Nick Mendonsa

Jazz was something I sought and discovered on my own. My dad was who got me started on guitar playing, but, while he had total respect for jazz musicians, was always a rock and blues guy. I'm someone who's always wanted to dig deeper and deeper into my fields of interest. I kept trying to find better guitarists, those who influenced them, and then who was better than those guys, who influenced them, etc. I hung about in a rock/shred purgatory for a while before getting into avant-garde jazz initially by way of David Lynch soundtracks and then John Zorn. Through Zorn I discovered Bill Frisell...the subsequent immersion into the music of Frisell (then Coltrane, then Monk, then Mingus, Bill Evans, Marc Ribot, Nels Cline) killed off the shreddy rock thing.