Interview Performance
Flip Oakes is the designer of the Wild Thing series of trumpets and cornets. Although Flip is a master of many musical instruments including the clarinet and saxophone (for which he was widely known during most of the 1960s and 70s), the trumpet later became his main instrument. He established the...
Bobby Shew’s cool jazz trumpet style helped revolutionize jazz in the 1960s through a series of successful recordings and world tours. During those years he developed several ideas that would lead to the design of his own trumpet. He felt that these improvements and adjustments would make it easier...
Jack Costanzo, also known as Mr. Bongo, nearly single-handedly (sorry for the pun) brought the bongo to enormous popularity in the 1950s. Jack recorded top selling albums, appeared on TV and in the movies, and gained a fan following at the height of the “lounge sound,” as it has come to be known....
Gil Orr played a part in the era of popular music known as the Surf Sound. With the steady growth of instrumental hits in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Orr performed and recorded his guitar-playing style with boardwalk bands on the California coast. The Surf Sound hit its zenith when a group...
Laurence Juber, like so many kids in the 1960s, began playing guitar soon after hearing the Beatles for the first time. He couldn’t dream that one day his talents as a guitarist would allow him to play along side Paul McCartney as a member of Wings, the band Paul formed a year after the Beatles...
Leita Jolly was celebrating her 100th birthday the week she was interviewed in 2003. On the occasion, she played the piano for her friends with her ragtime flare. In 1917, while World War I was ending, Leita was hired as a song plugger. Her main job was to play the latest songs in the music store...
Lee Oskar played the famed harmonica lick in the classic 1970s hit “Low Rider” as a member of the band WARS. The success of this song led to name recognition within the music industry that resulted in the idea of designing and marketing Lee’s own line of harmonicas. Lee Oskar’s has been noted for...
Junior Brown is a performer/inventor who dreamed of a sound to offset his rockabilly and blues styles. He designed a slide guitar and an electric guitar into one unit that did not require putting one down to play the other. The Git-Steel Guitar is now in production. It is his lead instrument in his...
George Gruhn is without question one of the top experts of vintage guitars on the planet! George collected guitars before opening the world renowned Gruhn Guitar Shop in Nashville, TN in the early 1970s. Since that time he has authored several historical reference guides and thousands of articles...