Subdivide and Conquer

’LL CONFESS, greatest thing to ever happen in my career as a guitarist took place not in a practice room or classroom, or on a bandstand. It happened on the football field. I wanted to join my high school jazz band, but in order to do that, I also needed to be in the concert and marching bands, and since there was no room for an electric guitarist in either of those ensembles, I was ingloriously assigned to the bass drum. Thankfully, during my first band camp, a well-known drummer and music educator named Tommy Igoe must have sensed that I had a pretty decent sense of rhythm and reassigned me to the snare drum.