Phil Farnsworth

David Tronzo

Professor
Affiliated Departments
Guitar
Faculty Bio E-Mail
dtronzo@berklee.edu
Telephone
617-747-2858

For media inquiries, please contact Media Relations

Career Highlights
  • Pioneer of extended techniques for bottleneck slide guitar
  • Recordings with David Sanborn, John Cale, the Lounge Lizards, Reeves Gabrels, Jerry Granelli, Sex Mob, Mike Manieri, Wayne Horvitz, Stephen Vitiello, and others
  • Performances with John Hiatt, Ray Anderson, the Lounge Lizards, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Reeves Gabrels, Sex Mob, Elliot Sharpe, Foday Suso, Hassan Hakmoun, Warren Haynes, and others
  • Solo projects include the Tronzo Trio, Spanish Fly, V-16 (with Jerry Granelli), and Slow Poke (with Michael Blake)
  • Recordings on New Albion, Knitting Factory Works, Accurate, Rounder, Traditione & Moderne, and Intuition Records
  • Headline appearances at various jazz festivals including North Sea, Pori, Berlin, Vienna, Montreal, Warsaw, Vancouver, and JVC New York
  • Featured in Guitar Player, Guitar World, Musician, Jazzthetik, New York Press, and Jazziz magazines 
  • International residencies as visiting artist and guest clinician
  • Voted one of the Top Ten Jazz Guitarists by Musician magazine in 1994 and one of the Top 100 Guitarists of the 20th Century in its 1993 Press Poll
  • Voted one of the Dirty Thirty Pioneers and Trailblazers by Guitar Player magazine in 1997; second in its 1995 poll for Best Experimental Guitarist
Awards
  • CalArts Alpert Award nominee, 2000–2001
In Their Own Words

"I specialize in a specific technical area of guitar playing known as slide or bottleneck guitar. When I first started to play, I figured out how to advance this area of guitar playing, particularly the technical aspect, to bring it into different kinds of music. I ended up developing systematic innovations in the technical repertoire."

"When I was 11, I heard a live band and it was kind of an epiphany. I couldn't believe the effect the music was having on my surroundings, not just on me. And I thought, 'I have got to explore this.' I'd had no music training at that point, but by the time I was 13 I figured out that I wanted to play guitar. I was completely self-taught. By the age of 15, I was playing five nights a week, though I really just had three good notes and five good chords."

"I started playing gigs even before I felt I was ready. But that's the beauty of the music business—there's so much on-the-job development. The constant discomfort from taking on things before you're ready can be corrosive, though—you need to be able to manage it. The balancing factor is when the task itself is exciting and inspiring, and you know it's right. Then it just becomes a question of how much approval you need, and in what form."

"A lot of the experiences I've had on the job are what I call 'threshold experiences,' meaning that I'm on a threshold I cannot cross over myself; someone on the other side has to pull me across. When I do cross over, my music is verifiably different."

"Each student I work with at Berklee is an individual whose life is following a certain trajectory. I'm seeing just one short segment of that path during one brief period in their time with me. I don't have a view of what came before, and just the barest instinct about the future of that path. My goal is to try to help students during that small window in a way that will actually fuel them to go on. To do that, I stress the craft of playing, which is both concept and technique. Because without craft development, even the greatest ideas remain unheard."

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