"I first met Craig Ventresco in San Francisco about five years ago. I was walking downtown and heard what sounded like an old Blind Blake record but without the surface noise. I looked around and saw this young guy out on the street playing for tips with a $25 electric guitar. I listened to him a long while and got to know him. We now play music together one night a week in a local restaurant ("Pauline's"). Every so often there, he'll play some new obscure tune that I've never heard and it'll be absolutely great and I'll ask him where he got it from. And invariably he'll answer that he has an old 78 of it. Craig collects 78s also, but these turn-of-the-century acoustically recorded performances by people like Arthur Collins and Billy Murray leave me cold. They sound very corny and stiff to my ear, but Craig insists they're masterpieces. He thinks his versions of these performances are vastly inferior! I beg to differ - the melodies are basically the same, but it's as though Frank Stokes or Memphis Minnie were re-interpreting this old rendition in some great, hot, raggy style. Tunes like the obscurities on this CD - "Belle of the Phillipines," "Won't You Fondle Me," "Abraham Jefferson Washington Lee," and "The Gabby Glide" were written in the 1st or 2nd decade of this century and usually the melody line was sung, they weren't instrumentals. Anyway, I much prefer Craig's versions - the guy is the only musician I've ever heard these days who improves on these old tunes he steals from. There's a number of these "ragtime fingerpickers" around, but they're all very precise and genteel in their approach, and their music doesn't amount to much even if they do manage to play all the correct notes. Craig pounds it out with an incredibly strong sense of rhythm and the right feeling. It's been great to be able to spotlight him and Boeddinghaus - two of my favorite living musicians."

"By soaking up 100-year-old rags and blues from scratchy 78-rpm recordings and playing for tips on the streets of San Francisco, this remarkable guitarist developed a uniquely powerful and passionate style.

If you ever wandered through San Francisco metro stations during the mid-1990s, you may have heard what you thought was the ghost of Blind Blake playing ragtime guitar. In fact, the music echoing through the tunnels was coming from the guitar of Maine native and transplanted San Franciscan Craig Ventresco, whose haunting interpretations of late-19th- and early 20th-century music entertained many a passerby. "That's how I made my living for a while," explains the 38-year-old former street musician. "I used to play at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, but I was always getting chased away by the cops."

One fascinated bystander was film director Terry Zwigoff, who recorded the guitarist for the companion soundtrack CD to his 1994 documentary, Crumb, about misfit comic artist R. Crumb. Since then, Ventresco has released an exquisite solo instrumental CD, The Past Is Yet To Come (Origin Jazz Library, www.originjazz.com), showcasing a style that ranges from rhymically forceful to remarkably sad and eloquent.

While the adult Ventresco honed his craft by playing on the street for anybody who would drop a coin in his hat, his unconventional musical direction was set during early childhood, when he fell in love with old 78-rpm recordings of early ragtime and jazz. When other kids were listening to Led Zeppelin, Ventresco was searching through dusty bins for rare sides by such obscure artists as Billy Murray, Arthur Collins, and Will Denny. "I love all kinds of music from the turn of the century - ragtime, waltzes, marches," he explains. And, as he rifles through wooden crates of precious platters in a San Francisco flat sparsely furnished with a couple of hand-cranked cylinder players and a stereo system with two turntables that can play 78s, he confesses, "I wasted every dime I've ever made on old records."

Ventresco's parents forced him to take classical guitar lessons, and he can read and write music. But he is essentially a self-taught player, and he says tablature seems like a foreign language. He mines gems from the mother lode of 1920s acoustic-guitar blues, playing exciting renditions of Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, and Blind Boy Fuller tunes, and when playing a Broonzy song such as "Pig Meat Strut," he has an uncanny ability to faithfully incorporate not only Broonzy's part but also the rhythm guitar part of Broonzy's partner, Frank Brasswell. "But I don't really listen to guitar players that much these days," Ventresco notes, and much of the material he plays was not originally guitar music. The rags of pianist Scott Joplin are obvious examples, but Ventresco also draws inspiration from horn players, accordionists, and even the American Quartet, a best-selling vocal group that scored hits during the 1910s and '20s with such popular songs as "Casey Jones," "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary," and "Over There."

Ventresco's eccentricity has paid off - artistically, at least. In 1988, he moved from Maine to San Francisco and formed Bo Grumpus with bass player Marty Eggers and percussionist Pete Devine, recording several cult-favorite CDs. In 2004 Ventresco moved for two years to New York City, where he gigged nightly with the Dreamland Dance Orchestra and the Red Onion Jazz Band. In addition to his unique interpretations of Broonzy tunes and obscure ragtime hits, Ventresco's playing stands out by virtue of his aggressive sound. Using only a flatpick (to set up an attack that can't really be duplicated with a naked thumb or a thumbpick) and the ring finger of his right hand, Ventresco manages to sound like three guitarists, and he achieves a brawniness lacking in the approach of many fingerstyle guitarists who play similar material. "People tell me my style is all screwed up," Ventresco says of his idiosyncratic picking, "but I think people used to play this kind of music in a muscular and aggressive way. My favorite ragtime pieces are the piano rolls, and when you hear piano rolls you really hear a heavy left hand."

Since returning to his rent-controlled flat in San Francisco in 2006, he has been sitting in with the Gypsy-jazz combo Gaucho and performing on a regular basis in a duo with pianist/guitarist/vocalist Meredith Axelrod - they have regular indoor restaurant gigs, and their CD of ragtime and rural blues is slated for release later this year. So if you find yourself sitting in Cafe Divine on a Wednesday night, eating fettuccine, sipping a nice Chianti, and wondering who that amazing ragtime guitarist is, consider yourself fortunate: you just ran into Craig Ventresco."

He learns most of his repertoire by ear, and his raucous yet sensitive playing style (developed by playing on the streets of San Francisco) is a welcome alternative to the scholarly, delicate approach that usually characterizes ragtime guitar recordings.

~Liner Notes: The Past Is Yet To Come
Barry Hansen aka Dr. Demento

TO SEE THE FUTURE, you only have to go back in time. Three local musicians - all fairly young, all involved in quite different 20th century musical enterprises - deserve more attention; maybe they'll get it this coming
season. Craig Ventresco is the guitarist in the Bo Grumpus trio. Along with his long-time colleague, washboard-percussionist Pete Devine, and the trio's bassist, Marty Eggers, Ventresco is a roots man, a deep digger into the
essence of American popular music. Ventresco and his Bo Grumpus pals don't delve much into blues or swing,
trad-jazz or bebop. Rather, he reaps from a much deeper seedbed of American music - back to the turn-of-the-century recording era when Billy Murray, Vess Ossman, Fred Van Eps, Arthur Collins, Ada Jones, Dan Quinn, Henry Burr, Cal Stewart and other big record sellers were the masters of pop - and Irving Berlin hadn't yet written "Alexander's Ragtime Band."

A typical set by Bo Grumpus is likely to include snappy numbers from the pre-World War I pop-ragtime era as well as vintage classic ragtime and mainstream trad-jazz. A Scott Joplin rag may likely be in the same set as a Dan Quinn music hall number and Django Reinhardt guitar stuff from the 1930s.

"I grew up listening to old records at Bill Bryant's big old home in Portland, Maine," says Ventresco. "Bill, who died last year, in his 40s, spent years touring the backwoods of old New England and had assembled the biggest collection of antique-era records, cylinders, catalogs and stuff probably in the world.

"As a teenager I spent hours every week learning about pre-jazz music and records from Bill. I gradually learned to play guitar and banjo along with the old discs, and took lyrics right off the records. I grew to love those old artists, their songs and tunes. By the time I went, briefly, to the University of Maine (where my father taught history), I had built up a big collection of records of my own and was playing guitar and banjo in little groups around Portland - that's where Pete (Devine) and I got together.

"I had a radio show on the student station, played old rags and stuff and some R&B, too. My fascination for early-century music consumed all my time. I got to know some of the famed researchers like Jim Walsh in North Carolina - he was writing about vintage records and recording artists in Hobbies magazine in the 1930s and '40s and was a wonderful old guy.

"Pete and I came out here about 10 years ago," he says, "because we thought the trad-jazz, Dixieland fans around the Bay Area would give us support. Marty (Eggers) is from Berkeley and well-known as a bassist and pianist in the trad-jazz community.

"In Bo Grumpus, we're not trying to prove anything, nor are we just screwing around," says Ventresco. "But we are discovering that the current "roots music' trend in popular music is generating interest in our music among old and young listeners - and that's all to the good."

At the JVC-NY's "Ragtime Evening" held at the Danny Kaye Theater, the audience gave Ventresco and Bo Grumpus a standing ovation at the end of their first number. Sometime in the next few months, I expect Bo Grumpus to become a national leader in directing the roots-music movement back to the century's beginning.
Bo Grumpus records on their own CD label, Miss Anne Thrope Records.
Of course.

Singer, Songwriter, Music Publisher Applejack sitting in with Craig and Meredith Axelrod (not shown) at the Atlas Cafe in San Francisco's Mission District.

Visit Applejack's webpage HERE

Visit Atlas Cafe webpage HERE

Ragtime Guitar God Interviewed at SFO

As I'm waiting for the traffic to clear on I-80, I'm reading this article on SFGate regarding the lack of airport activity at SFO. One person they interviewed was none other than SF's ragtime guitar god Craig Ventresco who plays regularly at Atlas Cafe and occasionally at other Mission venues such as the Knockout and Amnesia.

"This is eerie," said guitarist Craig Ventresco, an airport artist-in-residence who was flat-picking "Ain't She Sweet" for a crowd of one person on a landing near the door to the parking lot. "If this is a sign of the times, it's frightening."

Ventresco, whose fingers were flying faster than most planes, said the plummeting economy was making ordinary people as broke as musicians."

"That's not good," he added, with a grim smile.

What a treat it would be to happen upon his playing enroute to an always abysmal family holiday.

~Mission Mission: Saluting San Francisco's Mission District - November 26, 2008
Visit the Mission Mission Webpage HERE

Many listeners will remember Craig Ventresco as the guitar genius of the “Bo Grumpus” trio that busked on the streets of San Francisco , played at several ragtime festivals and issued five well-received CDs. That trio is now history, but Ventresco has resurfaced and reformatted as a duo with Meredith Axelrod. Both enjoy researching tunes and rags from the 1890s to the 1930s and they have collected a bunch for your listening pleasure.

While those selections by noted ragtime composers will be familiar to many, the rest of the tunes will be unfamiliar rarities. Ventresco’s unique style manages to sound like a cross between flatpicking and fingerpicking, while behind his melody line Axelrod’s guitar provides the ever-appropriate chord structure and walking bass line – an absolutely vital component to the overall success of this album.

The duo begins with a great opener, For My Sweetheart, which Ventresco picks on the mandolin. Three other mandolin numbers add effective contrast – Medley #1, Medley #2 and St. Louis Tickle – as do four Ventresco guitar solos: Springtime Rag, Asleep in the Deep, Blues and Medley #3. The medleys are all of songs from the ragtime era, with syncopation provided by Ventresco’s fertile mind. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to their make-up but they are always enjoyable.

While the mandolin can always be counted on to provide an unmistakable melody, the guitar provides a wider range of dynamic subtleties. His guitar solos certainly prove that he can carry the ball alone, yet with the exception of the Blues, the duets with Axelrod are somehow more satisfying. My favorite cut was the spot-on Something Doing – the best guitar version of this Joplin/Hayden collaboration I’ve heard. Other favorites were For My Sweetheart, Sogno Di Primavera (a lovely waltz), Elite Syncopations, St. Louis Tickle (a winner!) and Ventresco’s original Blues, with lots of the “bent” notes that make blues guitar so appealing.

Nit-picks are Wenrich’s Silver Bell, where Ventresco’s pianissimos are almost too soft to be heard, and Swipesy Cake Walk, the Joplin/Marshall collaboration, where Axelrod’s background creeps obtrusively into the foreground. The recorded sound is great and the graphics are appealing. The liner notes are heavy on the philosophy behind the project, leaving specifics on the pieces to be explored via the internet or your local library. Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod make very good music together and if you like string band ragtime, you’ll like this CD.

COMPACT DISC REVIEW by Jack Rummel
Visit Jack Rummel's Website HERE