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Anthony Labuguen

I grew up in South Elgin, Illinois, about forty miles west of Chicago. I went into the city often to visit family and friends and when I was older, I went myself, taking a commuter train or bumming a ride from friends that had driver's licenses. I learned to play harmonica-and the blues-on the infamous Maxwell St. (back when it was still there). I eventually went to school for a time in the Loop, at Columbia College, where I mostly majored in the City, its sights, and most importantly, its sounds. Music was big in my family, and while rock was an early favorite (especially Santana), and it co-existed quite easily in my record collection with jazz recordings( my favorite being late fifites to mid sixties jazz), jazz was what I wanted to play. Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Roland Kirk (thanks to Mr. Groh, my seventh grade music teacher, for making some of his recordings available to me), and Cecil Taylor were some of the first jazz artists I remember owning albums of, and I dreamt of playing at Wolftrap, or Montreaux, and since I was ten/eleven at the time, my friends thought I was crazy. My first instrument was the clarinet, which I started playing when I was ten. However, the only jazz I knew of played on the clarinet was Benny Goodman, and no offense to Goodman or his fans, it didn't really light a fire under me. I hadn't yet heard of Eric Dolphy, Benny Maupin, Roland Kirk, or even Artie Shaw, so I labored with the clarinet for the next seven years. As I mentioned earlier, I did take up harmonica, but that was strictly blues (I had a lot of Sonny Terry-Brownie McGhee records). When I took up the guitar, it was to ultimately learn jazz, but I read somewhere that Jimi Hendrix said if you wanted to play like him, you'd have to listen to what he listened to. So, to learn jazz, I figured you'd have to learn what came before it, which was blues. And being so near Chicago, not to mention frequent trips down to Maxwell Street, the blues were pretty easy to find, if not to learn. I moved to Arizona in 1996, and was in a group called Eclipse from 1998 to 2004. We were, at different times, a trio, a quartet (which was most of the time), and for one very strange month, a septet with an MC (I also recall having female back up dancers for about a week, not that a jazz band needs dancers, but the drummer liked holding auditions for them, and his wife was out of town).

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