Guy Capuzzo and Gregory Walker

Back in the late 80s and early 90s I was fortunate enough to have
placed in three of Guitar Player Magazine's soundpage competitions and
to have been featured in the GP Spotlight column and Guitar for the
Practicing Musician's Resume column. During this time I was also
featured (along with the granddaddy of modern microtonal guitarists,
Jon Catler) in a short GP article about microtonal guitarists. These
opportunities afforded me a great platform from which to network, and
I traded tapes with many other players who were featured in the
magazines as well.

I heard a boatload of exceptionally facile guitarists back
then--remember, this was the heyday of GIT, the stylus pick, and the
Varney brothers after all! But ultimately it was the players who had
something uniquely their own to say that I was personally most
interested in. Simply put, these were--as is usually the case--rare.

On the metal side there were many competent and some fabulous Shrapnel
type guitarists, but none that really stood above the crowd in what
was already an acutely overpopulated corner of guitardom. Ditto the
fusion, jazz and acoustic players I heard: plenty of competent (and
some really fabulous) Holdsworth, Torn, Frisell, Scofield and Hedges
disciples, but none, with the possible exception of Paul Brown, that
spun my head around anything like Holdsworth, Torn, Frisell, Scofield
or Hedges had.

In the past I've written about two of the GP soundpage winners, Kalle
Rademacker and Ken Rubenstein, and both of these guys definitely spun
my head around. I also met Denver, Colorado guitarist Neil Haverstick
through the guitar mags back then, and he continues to this very day
to carve out his own unique niche as a microtonal guitar pioneer.

Two other players I'd like to mention are Guy Capuzzo and Gregory T.S.
Walker. Both these guys stood out as well.

On Guy's two demo tapes I heard a young metal guitarist who was
eminently capable of injecting Stravinsky and dissonance into his
music as something other than token accessories. In fact, Guy's music
had more in common with, say, Present or early Univers Zero than it
did with either Cacophony or Buckethead.

Imagine the Roger Trigaux of Le Poison Qui Rend Fou with an amped up
tone and a Shrapnel level dexterity... now imagine that in the context
of a similar, yet even meaner, marriage of rock and contemporary
classical... at his best, Guy was all that.

Beyond the stunning 1990 demo Variations, I know Guy continued his
musical education at Eastman, taught at the NGSW, and authored an
instructional book for Hal Leonard. However, I think Guy Capuzzo was
easily one of the most interesting metal (or metal influenced)
guitarists of this period, and it's a real shame that his
accomplishments as such are utterly unknown.

Gregory Walker is one amazing fellow... don't believe me? Well, take a
look for yourself:

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~gwalker/I.html

Okay, supposing the ambitious composer and the accomplished violin
soloist (not to mention the associate professor of music at UCD and
the concertmaster for the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra) thing
doesn't pan out, well, I guess he could always fall back on the fact
that he's a plenty cool guitarist too!

When I first heard Gregory's guitar playing I had no idea of his many
other accomplishments--he won me over solely on the strength of a
short demo.

Gregory's playing on that demo gave me the vague impression of a cross
between Ken Rubenstein and Terje Rypdal... but he really had a sound
of his own, and it was a keen, composerly poise that made both his
phrasing and the overall shape of his music something special. Gregory
is one player I'd surely like to hear a lot more of.

There are a lot of great players out there that next to no one has
ever heard of. I'm glad I had the good fortune to hear these two--ars
longa, vita brevis!

take care,

--Dan Stearns