Dan Harris

I like guitars, a lot. I’ve played them my whole life, in lots of different configurations and styles. And I really like music. I was born into a musical household, my mom sang in church and dad played guitar and sang, lots of Al Jolsen, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. In fact, one of my earliest childhood memories is that of sitting on my Dads lap and learning to strum and sing “Hey Good Looking” while he held the chords.

I was also lucky enough to experience Dizzy Gillespie as a child when in the first grade the school took us to hear him give a concert and educational talk about jazz.  Watching his big old cheeks puffing out and making that amazing sound on the horn is an image that is forever burned in my memory. I took up the trumpet a few weeks later and played it through middle school.

In the time since then, I have earned a degree in classical guitar, played in numerous jazz bands, was a backup guitarist for a flamenco dance group for a period and I’ve played fiddle and mandolin in numerous groups, on the Front Range of Colorado and in New York. Currently I am focusing on writing songs and playing really good music on guitar and clawhammer banjo. My songs are inspired by life, real or imagined, which is a pretty wide net I agree. There’s a lot of images of growing up a country boy in southern Vermont, a fair share of references to whiskey, rivers, women, heartache…all the things that make songs real, whether the story behind them is real or not.

From folk to jazz, Jimi Hendrix to Bach to John Hartford and Norman Blake…guitars to mandolins, banjos to fiddles, I could travel this musical journey for a thousand lifetimes and still feel like each day brings a new lesson, and new inspiration, a new chance to stumble and try again.