Guy Van Duser

Fingerstyle guitar virtuoso Guy Van Duser has been heard on National Public Radio for many years as a player of background and theme music, and as a featured performer on Prairie Home Companion. Since the late '70s, his many collaborations with clarinetist, saxophonist, vocalist, and pennywhistler Billy Novick have endeared him to listeners with old-fashioned tastes, for Van Duser's primary working repertoire has always consisted of early jazz, swing standards, and Tin Pan Alley pop tunes. While his lifelong respect for Chet Atkins, some early experience as a bluegrass bassist, and longstanding involvement as a sideman with country musician Bill Staines is proof of his genre-defying versatility, Van Duser is primarily a jazz guitarist who prefers and specializes in warm, reassuring pop and jazz melodies from the '30s. Guy Van Duser was born in 1948, the son of a concert pianist and a food service worker. As a perceptive, impressionable youngster in upstate New York, he received some instruction on piano and accordion and engaged in guitar duets with his father while coming up under the influence of dad's collection of phonograph records and music taped off of the radio. It was through a taped broadcast that young Van Duser first heard a portion of Atkins' Finger Style Guitar album; the first Atkins LP that he actually owned was Chet Atkins' Workshop, which notably consists of pop and jazz standards. When Van Duser eventually met his idol, he showed off a bit by perfectly replicating a complex passage from one of the Atkins' albums that had originally inspired him to become a professional musician. Legend has it that Atkins paled visibly, sat down and looked at Van Duser with mingled admiration and awe as he said "kid, that album was overdubbed!" Atkins was also wowed by...