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Pierce College isn't exactly keeping it a secret that its music department have two extremely well-known and experienced guitar instructors on its faculty: John Schneider (pictured at right) and Ron Anthony (below).

Way back when I was a classical guitar student in the '80s, I didn't study with John Schneider, but I was a regular listener to "Soundboard," his KPFK-FM radio show that featured, as I remember it "music for the fretted string," meaning fretted instruments of all kinds. He's an expert in microtonal music, and that means freaky fretboards to reproduce unusual, multitonal temperaments (if I have that word and phrase right; I'm almost sure I don't).

I didn't study with Ron Anthony either, and a little jazz study would do me a whole lot of good, but that's another story for another time. Anthony is famed for his associations with George Shearing and Frank Sinatra. I used his excellent instruction book, "Comping," to help me find my way through the charts I was playing from while a very unexperienced guitarist in the Grant High School Stage Band even earlier in the '80s.

Very few books have ever been written about jazz accompaniment on the guitar, and Anthony's book was probably the best I'd seen. At some point, I lost track of it, but I do remember it fondly.