Wgg: Hi Scott, how are you doing?

Scott: I'm still a little shaky. I've had the flu for almost the complete tour. It feels like it's never gonna go away.

Wgg: Looking forward to going home again in a few days and taking a rest?

Scott: Yes, definitely!

Wgg: Scott, you started the tour in Athens/Greece and I think I saw on your website played in Sweden...

Scott: Yeah, we were all over the map. This was a pretty long, long tour, but it's kinda normal you know. That's how they all are. This one just happened to be a couple of weeks longer and just harder because of everybody being sick.

(takes a sip of tea)

Mmmmmh... never drank so much tea in my whole life, man!

Crowd reaction

Wgg: With that amount of traveling and playing in front of all the various audiences do you notice different reactions because of a different cultural background?

Scott: Yeah, definitely. But I don't know - it's hard to tell whether those are city specific or just nightclub specific; because people are different everywhere and sometimes it has nothing to do with the location. It has to do with just the way things are at the club.

Some audiences at some places are just like dead. We never know why. They are just completely dead. They just don't react to the music and then sometimes they go crazy and you try to figure out why.

It's really impossible to figure out. Outside from... like the usual, like sometimes "theater-seating" causes audiences to be a little dead when they are sitting in their comfortable chair and there is no booze and there is no table and there is no interaction among the poeple. That tends to be kind of a deader audience, but we've even had exceptions to that. Like some of the theater crowds in Italy - they go nuts and in Spain too. So I don't know.

Wgg: Otherwise who knows, maybe the dead audience consists of floored guitarists?

Scott: I don't know. Sometimes we do get a pretty big musician crowd and some of those guys may be more analyzing than enjoying.

Wgg: The guitar player syndrome...

Scott: Yeah. We much prefer to play for mixed audiences, so it's like a real show. And we get those probably 30 percent, maybe 40 percent of the time and the rest of time is... like you see a lot of guys in the audience. It's a little like playing a "Jonny Cash prison concert." And then you can pretty much tell it's a musician crowd.

Teaching at Musician's Institute

Wgg: Obviously, you've played with Kirk Covington for a long time with Tribal Tech but how did you hook up with the bass player John Humphrey?

Scott: We played in Jean Luc Ponty's band together. Like way back in the 80's and he also teaches in our school. (Musician's Institute in Los Angeles) So I've known him for years. We've been teaching in the same school together for a long time.

Wgg: You still teach there?

Scott: I'm there Monday and Tuesday when I'm in town. I still do that - probably will forever.

Wgg: Still open counseling?

Scott: Yeah, because that's a pretty open gig. I just show up and do my thing. Actually, I wouldn't mind teaching some classes just to get me out of that little room once in a while. But if I teach classes and then I leave I have to find substitutes and all that stuff and it's a lot more complicated. So I just kind of stick to what I do there.

Wgg: You enjoy teaching?

Scott: Sometimes I enjoy it and sometimes I don't. It sort of depends on who's in my room that day. Most of the more advanced guys come to study with me and we study playing over chord changes and stuff - and the ones that are serious are bringing their tape recorders and are taping me playing and are transcribing what I do. And they are coming back to me the next day and go, "You did this here... and what is this?" and yo can just tell they are serious.

Those guys don't come in every day.

Some days I feel like it's more of a babysitting job. Kids come in there, they just want to jam, they don't have tape recorders - so it's not gonna do them any good when they leave - you can just tell that they are not serious. They are there to have fun, they are there to do whatever they are there to do.

It's sort of like for me, "I'd rather practice. I'd rather sit around learning new stuff than jamming with guys who really can't play."

It's not a whole lot of fun on those days...

And I don't really have to do what they tell me to do. I can just say, "Well, no, I don't want to jam with you. You don't have a tape recorder, so obviously you aren't that interested in learning anything - so, no, I don't want to jam - we are gonna work on this."

And then I go into something and say, "Have you ever checked this out before?" and I just make them go through...

That's like a real teaching day and those days happen.

But on a good day I've got the better players at the school there. They know how to play over changes and they are really interested in the next level.