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Robert Conti - King Of Hard Bop Jazz Guitar!
Compiled & Edited By Steven Herron

    Jazz guitarist Robert Conti was born November 21, 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He initially started exploring the guitar by taking lessons from Joe Sgro who was a local guitar virtuoso. Throughout his teen years Conti was playing live nightly with a variety of groups while spending his summer seasons on the road. After he graduated from high school, Conti ended up spending the majority of the mid 1960's performing and touring throughout the United States and Canada.

    Although he has actually had numerous departures from his music profession, Conti is a consistently outstanding hard-bop guitar player. He was turned on to Howard Roberts, Joe Pass, and Johnny Smith by Pat Martino who was a friend of his when he was growing up. Conti started playing live when he was 14 and was on the road quite a bit during 1962-66 before settling in Jacksonville, Florida. In 1970, he stopped playing music for a living and during the next six years had a very successful profession in the securities industry. He is credited with advancing the idea of the financial supermarket.

    In spite of his successes in the business world, in 1976 Robert Conti returned to playing jazz guitar. He made his first recordings in 1979 including "Solo Guitar", starting a series on Trend-Discovery and Time Is Records that also included a 1981 album with Gerald Wilson. While continuing in jazz he spent much of the 1980s back in the financial world, which also included collaborating with movie maker Dino De Laurentis in 1988 which was the same year that he moved to Southern California. He was the resident jazz guitar player at the Irvine Marriott for 10 years from 1988-98. In more recent times, Conti has gone on to produce around 30 educational DVDs and 9 volumes of chord melody solos for jazz guitar.

    In addition to pointing out Johnny Smith, Wes Montgomery, and Howard Roberts as the primary jazz guitar players who helped mold his hard driving bop style of playing the guitar, Robert Conti also gives credit to jazz pianists Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson for helping to influence his special harmonic approach to playing solo jazz guitar pieces. Conti's highly effective methodology of teaching guitar players ways to improvise does not make use of modes and scales like many other methods.