About IGS

International Guitar Seminars did not begin as a business plan. It began as an observation the founders kept making on the road, in a dozen countries, over a decade of touring: there were a great many good guitarists out there who had nowhere useful to take the next step.

In the founders' words

This is the statement Bob Brozman and Woody Mann put on the About page, and it is the clearest thing either of them wrote about the purpose of the week:

Through our travels as performers, we continually meet guitarists from all over the world who are looking for a sense of direction and a fresh input of ideas and repertoire in their playing. We realized that there was a need to create a "safe" place where beginners as well as advanced players can learn from each other, expand their musicianship, and take musical chances.

Now in the planning stages of our tenth seminar, we have realized our dream creating along the way an enthusiastic community of alumni joining us on the lifelong adventure of music making with the guitar....

The word doing the work in that paragraph is safe, and the founders put it in quotation marks themselves. They did not mean gentle. The week was demanding, the days were long, and a great deal of the learning happened in rooms full of people who played better than you did. What they meant was that nobody was being graded, nobody was auditioning, and nothing depended on how you sounded on the first morning.

Who ran it

The staff list was short. Woody Mann and Bob Brozman were programme directors; Trevor Laurence, himself an acoustic blues, ragtime and jazz guitarist who taught and performed in New York, was managing director and the person most alumni dealt with before they arrived. Trish Wagner and Hope Kubryn worked on site as student coordinators. Emily Thompson handled art and design.

That structure mattered more than it sounds. Several alumni letters name Trevor specifically — for answering questions in the months beforehand, and for steering nervous beginners toward the right classes rather than the impressive ones. A residential workshop of a hundred-odd people either has somebody doing that job well or it does not work at all. You can read those letters on the testimonials page.

The two founders

Bob Brozman was a player and researcher of blues from around the world, widely regarded as the leading exponent of National resonator guitars and one of the most accomplished bottleneck and lap slide guitarists of his generation. His teaching linked African polyrhythmic feel, open tunings, humour and a formidable right hand. He died in 2013.

Woody Mann had published the majority of the accurate country-blues transcriptions then in existence. He was known for getting the actual sound and ideas of prewar blues into a contemporary style of his own, and his knowledge of jazz gave the blues classes an angle other camps did not have. He died in January 2022.

Both are described here as the site described them while it was live. Nothing has been added to either man's biography.

What happened to the seminars

The annual sessions ran from 1999 through the middle of the following decade, moving between Columbia University in New York, the University of California at Santa Cruz, San Rafael in California, and Seattle University in Washington. The last session announced on this site was Columbia, 18–24 June 2005.

After that the operation narrowed. A shorter-lived "Acoustic Sessions" workshop programme carried some of the same intent in 2007 and 2008, a message board kept the alumni community talking for several more years, and the site was eventually rebuilt as a small archive around a photo gallery and the forum. Then it stopped. The history page, written by the organisers themselves while the site was still up, is the closest thing to an official epitaph the seminars ever got.

Reading the rest of this archive

If you want to know what actually happened in the rooms, start with the class descriptions and the daily programme. If you want to know who was standing at the front of them, the faculty page lists the staff year by year. If you want the musical background, the repertoire page covers the players whose recordings the week was built on.