by don campbell
Paul Lestock, who is leading what is surely the most warm and cozy stringed instrument class cum jam session, is about nothing if not groove. Five players are circled around him, amid wine barrels and the rough-hewn interior of Springhouse Cellar Winery, as he leads them through the simple yet elegant changes of Django Reinhardt’s “Djangology,” at a painfully slow speed.
He teaches music like he builds his handcrafted Arrow guitars—patiently, honestly, clearly, with a profound if not overt sense of greater good. He is teaching his motley charges how to be ensemble players. They learn when to play and when not to play, where and how the melody fits against harmony and most importantly, how to find that pesky groove.
The groove is the thing. He strums fat chords on his round-hole Arrow acoustic, a guitar he handcrafted in his Rowena Dell shop from fine woods and a deep sense of what a guitar should not only sound like, but what a guitar should be. He instructs the string bassist on how to set the beat with simple notes. A young boy who plays an Arrow tenor guitar (four strings tuned in fifths, instead of the usual six strings tuned in fourths) cops a simple but effective melody. The bespectacled mandolinist struggling through the chord changes suddenly gets it and bites off a tasty melodic solo…
