Private lessons with Andy Fite

Andy is a jazz guitarist, singer, songwriter and body therapist, whose approach to music is totally oriented toward feeling.

Feeling is a word that encompasses quite a bit: emotion, physical sensation, intuition, and at the deepest level, identity itself, what we may also call soul.

To get the greatest music you have in you, you have to learn to be present, to be yourself, and to simply let the music flow through you. This is your best chance to create something original and personal, and to express your feeling so that someone else will feel it too.

To express yourself spontaneously in the moment, to trust your ear and your intuition, and to get your brain to relax and lay back and just enjoy the ride, is the essence of improvising.

Andy works with musicians on any instrument to help to open up this spontaneous capacity, and specializes in voice and guitar.

Every musician is a unique individual, and every lesson takes its form from the interaction between us when we meet. What you need now, what your problems are, what’s going well, what is exciting to you lately, and what you just happen to feel like doing right now— all this winds up determining what happens in the lesson.

But there are of course favorite themes that come up again and again in Andy’s teaching. For example:

Breathing. A deeper awareness of your body, and the way your energy is flowing. The sound and the feeling of a single note (a note is a vibration; the key is to feel it as such). Melody. Harmony as an expression of line and counterpoint instead of the chord-scale/modalistic approach. Singing with records by Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh and others (this is for both singers and players). To tell a story when you sing or play. Simplicity as the doorway to greater complexity. Pleasure as the doorway to deeper self-expression.

Andy is also available for sessions in the therapeutic form Body Sense, using touch to help the body to relax, open up and balance itself, which can have a corresponding effect to loosen up mental, emotional and creative blocks.