ISBN 9780786685950. Guitar Methods. 8.75 x 11.75 inches.
Ton Van Bergeyk launched his career as a musician during the late 1960s playing blues harp and ukulele in a duo setting, but he then switched to the acoustic guitar and quickly learned and mastered the instrument using fingerstyle techniques. He started to transcribe and arrange classic ragtime compositions for fingerpicking guitar and was discovered by Stefan Grossman during a tour in Holland. Stefan produced Ton's first solo album in 1973 Famous Ragtime Guitar Solos. This contained 14 of Ton's arrangements of classic ragtime pieces and became a best seller. In 1975, Ton's second solo album, Guitar Instrumentals To Tickle Your Fingers, was released containing transcriptions and arrangements of novelty rags, early jazz and popular tunes of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1980, Ton's third solo album was released and continued his exploration of arrangements for solo fingerpicking guitar, this time with a repertoire covering jazz, blues, contemporary pop and country and even Mexican folklore. This album was titled Lulu's Back In Town, Hot Guitar Solos. Ton also participated in several anthology projects, i.e. Novelty Guitar Instrumentals, I Got Rhythm, Masters of Ragtime Guitar, The Entertainer and How To Play Ragtime Guitar. Ton recorded the audio lesson series Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar to teach phrase by phrase and measure by measure some of his most requested arrangements. This volume presents his renditions of Jelly Roll Morton's Kansas City Stomp and King Porter Stomp, the classic American Songbook tunes If I Had You, Moonlight Serenade and Somewhere Over The Rainbow and the Beatles' Lady Madonna.
