Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Douglass
Adam, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started playing guitar at age 13, inspired by contemporary artists of the time like Nirvana and Alice in Chains as well as the great classic rock guitar bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I immediately took to it and started digging deeper into guitar music. My teacher suggested that I start listening to the blues, since that was what artists like Hendrix and Pink Floyd were listening to.
As I acquired more blues albums, I started noticing that I would hear several different versions of the same song. They would be in different keys, with different lyrics and different guitar solos. Much different from the approach of a lot of classic rock artists who would play every song just like the album when they played live. “What’s going on here?”, I asked my teacher. “They’re improvising,” he responded.
In my mind, that set off an obsession, that I had to figure out how these great musicians could just do on the spot what I was spending hours upon hours trying to do from memory. As I learned more about music I became more and more interested in improvisation, discovering and studying the music of jam bands and jazz artists.
Attending the University of Florida, I started playing in a band called Unkle Funkle and we toured the southeast for 4 years. We developed a following and did well in numerous southeastern cities. In 2002 I moved to Boston and started studying with a tremendous guitarist named Bruce Bartlett. We had a great rapport and as much as he loved and could play in the style of the blues and rock legends that inspired me to pick up the guitar in the first place, the focus of my studies were the numerous facets of jazz improvisation. I learned how to read music, studied ear training, and transcribed solos by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Michael Brecker, Sonny Rollins, and many others while studying with Bruce.
In 2004, I quit my last odd job that people tend to work in their post-college years and was teaching lessons and playing in bands full time. Four years earlier, I was in a band touring the southeast. Now I was living the life of a session musician in the northeast. I played in countless bands around New England, worked for hire as a guitarist for recording sessions, and taught lessons during the day. I played in bands doing everything from classic rock to disco, funk, motown, Brazilian music, and of course straight ahead jazz.
Craigslist was at the height of its popularity, and one of the key things with getting a gig from the musicians wanted ads was being the first one to respond to the ad. One fateful morning, I opened an ad right at the top of the page saying ‘Grateful Dead tribute band seeks Jerry’. What a fun gig, I thought. A few times a month I’ll get paid to indulge in my guilty pleasure and the music from my teens: jam bands.
Later that day, a very frazzled man came by my apartment to run through some of the material for the gig that Friday. After just a few notes of ‘Mississippi Half Step’, Mike breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Oh you’re gonna be fine’, he laughed. His lead guitarist had quit the band on short notice, and he did not want to have to cancel his band’s show that weekend. We’re still good friends to this day.
I played in that band for about 10 years, playing bars, clubs, and festivals all over New England. One of our keyboard players got us playing with Tom Constanten, the Dead’s second keyboardist, around 2010 or so. As those gigs started to lose momentum the opportunity to move to New York City arose and I moved a few hours south to a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Bushwick.
With all of the connections I had made playing with TC, it turned out there was a band in New York that needed a guitarist that was going to be embarking on a tour with Charles Neville later in the year. I started playing with these guys around NYC and the surrounding areas and got flown around to the west coast and Rockies playing clubs and staying in five star (and occasionally no-star, when there was an error by the tour manager) hotels.
I had also started playing with an excellent band called The Highway around this time, and shortly after getting back from the west coast tour with Charles, I jumped into an RV with two guys I hardly knew (who are now great friends) and drove down to Florida and back, playing shows along the way.
All this time, I was still teaching lessons. In challenging myself to become a better teacher I started writing exercises for my beginner students to help them through the painful (literally and figuratively) process of learning the guitar. Those exercises became my first book published through Mel Bay: Beginning Rock/Pop Guitar Etudes. An etude is just an exercise for your instrument, but it has a musical component so it feels like you’re playing a song and not just mindlessly running scales.
Playing with all these different bands and learning all these different songs and styles of music, I learned a lot about writing songs. Around 2015 I decided to place all of my focus on booking my own band playing my own songs, and Ted and Dan from The Highway put all their support behind my music and played in my band after I had played in theirs for a few years. We recorded an album and rather than streaming it, I decided to sell it independently on my website. There are other albums of mine that you can stream on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms.
We played around the 5 boroughs of NYC for a couple of years, and when Ted and Dan weren’t available my buddy Rob who I knew from my Boston days, Barry who I met in New York, and Ginter who I knew from my Boston days as well would play my shows with me. The band was doing great, playing bigger and bigger shows at happening venues on Friday and Saturday nights in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Then we all know what happened in March of 2020.
I had still been teaching a lot of guitar lessons. With the success of my first book, I was able to stop working for other people’s lesson businesses and start one of my own: Bushwick Guitar Lessons. I had a student who started taking lessons in 2017 who was very anti-paper. She just wanted me to email her PDFs of all the lesson materials, and I was already composing music in GuitarPro so I was happy to oblige. So by 2020, I had compiled a pretty large folder called ‘Teaching Materials’ on my computer. Switching to online lessons was no big deal, instead of printing the sheet music I just emailed it to the students. My online teaching business still does great, I have students in all 4 US time zones and in South America and Europe as well.
By 2022, I felt like I was paying too much rent in New York and not getting any of the benefits due to Covid. I was sick of the cold weather, and saw my friends down in Florida gigging all the time. So I made the move back down south, continued teaching, and I’m playing regularly with my band all around south Florida. Check out my jazz trio at the Norton Museum of Art on Friday March 8th!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There are always struggles in the line of work that I chose for myself. One of the things that Bruce said to me early on was “you have to be the commodity”. If you’re relying on other people to lead the band, to find your students for you, to hire you for their studio, then they might stop hiring you at any time. By being my own boss, I really have around 30 bosses or so. If one student or one club decides to stop hiring me, then it’s no big deal because I still have 29 other bosses who are paying me and I have time to get hired by another boss.
It can sometimes be incredibly frustrating work. I was in a band where the leader would ask me to do a gig, say 3 months in advance. I would agree, turn down other gigs, cancel or reschedule my students, basically rearrange my entire life to do a performance. Then, a few days before the gig find out that it was never even confirmed. He was just checking to see if I could do the gig, but it never materialized and never made that clear.
I’ve had the opposite happen, too. Where a bandleader would forget or assume I was available and say ‘hey I’m picking you up tomorrow at 4, it’s about 2 hours away. What?! I never agreed to this!
Running a band can be just as challenging. I’ve occasionally had to hire substitutes for my regular players who do not learn the material well enough, who have equipment issues, transportation issues, or scheduling issues. Club owners will sometimes ‘forget’ the amount you agreed to do the gig for, and I’ve had to pull up email and text message threads to show them what they had agreed to pay me just days earlier.
Only twice was I not paid for a gig: once, as a session musician in Boston for a wedding. After many expletives, I never worked with that band again. And once recently here in West Palm Beach, from a venue that I’ve heard owes a lot of musicians a lot of money.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m a guitarist. I specialize in improvisation. I teach lessons and I enjoy playing jazz and jam band music.
I’m most proud of my second book with Mel Bay which should be available in mid ’25, it’s called ‘The Encyclopedia of Pentatonic Scales’.
I think you would have to come to one of my performances to see what sets me apart, check www.adamdouglass.com for when the next show is.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
I have a jazz trio and a rock band that are available for hire. We can play for 3-4 hours doing jazz standards, cover songs, or my original jazz tunes, or my original rock music.
I offer guitar lessons for all skill levels and all styles of music, although my leanings are towards improvisational and groove based styles of music.
You can support me by taking lessons, hiring one of my bands, buying my books, buying my albums, following me on social media, or engaging with me on social media!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.adamdoulgass.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adam_douglass_music/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adamwdoulgass
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/@AdamDouglassMusic
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/adamdouglass
- Other: https://www.bushwickguitarlessons.com
