Kurt Shapiro is a Berklee College alumni, holds a B.A. in music from Hampshire College, and has over twenty years teaching and performing experience.

Kurt Shapiro began playing guitar at the age of 9, after a disappointing bout with the recorder.  After several months of begging, his grandmother took him down to Sears & Roebuck and bought him a Silvertone electric and a very loud amp.

When his parents could no longer stand the sound of his playing through his very loud amp, they decided it was time for lessons.  A Berklee student, Mike Terry, was teaching guitar out of the music store down the street and fit the bill just fine.  Mike Terry introduced Kurt to the music of Wes Montgomery.  Several years and many Steppenwolf songs went by.  Kurt also briefly studied lute, an instrument similar to guitar and usually used in Renaissance and Baroque music.

As a teenager in Vermont, Kurt's interest jazz developed.  Throughout high school, he studied with a teacher named Jon Weber.  Jon Weber was a great musician and had been the lead guitarist on Dan Hicks' first album.  Jon Weber was a protégé of the late great jazz guitarist Barry Galbraith, Chairman of the Jazz Guitar Department at the New England Conservatory of Music.  By that time, Kurt was taking solos off the records of his jazz guitar idol, Pat Martino.  Jon Weber was very impressed with the prodigious speed and kinesthetics Kurt had developed on his own.  During high school, Kurt also made extra money by teaching guitar to the students in his high school.

After high school, Kurt Shapiro entered Berklee College of Music with advanced standing.  One year later, Kurt left Berklee with over two years' credits and moved out to Seattle to join friends he had known since childhood.

After making the rounds of a local musicians referral service, Kurt heard a local funk and soul group.  The band included four singers singing harmony and doing coordinated dancing; they were performing the latest hits by Parliament Funkadelic, the Commodores, Pleasure and Cameo.  Though he had never heard this kind of music in the woods and wilds of Vermont, Kurt was now hooked.  After a month or two of listening to the local soul station on the radio (KYAC), Kurt hooked up with some older soul and blues musicians who were playing around town and in Pioneer Square.  Just after turning 19, Kurt did his first professional paid gig.   What a feeling!  A couple months later, Kurt even had the honor of playing in the band behind blues legend Charlie Musselwhite when he came to Seattle!

After playing with them for a couple of years, including road trips around the Northwest and Canada, Kurt joined a Top 40 combo playing the latest hits by Olivia Newton-John and Foreigner.

When the Top 40 band broke up six months later, Kurt realized it was time to go back to school.  Kurt went back east to, this time to Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, which had some terrific jazz teachers in residence at the time. 

While at Hampshire, Kurt studied under composer Roland Wiggins, who had been one of John Coltrane's teachers, was a contemporary and friend of the late Sonny Stitt, and had recorded and played with many great jazz musicians of the fifties and sixties.  Roland Wiggins was also a protégé of the great classical composer Vincent Persichetti.  While at Hampshire, Kurt also studied extensively with the late great jazz trumpeter Ray Copeland, a former sideman of Thelonius Monk and Lionel Hampton. Ray Copeland's biography can be found in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.  Along with studying Jazz, Kurt also studied recording and spent a good deal of time in Hampshire's recording studio.  MIDI was in its nascent years and digital audio was just coming into fruition.  It was a very exciting time for electronic music and recording.

Attending college on and off, playing with local bands, and teaching guitar in the Amherst area, Kurt graduated Hampshire College with a B.A. in Music in 1987.

Missing Seattle, Kurt moved back to Seattle and immediately hooked up with musicians he had known prior to his attending school back east.  Kurt played in Top 40 bands, playing the music of Van Halen, Madonna, Bonnie Raitt, Led Zeppelin, Babyface and Paula Abdul; i.e., whatever would get him work.  During this period, Kurt had the honor of membership in the band regularly backing Star Search winner and local legend Sam Smith, as well as playing with local jazz organ great Leslie Byrd.  Kurt also taught guitar, but rather than advertise, Kurt only taught those who had come to him after hearing him play.

While playing in a club in Pioneer Square with an R&B band in 1994, Kurt had the revelation that he needed a break from playing guitar and the scene he was playing with.  He quit that night and didn't play guitar again for eight years.  He did play keyboards briefly during this time with a local soul band (Society's Child), playing local and Northwest nightclubs, but he never considered himself a contender on keyboards and kept his time investment minimal.

Kurt also met his fabulous wife, Paula, during this period.  In the first four years they knew each other, Paula had never even heard Kurt play guitar.  By this time, Kurt had obtained several computer certifications (MCSE, CCNA, A+) and was contracting at Microsoft as a Software Test Engineer.

One night, after they had been married for two years, Kurt was half-heartedly playing keyboards at a party.  Frustrated with the guitar player, Kurt grabbed a guitar and began to play.  Paula was shocked.  Her jaw dropped.  According to Paula, so did everyone else's in the room, including the musicians.

One of Kurt's closest friends, Bryan Sorum, was a musician who had never heard Kurt play guitar either. Bryan was a jazz trumpeter and principal composer for avante-garde jazz-rock band Kilgore Trout. Bryan's compositions had received national acclaim. He had performed at many national jazz festivals and the legendary Knitting Factory in New York. Bryan always thought Kurt was a nice guy, but had never heard him play guitar.

One day, at Paula's urging, Bryan heard Kurt pick up a guitar.  Together, Bryan and Paula convinced Kurt to go back to playing guitar.

Thanks to Paula's and Bryan's urging, in August of 2002, Kurt bought the first guitar he had owned in eight years.  Kurt has now gone back to the music he always loved and now teaches and performs jazz regularly.

Kurt lives with his wife, Paula, their black lab, Kramer, and teaches out of his studio at his home in Maple Leaf (North Seattle). 

You can catch his performance schedule at www.kurtshapiro.com, www.blacklabmusic.com, and seattleguitarlessons.com.  

Paula and Kramer