The 46-year-old native of Queens, New York City, was raised in a
musical family and saw some of the greatest rock and roll acts—such as
Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Cream and Led Zeppelin—as they made their way
through New York in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
He settled in the Manchester area after attending Boston University,
and he has been teaching guitar and bass at Ted Herbert School of Music
for 12 years.
A guitar player, Westbay plays in a number of bands, including the Mark
Herbert Little Big Band and The George Westbay band, among others.
He performed at the Manchester Jazz and Blues fest last year, but is
unable to join in this year due to a prior engagement.
How did you become interested in
music? I started playing guitar at the age of eight. I was basically
influenced by the Beatles—my older brother brought home Beatles records
and he started playing guitar, so that’s what I wanted to do.
Did you have a musical family? I had four brothers and we all played instruments, so yeah, it
was a family thing. It was something that kept the brothers together.
You also play bass and other
instruments; what is your favorite and why? Guitar is my favorite. I’ve had opportunities to play other
instruments and did play some, but I always gotta go back to guitar. I
don’t know why—it’s just always been my favorite. My favorite musicians
were all guitarists, and I just liked the sound of the guitar—electric,
acoustic or otherwise.
How is the approach to guitar-playing different between jazz and blues? There really isn’t too much of a difference, at least for me,
because I go by feeling. But with blues, it would be even more about
the ability to go by my gut instinct and by feeling, because the
structure of blues songs is simpler than that of, say, a standard or a
modern jazz song. But if I’m comfortable with the jazz song, I would go
about playing the song and improvise on the song, you know, try to
convey a feeling, or take in what I’m feeling at that moment and try to
bring it out in the guitar playing.
Where did you see Jimi Hendrix? I saw Hendrix at Madison Square Garden [in 1968] when they still
had the silly revolving stage. That was very crazy. I mean, I was 12
years old, I didn’t even know what pot was and I keep asking my
brother, ‘Is the place burnin’ down or what?’ And the whole circular
stage was surrounded by cops with their hands on their ears; they were
either pushing people away or covering their ears because Hendrix was
so loud.
What brought you to Manchester from New York City? I went to college at Berklee in Boston, and joined a couple
bands that were popular up here and just kind of settled up here.
How do you like it here compared to such an enormous city like New York? I like Manchester and always have because it’s city-slash-town,
you know, and you don’t have to go too far and you’re in the country. I
never got that in New York City; we had to travel quite a ways to get
to anything that resembles anything like New Hampshire or the outskirts
of Manchester. So I like it. When I go back and visit New York I’m
always happy to visit my family and always thrilled of the ‘big city,’
but it’s too big.
Do you have a certain teaching style? I gear my teaching to the students—what they’re most interested
in. Because I teach anything from six years old to adults, I want to
know what brings them here, and what makes them want to learn to play
the guitar, and I try to go after that for them. So I mean, if it’s a
certain singer/songwriter that an adult likes, then we try to pursue
that. In the case with the kids, it’s…them showing a little bit of
interest and their parents acting on it, and then therefore I believe
it’s my responsibility to keep them interested.
Is guitar hard to learn? Guitar, in the beginning, is a very hard instrument. Piano, I
would say, in the beginning, is somewhat easier because you just press
down—and rather lightly—and you’ll get the sound. With the guitar, one
hand has to do one thing, the other hand has to do another thing, and
they have to do it together, and it’s gonna hurt. So there’s a lot of
obstacles to overcome—at first.
Does teaching try your patience? Oh sure. Anything in life is gonna try someone’s patience. It
just makes me realize that I’m probably not getting through to the
student, or the student doesn’t want to be gotten through to at that
particular point. So it’s either push hard and find something that
really interests them, or back off and see what they want to do—is it a
lazy day today? You know, or are we gonna find the thing that’s gonna
spark their interest that day?
How many students do you have at a given time? I’ve been up to 80 students a week before. Right now it’s down a
little bit. But I would say, generally speaking, usually over 60
students a week.
What do you get out of teaching? There’s tremendous satisfaction in getting someone going with
music. To me—to be kind of selfish about it—I see another person that I
can play with, that I can jam along with. And also nowadays I see that
the kids enjoy music and need any kind of activity to keep them busy
and keep their mind active. I form a lot of bands in the studio too,
which is another reason for all the instruments in here: the drum
teacher and students will come in and join my guitar students, maybe
we’ll get some of the horn teachers and students, and we’ll form bands.
What do you think of the lineup for the Jazz and Blues Fest this year? I heard that Monster Mike [Welch] was playing and that they were
getting Johnny A back again. So Johnny A, I love his stuff. That’s good
stuff. Monster Mike is great. I was jealous of him when he was a little
kid. He’s someone who plays with a lot of emotion. Other than that I
haven’t had a chance to see what the lineup is.
You’ve been in a number of bands;
what was one of your favorites? Well, one of the big bands around here in Manchester that I
started up [in the late ‘80’s] was a band called “Sharp Stick in the
Eye.”
That’s a...nice...name. Yeah [laughs]. I forget exactly how that came up. Ray Staples
was the keyboard player, and he plays in a number of bands; Mike Dupont
was on drums and Danny Blajda was the bass player. The interesting
thing about Sharp Stick in the Eye was that we did classic rock and
roll from the ‘60s and ‘70s...and in order to make ourselves
marketable, we tried to bring a humorous side to it, so we built and
ran a little show inside our show called the “Dead Rock Star Wheel of
Fortune,” where we had this enormous roulette wheel with dead rock
stars on it. So people would spin the wheel and they’d win a band
shirt, and then we’d play one of the songs by the dead rock stars,
which, in our minds, gave us a perfectly good reason to be doing
classic rock and roll while everybody else was doing big-hair bands.
What are you listening to right now? I listen mostly to what the students bring in. I still owe my
allegiance to rock and roll, even though rock and roll’s come a long
way since Elvis Presley and the Beatles. But the kids come in with
anything like Metallica-ish, and I’m not like ‘Turn of that junk off’
or whatever, because to me it’s still rock and roll.
