Hard Bop Jazz Guitar – Robert Conti is King!
Jazz guitarist Robert Conti was born on November 21, 1945, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He initially began learning the guitar by taking individual lessons from Joe Sgro, a local guitar virtuoso. During his teenage years, Conti performed nightly with a variety of groups while spending summer stints on the road. After graduating from high school, Conti spent much of the mid-1960s traveling and performing in the United States and Canada.
Although he’s actually had a number of departures from his musical career, Robert Conti is a consistently exceptional hard-bop jazz guitarist. Pat Martino, who was friends with him as a kid, turned him on with Howard Roberts, Joe Pass and Johnny Smith. Conti began performing live when he was 14 years old and toured extensively during 1962-66 before settling in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1970, he gave up playing music for a living and for the next six years he had a very lucrative career in the stock industry. He is credited with advancing the concept of the financial supermarket.
Despite his successes in the business world, in 1976 Robert Conti returned to playing jazz guitar. He made his first recordings of it in 1979 consisting of “Solo Guitar”, beginning a series on Trend-Discovery and Time Is Records that also included a 1981 recording with Gerald Wilson. While continuing to jazz, he spent much of the 1980s in the business world, including working with filmmaker Dino De Laurentis in 1988, the exact same year he moved to Southern California. He was a resident jazz guitarist at the Irvine Marriott for 10 years, from 1988 to 1998. In more recent times, Conti has produced over 30 instructional DVDs and 9 volumes of jazz guitar chord melody solos.
In addition to citing Johnny Smith, Wes Montgomery, and Howard Roberts as major jazz guitarists who influenced his bop style of guitar playing, Robert Conti also credits jazz pianists Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson with helping to influence his unique harmonic approach to guitar playing. play solo jazz guitar arrangements. Conti’s extremely successful method of teaching guitarists the best ways to improvise does not use modes and scales like most other approaches.
Instead, he teaches students how to learn to play jazz guitar by playing jazz on the guitar, which is how he learned to play. Conti firmly believes that the best way to get great results on the guitar fast is to memorize real jazz guitar solos right away, then start playing them over their respective chord progressions to embed the sounds in your head while getting the notes under your fingers. .
Robert Conti performs live primarily in the Las Vegas area and Southern California. His most recent recordings for Pinnacle Records consist of “The Jazz Quintet”, “Comin’ On Strong” and “To The Brink”. He continues to work on new educational products and assures his fans that some unique new releases for aspiring jazz guitarists will be available in the very near future. It will certainly be worth the wait if these future releases are anything like your current jazz guitar courses!