Flatpicking Spotlight: Stephen Mougin (Guitarist with Sam Bush Band)

 

Stephen Mougin

by Rebecca Frazier

On Saturday nights at music festivals across the nation, there’s a man in a fedora hat holding a dreadnought guitar. He’s got a commanding rhythmic style and improvises through solos and jams with clean, rapid-fire precision. That man on stage with the Sam Bush Band is Stephen Mougin, and he actually wears many hats. He’s not only a recognized and celebrated bluegrass guitarist—he’s a talented and skilled mandolin player. He’s also a powerhouse singer and vocal educator, with a degree in vocal pedagogy. He’s a prolific songwriter and record producer. And as a record label head, he owns Dark Shadow Recording with wife Jana Mougin. 

Mougin’s musical path began at an early age in New England, where he grew up in western Massachusetts. He remembers, “When I was 6 years old, my dad decided he was going to get a guitar and learn to play. He discovered that some of his work pals had a local gathering where they’d get together and jam. By the time I was 8, I was picking with them and doing shows.”

As a teenager, Mougin was already touring in an established bluegrass band. “When I was 15, I joined a band which ended up being two of the guys that taught me how to play,” he recalls. “The guitar player who taught me, and the banjo player who taught the guitar player when he was a kid. So it was three generations of music with that group, Thunder Mountain Bluegrass, and I was with them for 10 years until I moved down to Nashville. We played regionally throughout New England.”

The steady stream of performing, jamming, and hearing legendary bluegrass artists in the Northeastern festival scene provided a strong foundation for Mougin’s multi-faceted bluegrass career.  “From the time I was about 7 or 8, every summer was filled with bluegrass festivals up through New England, and I got to see a lot of the greats in the music: Bill Monroe, Osborne Brothers Jim & Jesse, Bill Harrell, Bluegrass Cardinals, all these classic groups,” Mougin says.

Despite his bluegrass expertise, Mougin decided to go in another direction as he matured into adulthood. “I was interested in music of all sorts, and I wasn’t convinced that playing bluegrass was going to be a potential for actual earning,” he explains. “So I decided to go to college for vocal music education and studied for four years—classical music and vocal jazz. I got a job straight out of college teaching at a school in Massachusetts.”

Mougin eventually migrated to Nashville in 2002 and began playing in various bluegrass outfits.  “It was tough when after the first year and a half, I was sort of broke and homeless for a while; I remember two times in my life when I poured the last nine dollars of money I had into my gas tank to get to the next gig. It happened twice,” he shares. “So yeah, it was a hard road for a while; but there were some really cool things that happened along the way. I remember one summer I was in seven different bands, none of them full time, and I was still sitting home every other weekend. But it was a really good learning experience, and I don’t think I have dug in and learned the quantity of material before or since. And I got really good at learning tunes quickly. Not just learning tunes, but learning arrangements quickly. And I spent a lot of time in the car driving here there and everywhere and just immersed myself in the music I was going to be playing.”

The rich bluegrass background, the musical education, and the intensive learning and ear-training involved with his Nashville performance gigs coalesced when he was selected in 2006 for the bluegrass A-list position as guitarist in the band of bluegrass icon, Sam Bush. His skill-building and hard work was paying off, and he and his wife Jana Mougin—a talented bluegrass musician in her own right—began building the foundations for their recording studio and record label, Dark Shadow Recording. Mougin racked up a steady catalog of production and songwriting credits, and has continued steadily touring and teaching vocal and instrumental workshops across the nation.

Mougin’s guitar style is built upon his vocal artistry, and he strives to come up with new ways to express his guitar finesse in a unique improvisational style. “I’ve oscillated between trying to do the jazz thing where you’re singing the solo while you’re playing it. And I find I never do it on mic, but there are times when I’m kind of singing it to myself, because for me, it kind of connects through the voice. I’m more aware of musicality as a singer than I am as a player. I just feel more connected to it that way,” he observes.

“In the Sam Bush Band, we have regular solos that go over a particular chord change that is a section of the song, like the chorus or verse—bluegrass style. And then we have long extended jams that might be over a static chord progression, whether it’s moving or whether it’s over one chord that goes for as long as you have ideas or want to play. Those were really challenging for me, and continue to be…because you sort of continue to play and it’s easy to run out of ideas and then feel like you’re playing all your dumb licks,” he laughs. “One of the things that I consciously try to warm up on any given day, is to spend enough time noodling with some kind of soundtrack until I’ve played through all of my dumb licks and try to get them out of my system, and then try to create something new. What I want to be happening is to make little motifs. And I don’t know if I’m ever particularly successful with it, but that’s always my drive.”

Mougin emphasizes listening as his single piece of advice for developing musicians. “I can’t express enough how important listening has been for me. And focused listening,” he advises. “I had a professor once who said, ‘If you steal from one person it’s plagiarism; if you steal from everybody it’s research.’ So, I try to take that to heart as I’m listening. I’m just picking and choosing from things I really dig, and also learning things that I don’t like. I think that’s just as valuable in the listening experience.”

But how does Mougin make it look so natural and easy to play bluegrass guitar with such power and skill? “I’ve noticed, the older I get, it feels like I’m a beginner every single day I start. And it’s really frustrating when my hands just don’t work. You know, it’s like I’ve never touched a guitar before, it feels like the pick’s a two by four,” he laughs. Mougin prioritizes practicing guitar and warming up in the days leading up to his tour dates, which can be tricky during his busy periods in the recording studio. “Yeah, I really struggle with that, because there’s not enough practice in the world that gets you ready for playing on stage with Sam Bush Band. But I do have to play midweek for sure, to keep it up, and I struggle with that sometimes in the studio. You know, if I’m doing ten hours a day behind the [studio] console, the last thing in the world I want to do is pick up a guitar. And so that is a struggle for me and something I’ve had to work on, and have not been really great at. It’s easy to let life get in the way of all of that, and I try to keep an eye on when it’s coming. So several days before I go out, I’m really getting back into things. But I’m losing a lot of ground on that, unfortunately, and it’s one of my personal frustrations.” 

Mougin’s honest approach and musical self-awareness are qualities that seem to push him further each day on his journey, as he’s never complacent about his success. “One of the things that I feel like I’m not super strong with is taking a really established melody and improvising in a way that still sounds like the melody, but you’re still doing something new with it. I feel like I am either straight-on going to rail the melody, or I’m going to be off in Egypt somewhere,” he muses. “So it’s one of the things I’m working on as a player, to try to connect those two in a more meaningful way.” 

Originally published in Americana Rhythm Music Magazine

Flatpicking Spotlight: Steve Kaufman (3-time National Flatpicking Champion)

 

Steve Kaufman

by Rebecca Frazier

Steve Kaufman has been influencing guitar players since the 1970’s, when he first set foot on stages of guitar competitions across the country. His ease and grace with his instrument are comfortable—almost humorous. It’s hard to imagine that a person as relaxed as Kaufman has spent so many years chomping the bit on the contest circuit and writing instruction manuals on airplanes. And while Steve Kaufman is known for his virtuosic flatpicking guitar styling and national championship honors, his music books and DVD’s, and his world-renowned acoustic camps, he seems to have accomplished all of this with a twinkle in his eye.

“I didn’t go to college,” Kaufman says, reminiscing about his childhood in New Jersey. “I was lucky to get out of high school. If my brother hadn’t gone and talked to my teachers, I would’ve failed high school. The day I graduated high school, my buddies dropped me off on Route 80 from New Jersey. I started hitchhiking to festivals.” All summer, Kaufman competed in guitar contests to support himself. “I would go to a contest, win the contest, they’d give me some jack so I could survive until the next weekend. I read ‘Bluegrass Unlimited,’ which told me where the next contest was; and I’d show up early. I was hitchhiking the whole time, and I was sleeping on the side of the road. I had a heavy backpack and my 1932 Martin with me. I’d see a spot that had a bluff on the highway; I’d have the ride take me down another quarter mile, and then I would walk back to that spot in the morning.”

Growing up with a single mother and two brothers, Kaufman lived in a musical household. His father had passed away, yet his mother was determined that her sons would have instruments and opportunities at home. She provided guitars, banjos, amps, and lessons. At age thirteen, Kaufman strummed Monkees and Beatles songs on his “plastic thirty-dollar guitar,” but lost interest until he overheard one of his brothers practicing along with a Flatt & Scruggs record with Doc Watson on guitar. “That’s when I heard what you could actually do with the guitar. I just loved Doc.” Steve’s obsession with bluegrass guitar began.

Becoming a guitar expert was literally all in a day’s work for Kaufman. During his high school years, he committed to a diligent practice routine. Every day after school, he practiced three hours per day. “And in the summer, I had eight hours a day,” he remembers. “Start at 9, break at 10:30, break for lunch. Get back to it half hour later, stop at 3:30 for a break, end at 5. It was great practice, but it was never boring, because it was segmented.” Kaufman set a timer for himself. He practiced one piece for ten minutes, and then he would move on. “When you have eight hours, you can have really solid segments,” he explains. Kaufman kept a notebook in which he would keep track of his repertoire, and over the years he drilled and perfected hundreds of tunes.

With this backlog of hours on his instrument, and his experience competing in guitar contests across the country, it seems natural that Kaufman was the first person to become a three-time winner of the National Guitar Championship in Winfield, Kansas. Kaufman worked out his contest arrangements on the guitar well ahead of time. “You need to drill and drill and drill and get it so you can do it in your sleep,” he explains. “I used to go to the gym and get the speed of the Life Cycle going to the speed I was going to be playing the song. Then I would run the song in my head from the beginning intro all the way to the end. If I couldn’t do that, then I wasn’t ready. That’s how strong the Winfield arrangements have to be.” 

Backed by his Winfield credentials, Kaufman booked himself at workshops across the United States and Europe on the weekends. He would instruct on Friday and Saturday, and perform a concert Saturday night. On the airplane home on Sundays, Kaufman would write his guitar instruction books. During the week he would film his instructional series for VHS and DVD. Eventually, Kaufman’s wife, Donna, suggested that he create a flatpicking camp at Maryville College, located near their home. 1996 was the inaugural “Steve Kaufman Flatpicking Kamp,” and 180 guitar players arrived on campus. With this success, Kaufman continued developing the camps, now called “Acoustic Kamps,” into two separate weeks with all instruments for old time and bluegrass styles, plus songwriting and vocal instruction. Kaufman has also added an African safari guitar workshop to the mix. This year the group will travel to Botswana.

Kaufman’s legendary ‘Parking Lot Pickers’ instructional series has been a jumping-off point for many bluegrass guitarists and mandolinists, eager to learn the jam standards and improve their skills. Kaufman has released over 130 books and DVD’s. He says he wrote most of the books while he was traveling to and from workshops and gigs, and therefore he did not have an instrument in his hands as he wrote. “Just out of my head,” he remembers. “It’s always been the way I did it.” He also did not elaborately plan his instructional videos. He explains, “I would have a theme, I would have an outline, and we recorded them in real time. That’s why some of them are two hours long.” 

Kaufman approaches his studio recordings with this in-the-moment attitude as well, viewing the process as a representation of his creativity on that particular day. “I just turn the mic on and go,” he remarks. While he might arrange the order of the soloists, for example, he prefers not to do more than that. “I tell people that I recorded with who aren’t satisfied with what they did, but they did OK—they did pretty good—I say, ‘That’s the way you did it today. That’s what it is.’”

Even though Kaufman says he doesn’t play guitar around the house anymore, he has recommendations for others to develop their guitar skills. “I’ve done my time. You know when people say ‘It’s a God given talent,’ I say, ‘No, I know how hard I worked early on.’” He tells musicians to plan their practice time and to cut it in half. “It doesn’t matter how much time it is, cut it in half. The first half is warm up. Play old stuff that you don’t have to think about much. Develop your motor skills. You have to have a timer running that’s going to go ding. You could work on chord progression, all your old songs. At the halfway point, you move on to the next section, which is new stuff. It can be sight reading, new songs, or transcribing. When the bell goes ding, you are done.” 

With such a voluminous output and prolific career, Steve Kaufman could be cast as ambitious in his work ethic. Yet it’s possible that his unique combination of structure and relaxed confidence has elevated his output, as he didn’t allow himself time to over-think or doubt himself. He simply forged ahead with each new project, because he enjoys guitar in all its forms. His focus has evolved over the years, however.  He says he’s competed in recent contests at Winfield, though he hasn’t placed first. “I don’t have that eye of the tiger,” he says. “I don’t have anything I’m proving to anybody. I get up there and have fun, more than anything else.” 

Originally published in Americana Rhythm Music Magazine

Flatpicking Spotlight: Chris Luquette (Guitarist with Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen)

 Chris Luquette 

by Rebecca Frazier

Chris Luquette is best known for his work as longtime guitarist with national touring outfit Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen. He is electrifying as an articulate, adept bluegrass flatpicker, and he also shines as a multi-instrumentalist in his local Brooklyn music scene and on his two album releases, ‘The Way I View the World’ (2019) and ‘City Suite for Two Guitars’ (2022). 

Luquette grew up in Seattle, where he gravitated towards the guitar at eleven years old. “My dad was listening to classic rock and roll radio all the time, and my ears perked up,” he remembers. He began his music journey with a nylon-string guitar, an electric guitar, and an eclectic mix of Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and eventually the Grateful Dead. “I simultaneously kept playing acoustic and electric guitar those first few years. As a teenager, the electric guitar was full-force, the most important thing.” 

So how did bluegrass find its way to Luquette’s musical palate? “Having had some time on the nylon string acoustic guitar, I still had the taste to play some acoustic stuff,” he says. A friend pointed him to the music of the Grateful Dead, and the folk and bluegrass roots of the Dead’s music resonated with Luquette. He dug a little deeper, reading books about the band and their influences, and found a live Bill Monroe album at the local library. This recording, featuring Del McCoury on guitar, inspired Luquette. “I remember thinking, this is it right here, it’s fast and furious and the energy’s high. I was just hooked right away,” he reminisces. “It wasn’t until I’d already been playing six or seven years when bluegrass came into my life, and that’s when the acoustic guitar took over for decades.”

During those teen years, now with a steel-string Martin guitar and a “hankering towards bluegrass music,” Luquette also acquired a banjo and mandolin and studied both of them. With this diverse background, Luquette finds that his skills land him quite a few gigs in the vibrant New York City music scene. When asked if he has a practice routine to maintain his many skills, he explains that his life as a busy working musician keeps him warmed up on his different instruments and styles. “I’ve been playing a lot of gigs, so my work schedule might be a telecaster gig, a bluegrass guitar gig, two mandolin gigs in a row, a banjo gig—it’s crazy. So I don’t even have to think, ‘Oh am I going to practice this today?’ I just go to a gig and do it. I’m not saying I practice on the gig; I like to warm up and practice some stuff in the morning, or the day of the show, but I don’t have as much time as I wish to do some of the things I’d like to do.” 

Luquette’s 2019 recording, ‘The Way I View the World,’ is a masterful showcase of his musical breadth, a unified blend of his many styles. He presents his bluegrass songwriting, acoustic flatpicking, mandolin and banjo artistry, as well as his classic country and telecaster work. He also includes a Dawg-style original tune with jazz voicings, two versions (acoustic and electric) of Tony Rice’s ‘Is That So.’ And, a classical rendition of a traditional polka somehow fits right in. Explaining his concept for this eclectic mix, Luquette says, “Maybe there’s a little jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none thing going on here, but I like all these different sounds. So it’s just trying to keep myself interested, too.” 

Luquette enjoys playing his influences off of one another in order to stay engaged. “I wish to sound like myself but also pay tribute, because it all comes from somewhere. You can follow along in that idea of respecting the boundaries of each genre, the sounds, and also how they all influence each other too. Country telecaster does have some fiddle elements, and some pedal steel elements. So it’s really fun to find a voice on each instrument, and see what happens.”

Originally published in Americana Rhythm Music Magazine

Flatpicking Spotlight: Tony Watt (Guitarist with Alan Bibey)

 Tony Watt

By Rebecca Frazier

Tony Watt’s agility on the fretboard has been a lifetime’s work in progress. With his smooth touch and warm, relaxed tone, Tony makes bluegrass guitar sound effortless. He expresses a warm familiarity with the roots of the genre, yet he stretches out to provide his own interpretation and even a sense of humor that comes from years of jamming, performing, and teaching bluegrass guitar. And while he’s lived and breathed bluegrass guitar for decades, he’s also earned degrees in science and worked in the technology field as well.

As a young boy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tony grew up in the vibrant and prolific Northeast bluegrass community. His father, Steve Watts, a banjo picker and mandolin player, was a founder of the Boston Bluegrass Union (BBU). Tony remembers, “My dad used to run sound for the BBU concerts when I was a kid, and I used to run around in the back of the hall. I grew up listening to bluegrass and going to festivals, but I never really wanted to play bluegrass.” That position changed when Tony was thirteen. “For some reason—to this day, I don’t know why—I went up to my dad and said, ‘You know, why don’t you show me some of that bluegrass guitar stuff that you know.’ That got me headed down this lonesome road, as you will,” Tony laughs.

Tony spent years of his bluegrass career playing rhythm guitar. “My dad showed me what he knew, which was a great start—'Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,’ ‘You Are My Flower.’ But I really couldn’t play any solos, couldn’t improvise. I knew a few set pieces and that was it. I played just rhythm guitar for about seven years. I was about 20 before I got going with flatpicking, which for me at the time felt like I was old and decrepit. Now I realize starting flatpicking at 20 is pretty young for most people,” Tony says. 

In his early years as a flatpicker, Tony was inspired by guitar legend Tony Rice. “To me the most important bluegrass guitar player that ever lived was Tony Rice, and that’s absolutely what grabbed me at every level: his rhythm, lead, singing, song selection, arrangements, just everything.” Tony studied Rice’s style, but he made a conscious decision to not become a Rice-style player. 

Tony eventually developed a unique touch on the guitar, with a clean and fluid tone and melodic ideas that channel the bluegrass language, but do not mimic the sound of any one guitarist. “I’ve been lucky to focus my energies trying to sound like some people who aren’t as widely emulated, and that’s allowed me to create my own unique style –I don’t think of it as my own style, I think of it as a derivation of all of these players that I love,” Tony explains. “One of these people who has been most important in developing my own voice would be Lincoln Meyers, a fantastic guitar player who lives up in the Northeast.” Tony took lessons from Meyers and would travel to Meyers’ gigs to learn from him. “I was picking his brain after his shows to learn his licks and ideas, and I as learning his solos note-for-note off of records,” Tony remembers. 

Another ‘enormous’ influence on Tony’s playing is Tim Stafford. “His playing moves me in a way nobody else’s does. His solos are so beautifully constructed and the tone is so perfect for my taste. I can’t imagine playing it better than that.” And while Lincoln Meyers and Tim Stafford are Tony’s biggest influences, he says there are “a bunch of people I’ve tried to steal stuff from: David Grier, Kenny Smith, Tony Rice, Scott Nygaard, Eric Uglum, Clarence White. It’s me following my ear to the folks that I loved.” Tony credits his unique style to the fact that he has studied so many different bluegrass guitarists’ styles. 

Tony is known in bluegrass circles for his fluid, driving rhythm and keen sense of time, skills which eventually earned him a coveted spot as guitarist in one of bluegrass’ top acts, Alan Bibey & Grasstowne. Tony has performed throughout the U.S. and Europe with Grasstowne, Alecia Nugent, Leigh Gibson of the Gibson Brothers, among others. Tony also teaches at camps and workshops across the country and has a roster of private students.

In the guitar world, it’s common for a player to have multiple talents—they may play multiple instruments, or be a commanding singer or songwriter, for example. And guitarists often have professional degrees in fields outside of music. Yet it’s rare for a full-time bluegrass guitarist to have earned advanced degrees in science, and to eventually choose music as their sole profession. “I have two degrees in science,” Tony explains. “I studied material science, which is a very obscure, small field; in undergrad I specialized in metallurgy, which is the study of metals. In my grad school work, I was researching a new kind of solar panel based on semi-conductor quantum dots—nanotechnology.” 

Tony spent many years keeping his options open by working in both music and science. “I kept both doors open as a young adult, switching back and forth. I worked a couple years with a technology company, and then did music for a while, and then went back to science. So even when I was doing a science job or school, I was still playing music on the side. After many years of bouncing back and forth, happily, keeping both doors open---it was the experience of living in Nashville and getting to play with amazing musicians and seeing all of my friends making a living with music. I was thinking ‘Oh, it’s not that hard, if you really want to do it. It’s not exactly the most lucrative job. But if you really want to do it, you can make it happen, and living there gave me a ton of confidence in how I could do it.”

Tony found that science uses a different part of his brain, which he appreciated. “When I was in grad school, I was trained to use the world’s most powerful microscope. It was really interesting stuff. I saw individual columns of atoms on the computer screen, a quarter of an inch tall. It was wild. But even that—working on the world’s most powerful microscope, which for a scientist would be as good as it gets—I was still like, ‘Oh, but I really like music, that’s what really makes me happy.’ So that was a great learning experience.” Tony’s science background translates into his work in bluegrass. “I bring a very scientific approach to my teaching of bluegrass, it’s a lot of that rigor,” he laughs.

When teaching guitar, Tony emphasizes three main elemental strategies. First, he asks his students to slow down. He believes that almost everyone practices at tempos that are too high for proper learning. Secondly, he believes that flatpickers should find a teacher in order to process and develop fundamental techniques. “Make sure you’re not developing bad habits and get a great teacher to help you identify an area that needs to be addressed, help you develop a regime to address that weakness, and then help you motivate to really go after it, to show you that if you put in some work you can have this positive growth.” Lastly, for students who are further along, Tony advises his students to jam once per week with others. He coaches his students in how to start their own weekly jam, in the instance that they cannot find a local jam that fits the students’ skill level. “It’s daunting at first but once you get used to it, it’s one of the biggest parts of this music and it’s the best way to get better, because you know you’re getting amazing practice while having amazing fun. It’s such a win-win,” Tony emphasizes.

Born and raised in the New England bluegrass scene, Tony is now an important fixture in the music community there. Coming full circle from his childhood days running around backstage, he now serves as Vice President of the BBU. He has also taken on the task of running bluegrass Tuesdays at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, which have been held for 27 years. Tony also foresees featuring his guitar skills with a potential studio project in the near future. 

“Above everything else, I feel lucky to have been exposed to this community,” Tony muses. “I think we all learned in the pandemic not to take it for granted. But it’s more than just the time that we get to gather together; it’s these relationships we have that last for decades. We’re so lucky to have this world with each other, our own little section of the world that’s separate from all the noise. It’s just fantastic.”

Originally published in Americana Rhythm Music Magazine