’re no longer dealing with the phase problems that you have with just two speakers. You can go much closer to the idea of creating a space in four different corners of the room – four directions, four personalities, four instruments, four bands. There’s so much you can do with it, and no one’s really writing specifically for surround.