Workshops

All Workshops will be held at the Civic Garden Club 622 S 2nd Street, La Conner, WA 98257

NOTE: Workshops require a separately purchased ticket in addition to General Admission

Tim Farrell

Friday May 10th — 10:00am - 11:30am

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Tim Farrell has the rare ability to inspire listeners to experience music on a multitude of levels. Through his mastery of the intricacies and melodic grace of fingerstyle guitar, he has created a sound that evokes emotion, a sound that is to be felt as well as heard. Tim has entertained audiences internationally, appearing in a variety of concert venues such as the Kimmel Center, Montreal Jazz Festival, Carnegie Center, Hard Rock Live, Metropolitan Museum of Art to name just a few... Tim performs as a solo artist and also has shared the stage with such notable artists as Les Paul, George Benson, Jean Luc Ponty, Rick Wakeman, Alex DeGrassi, Jake Shimabukuru, California Guitar Trio, John Sebastian and many more.

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Steve Davison & Peter Janson

Friday May 10th — 12:00pm - 1:30pm

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Steve Davison is a 2 time finalist and 2005 winner of the solo competition at the Arkansas Acoustic Music Festival and a finalist in the 2009 Merle Travis Fingerstyle Competition. Peter Janson is an award-winning contemporary fingerstyle acoustic guitarist, composer, and music educator. He has performed at the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Healdsburg Guitar Festival, the Argenta Acoustic Music Series in Little Rock, the WUMB Music Festival in Boston, and venues throughout North America.

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Dorian Michael

Friday May 10th — 2:00pm - 3:30pm

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Dorian Michael started playing guitar as a seven-year old in Los Angeles just as folk music was about to have a renaissance of sorts and earthy acoustic music was his first guitar experience. He has been a working guitarist for four decades and in that time has played plenty of blues and folk, jazz and rock and roll. There has always been a huge variety of playing experience from smokey honky-tonks to theater orchestra pits. At some point along the way he started playing a few solo fingerstyle instrumentals, made a cd and decided he needed to hit the road and see if he could sell all those cds he had. Three solo cds and four ensemble cds later Dorian is still playing throughout the States and Canada. He calls his solo music “contemporary traditional”; original music that reflects his interest in a number of styles of music. These influences come through in his original material, but it is a contemporary music that grows from, rather than mimics, those influences. When he plays someone else’s music or a traditional piece he always manages to add a few surprises. Says Dorian, “Some music makes you feel, some makes you think and some music is just for the fun of it. I try to get to all those places in the space of a performance.”

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Tony McManus

Friday,  May 10   4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Tony McManus has come to be recognized throughout the world as the leading guitarist in Celtic Music. From early childhood his twin obsessions of traditional music and acoustic guitar have worked together to produce a startlingly original approach to this ancient art. Self taught from childhood, initially through listening to the family record collection.
McManus abandoned academia in his twenties to pursue music full time. The session scene in Glasgow and Edinburgh provided the springboard for gigs around Scotland and a studio set for BBC Radio, frequently rebroadcast, began to spread the word. Tony’s work has come to represent Celtic music in the guitar world, making regular appearances at guitar specific events where just a few years ago jigs and reels would be unheard of. He is invited annually to the Chet Atkins Festival in Nashville, has appeared at Guitar Festivals in Soave and Pescantina, Sarzana and Francacorta Italy; Frankston, Australia; Issoudun and Bordeaux France; Kirkmichael, Scotland; Bath and Kent, England; Bochum and Osnabruck, Germany. In 2004 he appeared at the famous Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in the “All Star Guitar Night” featuring Steve Morse, Bryan Sutton, Muriel Anderson, Béla Fleck and Victor Wooten and headlined by the legendary Les Paul.

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Tracy Spring

Saturday May 11th — 9:30am - 11:00am

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

For decades, Tracy Spring has taught guitar and songwriting in alternate tunings in private lessons and camps such as the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. In addition to teaching, she's known for compelling performances with rich, emotive vocals, and versatile guitar playing. Her wide musical range is demonstrated by the women she's been compared to: Sarah McLachlan, Tracy Chapman, kd lang, and Yo Yo Ma's cello. Choral arrangements from her Songs of Hope and Humanity project have been performed by community choirs in the Northwest and beyond, and Peter, Paul and Mary recorded her co-written song, “Of This World” on their final album, In These Times.

 

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Tim Lerch

Saturday May 11th — 11:30am - 1:00pm

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Currently one of the Pacific Northwest's busiest and most well respected guitarists, Tim is a member of the legendary Northwest Gypsy Jazz Group Pearl Django. In between gigs with PD Tim tries to play as many Solo Guitar performance as he can fit into the schedule. Also a sought after session guitarist, Tim records frequently in Seattle and Vancouver.

In addition to his live playing and recording schedule Tim is also a well respected and popular teacher with a busy schedule of private lessons, classes and workshops. Recent activities include a new Instructional DVD for Hal Leonard Publishing and Master Class Videos for JazzGuitarSociety.com and a regular column in Fingerstyle Guitar Journal. For those players who don't live near Seattle Tim is now offering private online lessons via Skype

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Mark Goldenberg

Saturday May 11th — 1:30pm - 3:00pm

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Mark Goldenberg is a guitarist and composer who has played on records for a myriad of artists including Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Eels, Natalie Imbruglia,Chris Isaak, Ringo Starr, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Peter Frampton, Manolo Garcia, Joan Baez and William Shatner. He played lead guitar for Jackson Browne from 1994 - 2010. From 2012-2014 he toured with acclaimed pianist and actor Hugh Laurie. In 2016 he played with Spanish superstar Manolo Garcia.
He is also a songwriter and producer, whose works have been recorded by Linda Rondstat, Chicago, Pointer Sisters, Natalie Imbruglia, Eels, Chris Botti, and Olivia Newton John, among others.
During the 1980’s Mark released four albums of instrumental music in Japan. He released his first self titled CD of solo guitar music in 2004. In 2015 Mark and guitarist Eric Skye released a recording of duo music: “Artifact”. Mark, along with noted drummer Jay Bellerose and bassist Jennifer Condos released “trio” a collection of instrumental pieces.

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Bill Mize

Saturday May 11th — 3:30pm - 5:00pm

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Bill Mize is a past winner of the National Fingerstyle Guitar Competition at The Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. Guitar Player Magazine has labeled this event the “U.S. Open of guitar competitions."
Bill received a GRAMMY Award for his collaboration with musician and storyteller David Holt on the recording Stellaluna, and has been featured on the popular guitar compilations "Windham Hill Guitar Sampler" by Windham Hill Records and "Masters of the Acoustic Guitar" by Narada Records.
In 2009, Bill’s music appeared in the Ken Burns documentary “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea."
Mel Bay Production stranscribed Mize's second CD, "Tender Explorations," into a songbook, and his original compositions have been transcribed for Fingerstyle Guitar and Acoustic Guitar magazines.

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Sean McGowan

Sunday May 12th — 9:30am - 11:00am

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

About Sean: Sean McGowan is a fingerstyle jazz guitarist who combines many diverse musical influences with unconventional techniques to create a broad palette of textures within his compositions and arrangements for solo guitar. His first recording River Coffee won the Best Independent Release of the Year Award (2002) from Acoustic Guitar magazine and music from the recording has been published in Japan’s Acoustic Guitar magazine and Mel Bay’s Master Anthology of Fingerstyle Guitar, Vol. 3 (2005). His subsequent recordings Indigo (2008) and Sphere: the Music of Thelonious Monk (2011) offer compelling portraits of classic jazz standards performed on solo electric archtop guitar. Sphere was named one of Acoustic Guitar magazine’s “Essential Albums of 2011”, and Sean was recently featured on the cover of Fingerstyle 360 magazine (Summer 2012). His most recent solo guitar recordings include Thanksgiving & Christmas Tidings (2014) a collection of seasonal hymns and carols arranged for acoustic guitar, and My Fair Lady (2015) a collection of songs from Lerner & Loewe’s masterpiece.

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Mary Flower

Sunday May 12th — 11:30am - 1:00pm

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

An internationally known and award-winning picker, singer/songwriter and teacher, the Midwest native relocated from Denver to the vibrant Portland, Oregon music scene in in 2004. She helped develop the curriculum at Denver’s Swallow Hill Music School and has many instructional materials out there for blues, fingerstyle, and lap-slide guitar playing. Mary Flower is very much a guitar geek’s guitar geek; always learning and playing spreading the guitar geek gospel. She continues to please crowds and critics at folk festivals, teaching seminars and concert stages domestically and abroad, that include Merlefest, Kerrville, King Biscuit, Prairie Home Companion and the Vancouver Folk Festival, among many. Mary Flower’s immense finger picking guitar and lap-slide prowess is soulful and meter-perfect, a deft blend of the inventive, the dexterous and the mesmerizing. Her supple honey-and-whiskey voice provides the perfect melodic accompaniment to each song’s story.

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Jamie Stillway

Sunday May 12th — 1:30pm - 3:00pm

Civic Garden Club - 622 South Second St.  La Conner, WA

Over the last decade, Jamie Stillway has been quietly establishing herself as one of the top acoustic fingerstyle guitarists of her generation. In 2018, she released her first electric guitar recordings, the City Static EP, in which Jamie demonstrated the broadening of her compositional palette and her versatility as a musician, seamlessly incorporating ambient, jazz, classical, and pop elements. She has also become an in-demand instructor, having taught at the Healdsburg Guitar Festival, The Swannanoa Gathering, and Peghead Nation’s Advanced Fingerstyle Workshop. Additionally, a transcription of one of Stillway’s compositions was recently published in Acoustic Guitar, and she is a contributing author for the magazine.

 

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