Artist Interview:
Bebop Guitarist, Bruce Forman
by Stephen Rekas


Click to hear a sample of Bruce Forman!

Guitar Sessions: Ok, were rolling. Tell me about your band, Cow Bop.
Bruce Foreman: Oh you want to hear about that band! Sure. Cow Bop is an interesting mix of western swing and bebop, hence "Cow Bop". I've always been a bebop jazz guitar player and I'm also a western horseman. I compete in novice barnyard rodeos and horse events and I go out and ride all the time. Of course being ensconced in that culture and having grown up in Texas, western music was a part of me and part of my history, and I just really loved the groove. It was time to do something and I did it! You know what I mean?

So you went with the concept… and why do you call the style Cow Bop?
I call it Cow Bop because it's basically "Cow-ifornia swing" if you want to call it that. It's just like the Bob Wills School, updated by adding a little more bebop and jazz harmony, as it's already jazz.

And you're a four-piece group right now?
We are a five-piece group. Guitar, bass, drums, vocals, and the fifth person is usually a fiddle but sometimes a sax player who doubles on clarinet. The new CD has both of those guys and a piano player on some tracks.

How did you come up with the idea of the Route 66 tour?
The idea of the '66 tour germinated from a lot of places. One of them was when I was out there in St. Louis playing a gig with Charlie Shoemake and we went out to some restaurant and there was a roadhouse out there on Old 66 right outside St. Louis. I've always loved American culture and particularly vintage Americana culture, hence the jazz thing …and I just always wanted to see the old Mother Road.

Then I've always had this bebop Gypsy wanderlust in me, so I just mentioned to the guys in the band, since Cow Bop is the perfect kind of band to do that sort of Americana trail. As I thought about it, I conceived it as a fundraiser for my music mentoring program for kids, kind of like a pledge drive or a walk-a-thon kind of thing. And then the road Gypsy aspect just seems to be somewhere between Jack Kerouac and reality TV, I guess.

So all of these themes came together and basically what we do is we leave with $100 and no [scheduled] gigs and we play our way across the country out on Route 66. But it still could sound kinda like a road show as people know about it now. So we do allow ourselves to book gigs in advance, but any money that comes from a gig that is booked more than 24 hours in advance has to all go into the workshop program. We don't allow ourselves to live on that money. We keep the Gypsy road challenge intact.

What's the name of the program?
The program is called JazzMasters Workshop.

How do people get in touch with you to schedule a workshop?
They can go straight to the website: jazzmastersworkshop.org.

How long has that been going on?
It's been going on a little over five years now officially, or unofficially about six-and-a- half years. We achieved nonprofit status about a year into the program's life.

What is the target age for that program?
You name it, from 6 to 66, or 76, or 86! [Laughs] Basically, the feeling is that we collectively have 100 years of success in this music and the way it happens is- we play together [with the kids]. You know? You just play! You take people from where they are, and you start playing and you move forward.

I'm very much a believer in the experiential component of music, where you need to play with good players and you need to play a lot. So, the workshops are very much based on drop-in, play and a guy like me who can recognize how to get everyone playing at their own level and bring them up to the next level through the experience of picking music with good players in real time.

Is that all happening in southern or central California?
It's happening in central California and northern California, southern Chicago, and southern New York; we are really trying to empower communities to run and fund these types of programs so they can utilize the resources of local musicians to make a better world for their community.

What kinds of places did you play in along Route 66?
Well, it hilarious because you know we needed to live! We played barbershops, and hot dog stands, and art galleries, and curio shops, bars, restaurants... museums like all the Route 66 memorabilia kinds of places, car dealerships, roadside stands, and it was nothin' for us to just show up in a town and pull out our instruments and just start walking the streets like troubadours. It gets things going!

And when people first saw us and we explained what we were doing they'd say "You're crazy!" and when I'd see that look in their eyes I knew they had to be thinking, "These guys can't be very good if they are willing to do something like this." And then when we start playing, the people are kind of in shock! We are a good band! And the next thing you know they're calling their friends, or brothers or somewhere- and we've got a gig and we're partying at their house and we stay over, and then we have friends for life. It's been a wonderful experience that has really changed my life forever. Each one of these trips makes a real dent in my psyche in terms of how I feel about music, how I feel about the rest of the people that live in this country, and it's all positive.

I'm curios about the logistics of your travel? Do you rent a van or fly to Chicago and start there and go back to California…?
There are myriad logistics. The first trip we did Ford actually loaned us a vehicle as kind of a sponsor. We had an Explorer 4-track which was really small for us but we made it work. The second time on Route 66 we rented a van, and my wife Pamela [a.k.a. "Pinto Pammy"] who is the singer in the band - she's such a good sport- she drove all the equipment across before we flew to Chicago- because I had some gigs [in California] before we could all meet and leave from Chicago. We surrender all moneys and start with just one hundred-dollar bill and a full tank of gas; the goal is to go the whole way, Chicago to California, without pulling out a credit card.

How many such trips have you made?
There were two trips down Route 66, one trip through the California Gold Country on a road called Highway 49 and we just completed a trip called "On the Edge" which was [along] the entire California Highway 1 on the coast. This most recent one was very interesting because I brought two students from the program to play in the band so we really lived the mentoring concept hour by hour, day by day. You wouldn't believe the amount of progress these kids made in just two weeks.

So they played with you?
They were in the band! It was a 5-piece band. The fiddle player was 16 years old. We had to get him back in time to start the 11^th grade. The bass player was one of my students at my artist in residence program at USC.

That's phenomenal!
And they just played their @#%&s off; I hope I can say that.

We'll handle it the way Newsweek does.
But to watch … I know that this program works because that's how I learned how to play. Just to be able to able to observe it day by day, hour by hour… it's the most heartwarming aspect of the program. These people are changed for life in a good way. As for the music, they are going to be the next guys!

How did you get the music bug?
Well pretty much…I played as a kid and I heard Charlie Parker at one point. And that was it for me. That was like, wow! Here is a kind of music that embodies all the kinds of things I want to do in music; it's technical, it's free, it's exuberant, it's challenging, it's deeply rooted obviously - in a lot of history- all of those things; it just sort of embodies a feeling and an approach to life and music that I never could have recovered from.

Was your own household musical?
No, actually quite the contrary; no one in my house was musical. My mother made me take piano as a kid. My older brother snuck by and I think she always wanted to play the piano, so I was the one chosen to do that and I'm glad she did, because I know to this day that there are things that I can hear and do that could only come from all those years playing classical piano.

I was going to ask if your interest had always been in swing or jazz, but you have a classical piano musical upbringing.
Yes. That was from age 6 to 12 [as a pianist] and I begged her to let me quit and she finally did… and then I got a guitar. She said, "I've had enough of this trying to practice or trying to get you to lessons; Ill get you the guitar but then you're on your own!" Then within weeks I heard Bird [saxophonist Charlie Parker] and that was the end of that!

So there was no rock & roll phase?
No, I never had a rock& roll phase… I went through some blues and some Latin but already in the context of playing bebop, my main thing. I played in a lot of organ trios and some western swing bands, things like that…not the coolest stuff- just to make some money.

Did you have any formal education with the guitar or are you completely self-taught?
Pretty much I was completely self-taught. When we moved to San Francisco from Texas when I was about 14, there was this one guitarist I really liked; I really liked the way he played in the legato style. His name was Jackie King (See Getting Into Jazz Guitar). He was teaching at the Yamaha Music Center in downtown San Francisco. I would go down there and hang out in the waiting room because invariably most of the students would not show up for their lessons or whatever and basically we would just play. I would take their time because they had to pay in advance for their lessons. I would just be there waiting for him and we'd play, and then he would invite me to come play on his gigs, sometimes calling me from the clubs.

But in terms of actual formal training, I never had any. Because of that, I developed what I would consider almost bad habits that I have overcome, but I also had my own way of doing things, probably all based on what I was hearing. In a lot of ways, I developed a technique and style on the guitar that suited what I wanted to do musically; so it's kind of like an advantage and disadvantage component to having been self taught.

Besides Bird and Jackie King, who were you listening to?
I was totally into Bird, and Glen Powell, Hank Mobley. I really didn't listen to too many guitar players in that phase. It was more like Winton Kelly, Red Garland- that kind of thing. Also Lee Morgan, Johnny Griffin… so I was really looking for more of a legato sound, and my approach to playing chords was very much voice leading style vs. block style. It was much more of a close-voicing and strong voice leading and comping in kind of a bebop context.

So inner movement and four-voice chords, that kind of thing?
Three mostly, three and four [voices] and close inner movements, and kind of a "carpeting" approach to laying out the harmony. So basically, it was very obvious to me that the way I was going work it was to be able to comp well for these horn players.

Were you always planning on someone else playing the lead?
Within the context of when I came up I wasn't really qualified to play lead anyway. I was learning the tunes myself and I wanted to learn from these great guys and play with them, so my role in that picture at that point in time was to stay out of everybody's way, provide good support, and get my chance to blow and don't screw up when I got it.

Who do you like to listen to now?
I like to listen to everybody. On the guitar side I've got a whole lot of time to make up from all those years of being so horn and piano-centric. Over the last 10 years I have really gone back and digested a lot of Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Barney Kessel, Joe Pass, and Kenny Burell- just reacquainting myself with the brilliance and beauty of all those masters.

I hear that! There is so much to learn about the guitar. It's staggering.
I know, and yet I do feel as a teacher it can be problematic because oftentimes there are two kinds of people- the one who wants to play guitar and the other who wants to play music and to me, the guitar should never supersede the music side, yet it often does. They just get so into the guitar that the finer points of music end up being ditched.

Do you teach fulltime?
I teach, but not fulltime. My main gig is playing, but when I teach I try to teach from the perspective of trying to bring the student through the guitar rather than teaching them the guitar. I try to get them to be complete in all the musical ways- as an accompanist, as a soloist, as a melody player, to basically have a wide-open pallet at their discretion. I encourage them to be creative and musical and to play the guitar, not letting the guitar play them.

As I understand it, you didn't necessarily focus on first-position chords even when you were first learning.
No, I guess I didn't. But I can play 'em, I swear!

Maybe you're the wrong person to ask, but how does one who is stuck in that first position go about expanding their harmonic pallet?
The first thing is not to generally discredit what you already do well. I think that's a common thing that happens to guys. They say, "Oh boy, I want to go there and since he [the reigning guitar hero] didn't do that, I shouldn't do what I do well. I heard Joe Pass explain the way he approaches the guitar in the CAGED system with the five basic chord shapes. They actually appear on the instrument in that order: C-A-G-E-D.

Yes, I learned that through the use of the capo.
If you use only the Joe Pass approach and just pick a sound and a harmony and find all the consonant tones at all the various [fret] degrees, that system forces you into a more open vertical sense of the instrument. In other words, you force yourself to move through those positions you are comfortable with so you can use what you already do well to find new things. That's one thing you can do.

Then I would also suggest that in any given song, be able to play- and this goes more to a jazz rhythm section- you should be able to play the 3^rd and 7^th of a chord in the middle of the instrument, which would be either on the D and G or maybe the A and D strings- and then play a voice leading scheme on top and always grab the 3^rd and 7^th below, according to whatever chord progression you're playing. Combine the 3^rd and 7^th both harmonically and contrapuntally with the melody line on top. This will open you up to hearing even more possibilities; what you really need to do most is train your ears, not your hands.

That's the problem with the open forms if you're strictly training your hands to hear for you; by asking your ear to do the work you're taking the emphasis on the musicality away from your exterior and moving it inside your body, which is where it needs to be.

Have you explained that concept in print anywhere?
I have a book called The Jazz Guitar Style of Bruce Forman, but I wrote it 20 years ago and I don't know how comprehensive I was on that point. I'd like to do that; I guess I should really do that although I've read so many Mel Bay books [that touch on that subject] and they're great! I guess I feel it might be redundant.

Have any Mel Bay books figured into your own development as a guitarist?
Not really. I am one of those guys who play and learn by going directly to the source. I have a number of [Mel Bay] books at my house that I love to read through. When I come across an interesting idea I work on it and develop my own concept of it, something like one of the Dave Stryker, Corey Christiansen or Howard Alden books. In terms of my early development, I wanted to play like Bird so I got a book. After an hour I didn't sound very much like Bird, but when I took the record and slowed it down and played what he played - it sounded pretty much like him!

As kids we tend to see things in black and white. I developed this "record good/ book bad" concept, which was totally oversimplified and not very wise. But I carried the idea over until later when I started to look into the books in earnest, I found all this great information that I wouldn't have found anywhere else; I saw how stupid I had been in my oversimplification.

Do you also compose?
Yes I do. Unfortunately I haven't been doing as much of it because the world doesn't seem to really have much room for it; it's hard to continually write stuff when it sits in a stack on the desk or a book in my briefcase. I only do one record every couple of years and generally speaking the prevailing winds want to hear a lot of standards anyway. A lot of my recent writing has been in developing arrangements for Cow Bop. I've got a suite that I've written that I took apart to play in various tunes with my jazz group; I'm thinking of reconstructing it and orchestrating it for guitar and full orchestra.

That would be something.
That's something I plan on doing over the next year.

Which of your albums would you recommend for the first time listener?
Oh wow! I don't know - I guess I'd mention three of them: River Journey to hear me in my early, early days; and I'd say Full Circle for my next phase, and Dedication, which is my most recent one- illustrating my trio concept. Then of course there's Cow Bop [Swingin' Out West] and numerous sideman records.

What is your principle axe right now?
I'm playing a Sontag. Stefan Sontag is a builder in Germany who I met at an international guitar festival where there were a lot of luthiers and a lot of us players offering workshops. I was very impressed by his instruments.

Is the Sontag an archtop guitar?
Yes, it's an archtop with a 16-inch carved top. In all fairness, before this guitar I had an Ibanez custom made, more in the L5 school with a built-in pickup. It had no model number; it was like a Bruce Foreman model that never went into production. So I still have that guitar and I love it! The Ibanez is one of the best-playing guitars I've ever played, and most of my records were made using this guitar.

I go acoustic a lot because of Cow Bop and the western swing thing and because of embracing the Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian styles, also because of wanting to feel more of a vibration and have a broader palette in terms of tone quality. It's been a real good electric axe too but it sounds real acoustic in terms of lower notes that have a little more fundamental in them and a little punch.

Has Cow Bop toured outside of US?
Music is representative of American culture in a very interesting way. We usually draw from the Western culture and from the jazz and swing styles. I've spent a lot of time touring, playing straight-ahead jazz outside of the States, particularly in Italy; I love to gauge the audience's reaction to what we're doing. Man it's a lot of fun! It really is.

How has your family affected your music? You've mentioned being married to the singer in the band, so that has to affect your music and life in general.
Yeah, actually I didn't even know she was a singer 'til we were married. We met at a horse show. She had heard me complain about problems with various singers my whole life, and girl singers which I still believe are the third sex. She didn't really disclose that part to me. Through her I have learned to appreciate singers in a way that I had never been able to in the past. She's not really coming from the jazz singer tradition; she is more of a big band singer. She sings melodies and she's into western music and stuff and so I guess I fell back in love with the stories and the words through her, and of course now I just really dig all the jazz singers and love playing with them and have been fortunate to work with so many of them.

Have you co-written any tunes with your wife?
No, not really. I write a lot of tunes on my own but we've never written any together.

Is she featured mainly on the Cow Bop album?
Yeah she's mostly on the first Cow Bop record; it's almost like it's her record. The new one I made a lot more instrumental- more like half vocal and half instrumental, you know.

Have you ever had a dry spell in your playing or composition or other creative endeavors?
Yeah, but I never had one of those writer's block that you hear of guys who quit for a year and can't do anything, but it's cyclical; you kinda play along and some things sort of click for you and you move to a new plateau. At first it's so exciting and just can't wait to play, but then it gets stagnant and loses it and then you survey the territory and it drives you crazy 'til you hit the next spot.

How do you get through it?
The more you play though, the faster those periods go by. I can remember when I was a young player how a new lick or a new comp could keep me happy for a month. Now some kind of new realization kind of gets me excited for a day or two, then it feels old to me and I've gotta move on to the next. Generally speaking, I've gone through enough of these little ups and downs to learn to appreciate the down moments. It's great to realize when I'm on the verge of a breakthrough and to challenge myself to work harder to break through to find the next thing! I try to turn it around on itself and create something positive out of it.

Is your current tour schedule on your website?
Yeah, I do it myself- so yes in theory. I wish I could say I was better at it then I am. I try to put all of my gigs up there and one of my ongoing resolutions is to do a better job.

When is the next 66 tour scheduled?
Oh, I don't know. We just did this big monumental tour up the coast so that wanderlust to get out there and do the Gypsy thing again is not as strong with me, but I just love Route 66 so much that I'm feeling the call. To be honest with you I would like to make it a bigger thing and get some more bands to come along and make a Gypsy caravan out of it. One of my callings in life is to bring people together and come up with ideas to get people to follow their muse, and to inspire them to do things themselves.

Over the years it's been rewarding that many of my students have gone on to do great things. I'm so grateful to the people who have done it for me. The Route 66 tour is very much an embodiment of that whole philosophy.

When you went to SIUE [Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville] for example, you not only played but did a workshop or something, right?
It depends. Most of the time I go to schools and do anything performance-wise, but there is also some kind of educational component to it. The word "education" meaning I just hang out and share my point of view and what I've learned by experience. Ultimately, I try to get inside the students' heads to find the things that will enable them to get to where they want to go quicker.

Is there any chance of getting a list of the places you played on Route 66?
A lot of places we played are listed on our journal blog of the trip. Go to any of my websites and you'll see a road shield icon. It will be on the edge now because that was the last trip, and you'll go there and up front and center is that new trip. You'll see in the margin it will say "Click here to view archives of past trips." You'll see "The Original Route 66 Tour" and "Route 66 Revisited"- if you go through there it will say pretty much where we have played and the people we met. So that's a good start.

Have you ever been to Seligman, Arizona and seen the Snow Cap Drive-In and gift shop/barbershop owned by the Delgadillo brothers?
Oh yes- twice! On our Route 66 Challenge Tours we actually played a gig in front of the Snow-Cap to a very appreciative crowd. That's what we do on those tours. When we see a crowd of people we pile out of the truck with the upright bass and all and play completely acoustically, our drummer with a cardboard box. We stand on the corner and play. We pass the hat and hope that somebody gives us enough money that we can eat our next meal. The last time we were in Seligman there was a big tour bus with people from England or Germany and they loved it. They thought it was part of the whole tourist scene.

So you were part of the local Americana scene that afternoon. Did you get paid with cheeseburgers?
The folks at the drive-in liked us so much that they did feed us! When we told them that we were raising money for the JazzMasters Workshop they comped us all milkshakes too. They were wonderful people.

Route 66 is just a natural venue for the style of music you play with Cow Bop.
We've done it twice and I would love to do it again if we could partner up on something. You guys are right on Route 66. I would like nothing better than to pool our resources because I do agree with you, this band I've got is the perfect band to be out there on that road. The reason we do it to encourage music mentoring and community empowerment, which is the anti-interstate contest. The fact is that my concept of the way music should be for kids is like Route 66 is to the interstate highway system. I don't think it's a numbers game; I think it's about people. That's the core of the strength of Mel Bay books- while you're all around the world, it's musicians and teachers and people playing who buy your books. It's the personal contact component that makes it work.

I would hope that other Mel Bay artists could take the Route 66 tour that you guys have pioneered in a way, and give a lot of worthy people opportunities to play in what looks like an ideal situation. They'd have to be willing to put up with the challenges, however!
The way we are doing it, it doesn't have to be a challenge anymore. We can just build tours now. That's what I'm hoping to do. It's almost not fair for me to call it a "challenge" anymore. It's as if I've buried stuff along the way. Doing new routes- that's a challenge because I'd have to continually make new friends! Half the places we showed up on Route 66 the second time, they remembered us! We went into Gallup, New Mexico and I thought I was going to have to talk 'em into everything again and it was like - "Oh! Do you want the same room you had last time. You can play in the bar." The bartender even remembered what we drank. Oh well, this is no longer a challenge folks!

What is the JazzMasters Workshop? Is that a program you put on for kids?
That's my mentoring program. You guys have been very supportive. You have always sent books to me and I have lending libraries for kids with so many of your books in it. Basically, it's all about playing. I pay musicians, I raise money through these challenges and writing grants to pay musicians to play with kids, recreating a kind of club in the living room atmosphere that the music grew up in to ensure that the legacy moves on to another generation.

I see on your home page that you have written a novel. Does it have anything to do with music?
My novel? It's the story about a guitar player who wants to be famous. There is a lot of music in there. It's kind of a comedy, mystery fiction. I'm very proud of it; it a fun story although it probably not going to win a Pulitzer Prize. It is an entertaining story about a musician and what happens to him in life.

I'll look for it at my local bookstore or on amazon .com. Is there anything that you would like to add that I haven't asked about?
No, just basically- I wish everybody would play more. I don't know anybody that disagrees with that fundamental idea which is, the best way to be a better player is to play a lot. I wish people would do more of that; I think the world would be a better place and we'd all be in a better state if we all just played and appreciated each other.

Apart from music what are your interests?
Both my wife and I are horse people. I've been riding since I was a child. We have a wonderful registered quarter horse named Calvin and I like to do cow work on him. I've even won some buckles in reining and Western pleasure and events like that.

What is "reining"?
It's kind of like fancy dancing with a western horse with sliding stops, bends, galloping in particular patterns. It's rather high-level riding and not easy to do. You have to have a horse that is very well trained. I've published one novel and have written some others which I'd like to get published. I just love traveling cross-country in the United States and enjoy all aspects of Americana.

Thanks Bruce. This has been one of the most enlightening and entertaining interviews I've ever done. My pleasure, Steve. It was really great talking to you and stay in touch!

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To learn more about Bruce Forman, the JazzMasters Workshop and Cow Bop and its Route 66 Tours, please visit: www.bruc.eforman.com/.

To learn more about Seligman, Arizona and Route 66 in general please visit: http://www.theroadwanderer.net/RT66seligman.htm


Epilogue

As this interview is "going to press" Bruce Forman is touring with a jazz group in Italy. The suite he mentioned in this interview indeed came to pass and will premiere as a narrated operetta called The Fable of the Red Guitar. Cow Bop is offering a concert in Castro Valley in the Bay Area on the March 17, 2007 which will feature the work.