Camp I – Instructors
Susan Cattaneo
Susan Cattaneo is one of Boston’s most respected songwriters. Respectful of tradition, but not bound by it, Susan blends rock, folk and blues with a healthy dose of country. Call it New England Americana with a twang.
Susan’s latest project, The Hammer and The Heart is a double album with an electric side and an acoustic side. The album charted at #1 on the Billboard Heatseekers Chart. Her single “Work Hard Love Harder” was the #1 song on Folk Radio in August and the album was a top 5 Folk Radio Album. The album has also been nominated for five Independent Music Awards including Best Country Album, Best Producer and Best Acoustic Single. The album reflects her love for collaboration the record features 40 local and national artists including Mark Erelli, The Bottle Rockets, Bill Kirchen, Jennifer Kimball, Dennis Brennan and Jenee Halstead just to name a few.
Over the past three years, she was an Emerging Artist at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival and a finalist or winner at some of the country’s most prestigious songwriting and music contests including: Kerrville’s New Folk Contest, the Philadelphia Songwriters Project and at the Wildflower Festival Songwriters Contest, the International Acoustic Music Awards, the Independent Music Awards, the 5 Unsigned Only Song Contest, the USA Songwriting Competition, the Mountain Stage New Song Contest and the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest.
Susan has also been teaching songwriting at the Berklee College of Music for over 15 years and performed all over New England with Western Mass trio The Boxcar Lilies. (Last
John Corzine
John Corzine has been part of the southern California acoustic music scene for more than 40 years. Festivals and contests, Disneyland and dance floors, coffee houses and concert halls — John has performed throughout the southland, having gathered a collection of some of the best bluegrass, old-time, country and folk music you’ll find. Influenced and inspired for life by meeting Doc Watson at age of 9 years old, John spent his early years in local flatpicking and clawhammer banjo contests and began performing bluegrass and old-time music professionally shortly thereafter. John performed and toured with Philo/Flying Fish recording artists Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin, and was featured on Mary’s A Life and Time album.
John has played in many area bands over the years, often with his wife Peggy Corzine on bass and vocals. John and Peggy currently perform with their youngest son Cody as the Corzines, and you can hear him this summer with the Coyote Brothers at the California Bluegrass Association’s Father’s Day Festival in Grass Valley, CA. John comes to Camp for the first time this year to share his teaching and performing experience in the use of the guitar as a lead instrument, as the rhythmic foundation in a bluegrass and old-time band setting, and as the melodic and complementary background to vocal performance. (Last update 2021)
Dave Firestine
Dave pulls out the “take no prisoners” style of playing at every dance – bringing the tunes to their full potential and beyond. He is a tune-meister and music jams are super fun when he is in the driver’s seat.
Originally a drummer, his strong sense of rhythm and syncopation is the foundation of his playing and tune writing, and truthfully he is never happier than when he gets to pull out the laptop drum kit to back swing and honky tonk tunes. Don’t worry, he can access his sensitive side when playing waltzes and beautiful melodies.
Dave is a music vagrant retiree now, but before that, he was Senior Gyzmologist building lightning detection systems. He is currently playing with the dance bands STEAM! (www.dancetosteam.com) and The Privy Tippers.
Katie Glassman
Katie Glassman is one of the country’s most renowned and decorated Texas-style and swing fiddlers, as well as an accomplished songwriter, singer, and a highly sought after educator. Katie is a 4-time National Swing Fiddle Champion and 2-time National Divisional Champion, to mention a few of her accolades.
For 6 years Katie toured and recorded with the renowned trio, The Western Flyers, winners of 2018 Ameripolitan Awards “Best Western Swing Group” and Western Music Association and the Academy of Western Artists “Western Swing Album of the Year” award for Wild Blue Yonder.
As an educator, Katie is the founder, owner, and primary instructor at the online fiddle academy, FiddleSchool.com. Since Fiddle School opened in 2018, her thorough online curriculum has given fiddlers around the world the opportunity to learn, improve, and progress in Texas-style fiddling, western swing, and early jazz. Offering over 1,000 sequential instructional videos and countless webinars on fiddling and improvisation, Katie is also an innovator, creating a modern curriculum for a traditional American art form.
(Last update 2023)
Lewis Mock
Greg Schochet
Greg Schochet is a full-time performer, teacher and producer in Boulder, Colorado. Equally adept on guitar and mandolin, he is fluent in all manner of acoustic and electric styles, specializing in bluegrass, swing and country. He is the lead guitarist for Halden Wofford & the Hi*Beams, Colorado’s beloved and venerable honky-tonk and western swing band. Greg is an integral part of Colorado’s thriving roots music scene, and is a sought after instructor, session player, producer and collaborator.
A veteran of many teaching camps, Greg has also been guitar and mandolin teacher at Woodsongs Music, Colorado’s premier acoustic music store, for some 20 years. His teaching practice centers around preparing students to thrive in ensemble settings, whether it be a campground jam or a working band. Students start with technique fundamentals, then move to learning, executing and maintaining core repertoire, and finally learning to improvise tastefully and intentionally. Greg’s enthusiasm for the music he teaches, as well as his personable manner and attention to detail have established him a loyal and committed student body. (Last update 2021)
Jennifer Scott
Considered the finest jazz vocal improviser in Canada by peers, fans and musicians, Jennifer Scott is an important jazz voice. She’s sung with such greats as Gene Bertoncini, Clark Terry, Tommy Banks, Paul Horn and Kenny Wheeler, to name a few, and has been nominated for a Juno (Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) award.
She’s performed to sold-out crowds from San Diego to Vancouver to Whitehorse and has more recently performed in Amsterdam, Milan and Rome. During a recent tour of the western states and Canada, she was named “Pick of the week” by the Los Angeles Times where she was quoted as having: “…a velvet tone & superb phrasing….”
Jennifer has set herself apart from the jazz-vocalist pack with her mesmerizing renditions of the most unlikely tunes. With her warm, flexible contralto, she brings a striking emotional intelligence to everything she sings. As much a song stylist as an improviser, she puts her stamp on material through her supple sense of swing and deft, slippery phrasing.
For years, she’s also been very much in demand as a clinician and teacher of workshops throughout the United States and Canada. (Last update 2022)
Cosy Sheridan
Cosy Sheridan first appeared on the national folk scene in 1992 when she won the songwriting contests at The Kerrville Folk Festival and The Telluride Bluegrass Festival. The Boston Globe dubbed her “one of the best new singer-songwriters in the United States.”
She is a veteran touring performer of the folk coffeehouses from Boston to Seattle, as well as The Cowgirl Hall of Fame, Carnegie Hall and on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. “You can’t make it into double digits, and continue touring for twenty or so years, unless you know what you’re doing, and do it well,” wrote The Chicago Examiner.
Her 2021 CD A Beautiful Sound charted in the Top 10 on the folk radio charts, as did her 2018 release My Fence & My Neighbor. Her CD Pretty Bird was listed among Sing Out Magazine’s Great CDs of 2014.
When the pandemic hit she came off the road and now reaches her audience through her weekly Tuesday morning livestream concerts. She plays a percussive guitar style backed backed up by bass player Charlie Koch.
Cosy teaches classes in songwriting, performance and guitar at workshops and adult music camps across the country. She is the director of Moab Folk Camp in Moab, Utah.
Steve Smith
Steve Smith is not only known as one of this country’s top mandolin players but also as an outstanding educator. Along with his work with the Roots/Bluegrass group, The Hard Road Trio, Steve has been on faculty at a host of camps. He’s appeared at some of the country’s largest festivals and venues including Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, High Mountain Hay Fever, RockyGrass, Swallow Hill, the Freight and Salvage, Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival, the Big Horn Mountain Festival, and the Minnesota Old-time and Bluegrass Festival. With the Las Cruces (NM) Symphony, he has performed works of William Grant Still, George Gershwin and George Crumb and music from the show “Chicago.”
In his thirty years of touring, he’s also performed in Ireland, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Cuba and the US Virgin Islands. He has also performed in musical theater in Cotton Patch Gospel (multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and actor) and the Robber Bride Groom; he composed and performed the score for a production of the Sam Sheppard play “Curse of the Starving Class.”
Steve has appeared on over 30 albums as performer and producer with musicians including Jim Hurst, Mitch Perry, Tim May, banjoist Bill Evans, Alan Munde and Tim O’Brien. His music has been heard on countless radio stations across the US and on the Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even the Weather Channel. (Last update 2018)
Rene Worst
Rene Worst has been a professional bassist since 1971. His virtuosic and supportive bass playing has been a Canadian treasure for many years on both acoustic and electric basses. He is as gifted on fretless as he is on acoustic, a rarity in the music industry.
Born in Ifar, New Guinea in 1954, he moved to Canada with his family in 1960, settling on the West Coast where he grew up and went to school. At an early age he showed an aptitude for music, in particular jazz bass, and it wasn’t long before he was out establishing himself as a leading bassist. The list of noted artists he’s performed with is really too long to list here, but here are some of them: Chet Baker, David Bowie, Poison, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Aerosmith, Dr. Hook, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, Ferron, Phoebe Snow, Beverly D’Angelo, Buddy Greco, Martha Reeves, Sheena Easton, Barney Kessel, Larry Corryell, and that’s just a short list…
Rene has been a regular instructor at several camps including the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop; he’s also one of the founding members of the noted fusion band “Skywalk” and has anchored and produced six recordings with them. (Last update 2022)
Assistant to the Director
Charlie Koch
Charlie Koch has trained horses, sailed across the Atlantic more than once, and fronted an R&B band. He skippered a race boat for Buckminster Fuller. He whipped in for a fox hunt in Ireland and saddle-broke young horses on a breeding farm in France. He taught tennis, skiing, and horseback riding. He trained as a body-oriented psychotherapist. These days, he tours playing bass for singer/songwriter Cosy Sheridan.