International Guitar Seminars

For most of a decade, a week each summer, guitarists from a dozen countries carried their cases onto a university campus and did almost nothing but play. International Guitar Seminars — IGS — was an acoustic blues, slide and fingerstyle workshop founded in 1999 by Bob Brozman and Woody Mann, with Trevor Laurence as its managing director. This site is the surviving record of it.

The seminars are over. Both founders have died — Bob Brozman in 2013, Woody Mann in 2022 — and no session has been held since the mid-2000s. What follows is not an announcement and nothing here is for sale. It is an archive: the class descriptions, the daily programme, the questions students asked before they came, the letters they sent afterwards, and the roster of players who taught.

What IGS was

The first session of the Acoustic Blues and Slide Workshop was held in June 1999 in New York City, at Columbia University in upper Manhattan. A second session followed that August at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Later years added San Rafael, California, and Seattle University in Washington. The core faculty at the outset was Woody Mann, Bob Brozman, Martin Simpson and John Cephas — in the site's own words, "all master players, performers, recording artists, writers and teachers who bring years of experience in sharing their knowledge of blues guitar and presenting it in a clear and direct manner."

What set the week apart from the broader guitar-camp circuit was how narrow it was. IGS did not try to cover everything with a string on it. It focused on the many facets of finger-style acoustic blues and slide guitar: the Mississippi Delta style of Charlie Patton, the ragtime stylings of Blind Blake, the jazz-influenced playing of Lonnie Johnson, the bottleneck of Blind Willie Johnson and Kokomo Arnold, and the Hawaiian slide styles. You can read the full repertoire the classes drew on and the tunings and slide technique that carried it.

The teaching idea

The founders were explicit about their reasoning, and it is worth quoting because it explains the shape of everything else here:

More than simply learning the styles of blues, we want to illustrate how this knowledge can be used to develop one's own playing and offer many ideas to broaden your "toolbox" of expression. Our feeling is that understanding and playing past guitar styles and traditions is a jumping off point for developing one's own music.

That belief produced a curriculum built for mixed levels rather than streamed ones. Classes were separated by subject, not by ability. A beginner and a working professional could sit in the same room on open tunings because the subject, not the skill floor, defined the class; when a class grew large, staff described as "musical instigators" worked alongside the teacher so that beginners were not left behind and advanced players were not held back. The class descriptions show how that worked in practice.

A week, not an afternoon

Everyone lived on campus. A typical day ran from breakfast at half past seven to jamming that ended, as the FAQ put it, "until you pass out." Between those points sat a morning class, an optional Toolbox basics class, an afternoon class, a second Toolbox slot, late-afternoon informal workshops run by faculty and students, and an evening event — a faculty concert, a student concert, or the faculty "de-constructed" jam. The daily programme is preserved in full.

The residential part was not incidental. "We expect participants from many countries to create an international community of musicians — all living together — and sharing the learning experience," the launch page said in 1998. The letters alumni wrote afterwards return to that point more often than they return to any technique.

Using this archive

• About IGS — the founders' own account of why they started it, and who ran it.
• Classes — the class descriptions as published, teacher by teacher.
• The Program — the daily schedule and the optional workshop list.
• Faculty — the teaching staff across the years, in the site's own words.
• Repertoire and Tunings & Slide — the musical ground the week covered.
• IGS History — brochure excerpts and the year-by-year faculty rosters.
• FAQ, Testimonials, The Guitar Forum, Sponsors and Links.

Woody Mann's death in January 2022 was marked at length by Acoustic Guitar, whose remembrance includes Happy Traum's recollection of teaching alongside him at these seminars. It is a fitting place to start if you never got to a session.