Guitar
Longtime Djuner guitarists will be happy to hear that Adrian Holovaty will be back on our teaching staff this year. He often opts for part-time teaching so he can get in a few classes and more jams himself. We’re happy to have as much of him as we can get.
As he mentions below, Adrian has been to Django in June both as camper and as a teacher many times. So we asked him to offer a few factoids for this, his updated profile. Here’s what he has to say for himself:
* I’ve been playing gypsy jazz since 2004. This will be my 16th Django In June — I first attended in 2007 and have been at every one except 2022. This will be my eighth year on teaching staff.
* I’m a longtime poster of YouTube videos, though I haven’t done any in a while. There’s a large archive of stuff on my channel, from gypsy jazz to solo fingerstyle. https://www.youtube.com/@adrianholovaty
* I released my first album a little over a year ago, Melodic Guitar Music. It’s 10 original tunes, and a gypsy-jazz-ish example from it is The Aching Waltz. There was a nice review written in Acoustic Guitar Magazine (link here).
* My second album, Layer Cake, is almost ready to be released (it’ll come out sometime in February, we hope). It’s entirely gypsy-jazz, moreso than the first album, again all original tunes.
* I’m playing at the Django Amsterdam festival this year, opening for Jimmy Rosenberg (!). I’ve been busy converting my tunes into arrangements that can be played live (slightly tricky, because the tunes were “studio creations” with many simultaneous guitar parts, but we’re getting there).
* Perhaps an odd thing to share, but: over the last year or so, I’ve thought a lot about my artistic goals. I’ve realized my path is to bring fresh colors into the gypsy-jazz world. Fresh repertoire (either my own tunes or nontraditional covers such as video game music), and fresh instrumentation (e.g., a rhythm section that combines La Pompe with Chet Atkins-style fingerpicking). Basically, I’m the total opposite of Duved. 😉
* On a meta level, I’ve come to believe every musician can benefit from thinking about artistic goals, so this is something I plan to touch on in my classes. At the daylong workshop I did at last year’s DIJ, we spent part of the session talking about this, and we had a great discussion.
* I still spend my days building Soundslice, music learning/practice software — it’s been my day job for 12 years now. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about optimizing music practice, specifically via help from software tools.