Stevie G.
By Bernard Greenwald

Ambling down Route 9 through the crowds at Hardscrabble Day, with my young sons, quite a few years ago, we came upon a big guy in a beret with a guitar. A man in his thirties, he was seated on a wooden folding chair surrounded by numerous little kids, also with electric and bass guitars. They were jamming together—the blues. Steve would take a chorus, the kids comping behind him, his huge hands working the neck of his Gibson ES 335, and then he’d give the nod to each of the kids in sequence. Even the smallest ones knew the chord changes and they took solos in turn, their hands tiny and delicate in comparison as their fingers found their places on the fretboards. These little kids were improvising together with no written music. It was like stumbling onto Fra Vivaldi’s 16th century music school for Venetian foundlings with electric Mississippi Delta overtones, but here in Red Hook. We took our places amid the beaming moms guarding the instrument cases and the older kids waiting for their turn in the spotlight. I asked one of them who the big guy was. She said, “Oh, that’s Steve, he’s great.”

I introduced Ben, who was six, to Steve, and asked if he were too young to become a student. “Absolutely not, get him a guitar.”

So the next week I found a quarter sized classical guitar in Kingston and had a tiny black canvas gig bag made for it with Ben’s name embroidered in red. The perfect ax for a six-year-old boy like Ben. (“Ax” is jazz lingo for instrument.) He began studying with Steve and we have seen him now at least once a week for almost eight years. He is great.

While improvising a meal in the kitchen might mean producing a palatable concoction from whatever you find in the refrigerator on a snowy Sunday night, jazz improvisation is a much more demanding discipline. Certainly this is true for a serious student of Steve’s. You need the tenacity and stamina to learn scales, modes, and chord structure and the imagination to master theory and harmony. You have to be able to repeat phrases and patterns until not only your brain knows them but your fingers can seem to do them on their own, And you need the boundaries of character to permit you to contain the wild, delicious exhilaration of making your own music, swept along by Orpheus’s harp, almost from the beginning of your training. Steve has shown Ben all this.

Steve lives on the top of a hill in Milan, no other houses visible from his. We usually see a trio of deer who live in the meadow just below as we drive toward his house. You enter his studio through a purple door to a room whose walls are lined with guitars, amps, a huge fish tank and many instrument cases. On one wall, over the sofa, hangs his surfboard. Near the door is a recliner and against the opposite wall Steve has his desk with music stand, drum machine, recorder/CD player, metronome and telephone. The pictures on the walls reflect his love of horses (he was once a blacksmith and as a teenager traveled on horseback to Canada) and his passion for surfing. Steve is over six feet tall and looks strong—huge hands, big arms. Both beard and hair on his handsome, massive head are close cropped, and he has a prominent, substantial nose, the profile of a Roman patrician. He always rises to shake your hand in greeting and he is usually wearing a tee shirt with the neck and sleeves cut away and voluminous trousers made for him by his wife Kathy who is a costume designer and dealer in antique clothing. Under his trousers he often wears lead weights on his ankles, to keep his legs in shape. The light from Steve’s desk silhouettes him and his student in the otherwise dimly lighted room. Introductions are always made between arriving and departing students and parents.

My older son Isaiah eventually also began to study with Steve—bass, though he later switched to guitar. With two hours to wait for the boys I would hike the hills above Steve’s house, enjoying the landscape and the changing seasons: the brook full of frogs I liked to sneak up on, the feral apple trees. Once I came close enough to a deer to hear him snort with indignation before crashing away through the woods. Later I’d read and doze in the recliner listening to the lessons and I often made drawings and even prepared several etchings of Steve working with the boys.

And of course, I listened. Steve and the boys were having a conversation, musical of course, but also verbal, in a language I could not comprehend, with a vocabulary new to me. “Lets stack pattern one over pattern four, I’ll get the chords, switch patterns every four bars,” Steve would say.

I didn’t want to be left out. So, about a year ago, when Isaiah decided to drop out and become an autodidact I took his place in the rolling office chair, using Ben’s tiny guitar. I soon graduated to a small travel guitar and then, with Steve’s help to convince my wife of its importance, to the purchase of a gorgeous antique 1958 Gretsch Streamliner. The quality of the instrument much outstrips my musical accomplishment, but I am beginning to take part in the conversation. I jam with the boys—Steve and Ben, Isaiah when he is feeling generous.

Steve is one of the most brilliant teachers I’ve ever encountered, on any level in any field. His knowledge of the guitar is encyclopedic. He asks a lot of each student but is supportive and nonjudgmental. One wants to practice and complete his weekly assignment but there is never a hint of criticism or rebuke if one cannot. Steve works very productively with what each student brings him. He says if you don’t get it it’s his fault; but after a while the student takes over that responsibility. He has taught me music but also how to be a better teacher and father, precious lessons provided for such small expense.

Steve makes little use of published guitar manuals, preferring to write out, in pencil, each week’s lesson. And when a student brings a favorite CD he listens carefully and writes out the chords to play it—from teeny bopper rock to techno to punk, reggae, country, heavy metal or jazz standards, whatever is necessary to keep that particular person engaged and making music as they are being urged forward with their theoretical learning.

My guess is that most students do not become musicians because they hit a certain barrier of frustration that causes them to quit their lessons. Certainly this is true of kids. Steve is expert at guiding them through this temporarily bleak landscape.

Isaiah, now 17, has his own band. A fluid, prolific guitarist, he is beginning to write songs and vocalize. Ben, 14, is also accomplished, Steve having introduced him to classical as well as jazz and rock guitar. His band, the Asthmatics, performed at his school in Poughkeepsie and he plays frequently in open jams at local bars with players many years his senior, with of course his old man in tow. And currently, his old man is being guided across one of those bleak stretches in every guitar student’s journey, but is still committed to learning.

When he is not teaching or playing music, Steve may be seen skateboarding in the parking lot of the local supermarket while Kathy shops. Or he is surfing in Maine. Or he’s working on his Tae Kwon Do. You might see him around town—a big guy in a beret, driving an older van with a working window air conditioner set into the rear door. He’s great.