Doughnuts and Turnarounds

Published: Fri, 04/01/22

get a Dunkin' Donut in Austin. This is not something I have taken the trouble to do, mostly because I am conditioned to get my powdered-torus fix when mass transportation is involved – on the way out of Logan Airport, say, or when I'm about to board the T at Alewife Station, both in Massachusetts. But also because, at least at one point, there were Krispy Kremes here in Austin, and there continue to be Shipley's doughnuts on hand. I rarely avail myself of either, but it's good to know they're around.

Doughnuts also remind me of the late, lamented National Guitar Workshop in New Milford, Connecticut. Musicians get wired and hungry after 10pm, and that's about when things shut down in small New England towns, so the doughnut run was one of the few ways to handle the inevitable post-concert munchies. One summer I roomed across the hall from banjo master Tony Trischka, and so found myself heading down the hill numerous times in someone's small hatchback, listening to Tony and Stacy Phillips exchange banjo and dobro jokes and hearing Tony tell everyone: "Don't you know? When you ride with me, the doughnuts are free!"

I'm pretty sure jazz guitarist Tom Dempsey was the first teacher to institute "Doughnut Day," bringing boxes of Dunkin' to the final morning class of each weekly session. After six days of nonstop classes, guest artist clinics, ensemble rehearsals and nightly concerts, teachers and students alike tended to be pretty much done, and expectations ran low for those last few hours. But inevitably, someone would break the trance with a question or two. Usually it was totally justified, along the lines of "hey, so how should we go about working on this stuff once we get back home?" But one time I spent a week covering the blackboard with tab and scale diagrams, providing a veritable snowdrift of photocopied handouts and conducting innumerable opportunities to practice improvising with the new material, only to have someone raise their hand the last day to ask, "hey, so, could you explain how to play rhythm guitar?"

Ok, so that's sort of my bad. And I'm sure Stacey felt the same way the summer I sat in on his Dobro class. He spent the week showing us a dizzying array of styles, teaching us Hawaiian, Western swing, old time and klezmer tunes, and his own pet project, using bar slants, open strings and behind-the-bar pulls to play all manner of exotic and extended chord voicings. At the end of all that, on the last morning, I raised my hand to ask, "um...could you show us a bit about how to play bluegrass?"

Another thing I got asked a lot teaching blues classes was, "hey, can you show us some more turnarounds?" So in today's Youtube lesson, you can learn ten turnarounds for a blues in E. Along the way, you'll learn how to group them into families of similar moves, and how to make it easy to swap in one turnaround for another.

You can find the lesson here:

10 Turnarounds

More soon,

David

 
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