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Jazz guitarist Robert Conti was born November 21, 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He first started learning the guitar by taking private lessons with Joe Sgro, a local guitar virtuoso. During his teenage years, Conti performed nightly with a variety of bands while spending his summer seasons on the road. After graduating from high school, Conti spent much of the mid-1960s traveling and performing throughout the United States and Canada.
Although he did have a number of starts in his musical career, Robert Conti is a consistently outstanding hard-bop jazz guitarist. He was turned to Howard Roberts, Joe Pass and Johnny Smith by Pat Martino who was a friend of his when he was growing up. Conti started performing live at the age of 14 and was on the road quite a bit throughout 1962-1966 before settling in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1970 he quit playing music for a living and over the next six years he had a very lucrative career in the securities industry. He is credited with advancing the concept of financial supermarket.
Despite his success in business, in 1976 Robert Conti resumed playing jazz guitar. He made his first recordings in 1979 consisting of “Solo Guitar”, starting a series on Trend-Discovery and Time Is Records which also included a 1981 recording with Gerald Wilson. While continuing in jazz, he spent much of the 1980s in the business world, most notably working with filmmaker Dino De Laurentis in 1988, the exact same year he moved to Southern California. He was Irvine Marriott’s resident jazz guitarist for 10 years from 1988-1998. In more recent times, Conti has produced approximately 30 instructional DVDs and 9 volumes of chord melody solos for jazz guitar.
In addition to citing Johnny Smith, Wes Montgomery and Howard Roberts as the main jazz guitarists who influenced his bop style of playing the guitar, Robert Conti also gives credit to jazz pianists Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson for helping to influence his unique harmonic approach to playing solo jazz guitar arrangements. Conti’s hugely 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 guitar, which is how he learned to play. Conti firmly believes that the best way to get great guitar results quickly is to immediately memorize real jazz guitar solos and then start playing them on their respective chord progressions to incorporate the sounds into your head all over. by putting the notes under your fingers.
Robert Conti performs primarily in the Las Vegas area and southern California. His most recent recordings for Pinnacle Records include “The Jazz Quintet”, “Comin ‘On Strong” and “To The Brink”. He continues to work on new educational products and assures his fans that unique new versions for aspiring jazz guitarists will be available in the very near future. It will certainly be worth the wait if these future releases resemble his current jazz guitar lessons!
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Source by Steve M Herron