Bio:
Greg Ruby is a guitarist, composer, author, bandleader and music educator living in Seattle, WA. His most recent record, Syncopated Classic, was named Northwest Jazz Recording of the Year by Earshot Jazz Magazine.
Greg tours and performs at swing dances, concert halls and festivals that have included: Lindy Focus, the French Quarter Festival, DjangoFest and the NW Balboa Festival. Greg’s most recent band, the Greg Ruby 6 performs the compositions and arrangements of swing guitar legend Oscar Alemán. Greg also leads The Greg Ruby Quartet, a Hot Club jazz group dedicated to all-original compositions; collaborates with New York and New Orleans musicians in The Rhythm Runners, a Prohibition-era dance band; and plays Valse musette and European café jazz with the Bric-a-brac Trio. During his tenure with the venerable Hot Club ensemble Pearl Django, he performed at the Django Reinhardt Festival in Samois-sur-seine, France.
Greg’s compositions have been heard on radio, television and documentaries including NBC’s Parks and Recreation and the podcast Freakanomics. His 2010 CD, Look Both Ways, features all original compositions and reached #1 on the Roots Music Review jazz chart. Greg has authored the Pearl Django Play-Along Book, Frank D. Waldron: Seattle’s Syncopated Classicand the Oscar Alemán Play-Along Book. As a sought-after music instructor, Greg shares his love of vintage jazz guitar at schools, clinics and camps and he is the Swannanoa Gathering Guitar Week coordinator at Warren Wilson College.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“Over the past 20 years, Greg Ruby has become a gem of the Pacific Northwest Jazz scene as a guitarist, composer, band-leader and music historian.”
— Joe Bebco, The Syncopated Times
My Instruction
Lessons/Workshops:
From private guitar lessons, to workshops and the school classroom, Greg is adept at multiple teaching styles. He has led Gypsy Jazz Guitar Workshops at the State University of New York, Oswego; Seattle Jazz Guitar Society; Wintergrass Music Festival; DjangoFest; the Dusty String Music School (Seattle); The Mandolin Symposium; the Millwood Guitar Week; and at the Swannanoa Gathering (North Carolina).
Greg is available for private guitar lessons either in person or via Skype. Please contact him directly at [email protected] to arrange a time.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).