MIKE BARRIS

BIO

Guitarist • Writer • Educator

HE CHAMPIONS THE MUSIC of Americana, picking and singing the sounds of the American front porch.

And when he’s not whaling away on that big blonde Guild dreadnought of his, he’s pursuing his second passion – writing and teaching Americans about traditional American music.

But Mike Barris isn’t even American. He’s Canadian. A native of that land of Molson’s beer, the hockey game, the Arctic cold front.

And he lives in New Jersey.

So how did this nice suburban kid from Toronto, Canada, get mixed up with the music of the U.S. Southland?

"This music is my religion," Mike explains. "I have a very strong, primal connection to this music."

Mike, who now lives on the Jersey Shore, about an hour’s drive south of New York City, is the guitarist and leader of Mike Barris & Delta Sunrise, an acoustic roots and swing-blues trio that plays on the CD, Swingbilly Blues.

He’s also a prolific writer, contributing articles to publications like Down Beat and Acoustic Guitar, and a respected educator, who opens minds at colleges, libraries and festivals to the joys of performing and music in general.

In 1992, he moved to the U.S. to marry his long-distance sweetheart. They’re still married.

But the forces that shaped his unique guitar style were in play long before that.

Mike’s guitar style, arrangements and original songs are an amalgam of jazz, blues, country, Western swing, rockabilly and Cajun sounds. Think of Leon Redbone colliding with the Count Basie orchestra (with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys caught somewhere in between) and you’ll have an idea of what he sounds like.

"When I hear music, the first thing I notice is the bass," Mike says. "The second thing is the drums. The third thing is the melody. Unless there's a guitar part, which I might notice first.

"When I perform, I’m reacting to the overall shape of the piece, which comes rushing at me in bursts of color," he says. "I try to craft an integrated whole as I move through the song.

"I don't ever play a song exactly the same way twice," he adds. "In that regard, I'm more like a jazz musician than anything else."

His axe is a Guild D-100C, which Mandolin Bros., a highly regarded New York City guitar dealer, calls "one of the finest dreadnought guitars Guild has ever made."

Its back and sides are rosewood, its top spruce. It has abalone inlays and a hand-carved heel.

On Mike’s CD, it sounds incredibly mellow, particularly when Mike plays chords solo, as in the out-of-tempo intro to Home on the Range.

"I strive for a sound that is somewhere between an acoustic cowboy guitar and a lightly amplified arch top jazz guitar," Mike says.

"I try to blend open-string melodies and chords and jazz-style chords within the same song, and this guitar gives me the flexibility and capability to do that."

It’s dynamic music: rhythmic, soulful, very Southern, in the spirit of Jerry Reed, Merle Travis, Elvis and Louis Armstrong.

Yet, like most kids growing up in Toronto, Mike Barris cut his listening teeth on the blander pop and rock music of the day. 

Hooked on Old Records

One day, his father brought home old records by Chet Atkins, Travis, Johnny Cash and a host of other roots musicians, castoffs from a disc-jockey friend, and the youngster was hooked.

"Those records showed me there was a lot of other music out there besides rock," Mike recalls.

In this way, he also learned about an unlikely mix of niche artists, from Eddie Layton (the New York Yankees’ ballpark organist) to the United States Marine Corps Marching Band.

It wasn’t long before such eclecticism found its way into his guitar style, which also took its direction from the likes of Charlie Christian and B.B. King.

Years later, smitten with the music, he would quit his job as a Toronto elementary school teacher, plunge into guitar studies and go on the road. He spent two years taking lessons from Hank Monis, a Toronto studio musician.

When he wasn’t gigging, he was substitute-teaching. Or collecting his unemployment check.

That musical schooling is partly why Mike just doesn’t sound like anyone else.

He knows his chord theory and can whip out some of the prettiest jazz licks you’ll ever hear. But at heart, he’s a country boy.

A hiker, a swimmer. A tree-hugging, granola-eating, yoga-practicing nature boy.

Despite all that good city education, he just can’t suppress the itch to thumbpick like Merle, flatpick like Doc, and play in the style of a host of good ol’ boys from the great American Southland.

He’s played clubs like The Stone Pony (the original stomping ground of Bruce Springsteen) in Asbury Park, N.J., and festivals like the Golden Link Folk Festival in New York State and Summerfolk in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.

"I love variety," Mike says in explaining his philosophy of performing. "I feel I have a responsibility to the audience to keep things moving and interesting. I can't ever let them get bored."

Perhaps it comes as no big surprise that this die-hard exponent of traditional American music yawns at a lot of the music he hears today.

"To me, it lacks soul," he says. "Maybe that's because we’ve gotten farther away, as a culture, from the blues and jazz sounds which originally formed the base of popular music."

sA Natural Writer

While performing is the lifeblood of any artist, writing also comes naturally to Mike. (Thus proving the old saying: scratch a writer and you’re likely to find a musician.)

Mike has penned practical articles on musicianship for Acoustic Guitar, news items for Down Beat and features and reviews for Britain’s Jazz Journal International.

"I get ideas for articles from playing, and ideas for my act from doing articles," Mike says.

He has turned his experiences on the club and festival circuit in the New York-New Jersey area and in Canada into articles like "Troubleshooting Your Show," which became part of "Performing Acoustic Music," a book of practical advice on performing, alongside articles by Suzanne Vega, Leo Kottke, Sharon Isbin, and others.

He’s also produced hundreds of pieces on a range of topics – musical and otherwise – for newspapers including The New York Times and The Toronto Star; Time magazine; and Knight-Ridder Financial News.

Mike says he thinks of the tips in his articles when he’s searching for inspiration in working a crowd.

So do readers of the newsletters of two New Jersey-based music organizations. Mike writes regular columns on musicianship for the official publications of the Acoustic Musicians Guild and the New Jersey Jazz & Blues Foundation.

In these newsletters, Mike’s compassion, intelligence and bluntness know no bounds. He plainly communicates his distaste for anything in music that is artificial or fake.

Take this sentence: "A mature musician has learned to accept himself, and all his limitations. That means he learns to favor phrases, vocal stylings and influences which are truest to his capabilities and tastes – and dismisses clichés and stage mannerisms which are flashier but ultimately emptier."

 Answering a Call

An easy person to talk to, Mike also is a popular teacher.

Whether he’s teaching guitar privately from his studio, leading classes on performing at a college, or presenting programs on the music business at a public library, he’s always clear and thought-provoking.

The proof is in the evaluations students turn in at the end of class.

Asked what they liked best about one of Mike’s recent courses on performing as a guitarist-singer, at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, N.J., one of the class participants replied: "the teacher."

Mike later remarked that that comment "told me I had found my calling."

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MIKE BARRIS & DELTA SUNRISE: SWINGBILLY BLUES

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• About the CD

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