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Kenny Vaughan Trio
Americana
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Born in Oklahoma, raised in Denver, Kenny Vaughan's earliest memories of music are his father's jazz record collection:
“My dad listened to Jimmy Smith, Mose Allison, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Miles Davis, Tony Mottola, and used to take me to hear Johnny Smith play at Shaner's in Denver. My neighbor, Charles Sawtelle, listened to Flatt and Scruggs and played Salty Dog on his Martin guitar for me. I knew then and there that I wanted to do that! I got my first electric guitar when I was twelve. The first thing I played was ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. My first band played Stones, surf, '60's garage punk, and Memphis soul. I saw the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Cream, Howlin' Wolf, Captain Beefheart, Buck Owens and The Buckaroos, The Dead, The Doors, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Johnny Winter, John Mayall, and Led Zep's first stateside gig, all before I was sixteen!"
Vaughan studied with guitarist Bill Frisell, which led to gigs with a local progressive jazz group. “Bill really opened my approach to my playing,” he explains. At eighteen, when his family moved to rural Kansas, Kenny opted to stay in Denver, and after answering an ad in the paper, he began working seven nights a week playing country music on the local honky-tonk scene. “I played with some real characters,” Vaughan recalls, “Great players and singers. We played mostly '50's and '60's country. It was like another world -- I was playing a joint one night and Willie Nelson showed up and sat in for two hours, we ended up on his bus in the parking lot. Fantastic!” It was during this time that Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings performed in the area. "Seeing those two shows changed everything. They had great bands and sang with remarkable intensity and depth." |
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