Congratulations to Josh Workman for being selected as the first MGH Guitarist of the Month!
Each month we select a “MGH Guitarist of the Month” from the Modern Guitar Harmony Facebook Group.
Josh has been very helpful in the Facebook group and has shown that he is a very nice guy that can really play and teach (evidence of this can be found in the Triad Trickery Youtube Lesson found below).
To find out more about Josh read on!
Josh Workman grew up in San Francisco, CA and began playing guitar at age 9, inspired by hearing his parents’ Jimi Hendrix records and hanging out with Mike Bloomfield a few times with another young guitarist.
He soon formed a rock band called Flashback at age ten and started
gigging at night and on the weekends, while attending the San Francisco School of the Arts during the day and (after an apprenticeship) running an amp repair business out of his bedroom
when he wasn’t holding a guitar or saxophone.
Josh would spend every weekend until leaving for Boston with various incarnations of that band, which gradually became more of a jazz fusion group. Josh’s first guitar teacher, Ray Scott handed him a ratty Tone Master cassette tape that literally had dog hair stuck to it but the music contained on those two sides would change his life
forever.
It was Wes Montgomery’s “Road Song” on that tape that catapulted Josh into a life’s pursuit of learning jazz. Josh went on to study with Tuck Andress and Bruce Forman, before leaving for Berklee in Boston, where he studied with Jon Damian and Al Defino.
After a year struggling in Boston, Josh moved to New York City and attended The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, where he finally felt at home. His main teachers there were Vic Juris and Gene Bertoncini. Josh gigged around NYC during college and then in his senior year, did the transcribing and wrote the text for a John Abercrombie transcription book for Advance Music in Germany. This then led to him becoming a regular transcriber for various publishers, including Warner Brothers and Hal Leonard. Josh worked on around 75 book projects over a five-year period.
While still in New York, Josh recorded on some eclectic projects with The Jazz Passengers, members of The Groove Collective, and his main band at the time, Dvash. At one point, he did a recording session with the Jazz Passengers and Debbie Harry, where he and Debbie exchanged “whale calls” for the soundtrack of an animated film called ‘Joy Street.’
After several years of playing jazz and what became known as “Acid Jazz” with various bands, Josh moved back to San Francisco and immediately began playing with the top jazz players there. Within a year, Josh joined Indigo Swing, which was riding the wave of the Swing revival of the mid to late ’90s.
Within a month of joining the band, Josh was touring the U.S. relentlessly. The band soon got signed at SXSW in Austin, landing a deal with Time Bomb Records, a boutique label owned by Arista Records. This led to a grueling schedule of about 300 gigs per year from 1997 to 2000, including U.S. and UK/European tours opening for the Brian Setzer Orchestra.
The band also worked on a few television shows, including Penn & Teller and had songs on several movie soundtracks. Some other highlights from that period include spending a month recording in Studio B at Capitol Records, sharing the stage with Lionel Hampton and Rosemary Clooney in Stuttgart, and playing with Run DMC and Crystal Method for an event in Times Square.
After the lead singer quit, Josh and the remaining musicians toured under the name ‘Indigo,’ with vocalist Nicole Vigil, who would later go on to have a successful voice acting career and become the future “Mrs Workman.” Over the next few years, Josh toured and recorded with The Hot Club of San Francisco, Lynda Carter (TV’s Wonder Woman), and did his own CD, ‘Jumpin’ at the Border,’ which got to #24 on the national jazz charts.
He also recorded albums with vocalist Jon Hendricks, pianist Benny Green, and several others. Josh has done the Monterey Jazz Festival several times and on one particular show had the pleasure of playing with tenor saxophone legend, Houston Person. During that period, Josh spent about ten years writing for Guitar Player Magazine, Acoustic Guitar, and several other publications.
Josh finally moved to Los Angeles in 2015 and has been teaching at Musicians Institute in Hollywood and
performing with various singers and bands. His main band, The Hot Club of LA is currently finishing up their third album, which they recorded at Jackson Browne’s studio.
Through their connection with Browne, Josh has also had the pleasure of working with the likes of Bill Frisell, Adam Sandler, Rufus Wainright, and even Gerald Casale of DEVO. Yes, Josh wore a red flower pot hat for that gig. After seven years of mostly playing gypsy jazz, Brazilian, and other “jazz-adjacent” styles, Josh is thrilled to be diving back into straight-ahead jazz again, as well as continuing to unravel the mysteries of the guitar, especially after rediscovering Mick Goodrick’s book, ‘Advancing Guitarist.
Triad Trickery Lesson By Josh Workman
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