About Archer
Currently based in southern Vermont, New Hampshire, and the Pioneer Valley area, the 23-year-old guitarist has a style informed by diverse influences and mentors. He began his musical journey at a young age inspired by his father's country blues playing and the classic rock and metal music he heard on the radio. He gained a strong foundation in theory, fretboard knowledge, and technique while studying with his first teacher, Aaron Chesley, a locally renowned Brattleboro-based guitarist and educator. In his early teens, he founded Nomad Vs. Settler, an indie rock band that had a strong local reputation. In 2015, NVS took first prize in a Battle of the Bands contest and was able to record an EP.
While attending the Putney School, he took every music class offered in theory and composition and dove deeper into jazz guitar with Draa Hobbs (who in turn was a student of the great Atilla Zoeller). While at Putney, he befriended banjoist G Rockwell, who initiated him into an entirely new world of bluegrass and old-time music. He learned mandolin and flatpicking guitar while playing in Rooftop, a band made up of Rockwell and other Putney students. They played songs from the folk and bluegrass cannon and acoustic versions of rock songs and original material, loosely resembling a bluegrass band's instrumentation. In the summer of his junior year, he attended Guitar Sessions at Berklee College of Music and returned the following year to attend the five-week program on a full tuition scholarship. At Five Week, he got a start in college-level music theory and caught the attention of, and received some deserved critical feedback from, the great Peter Bernstein. Putney’s traditional music ensemble exposed him to Irish, Scandinavian, and Balkan traditional music. The latter of the three caught his ear with its use and treatment of odd meters. As a capstone senior project, he arranged traditional Balkan tunes for a large jazz ensemble and assembled and rehearsed an ensemble of local musicians to perform them.
After Putney, he continued to Oberlin Conservatory, studying under Bobby Ferrazza. With Ferrazza, he studied the fundamental jazz literature and gained a new affinity for the bebop language and his exploration of the great players of the past took him off the beaten path into the music and technique of Blind Blake (A performance of Blake’s “guitar chimes' 'appears in his senior recital performance). He studied some classical guitar with Stephen Aaron and dabbled in classical composition, completing a string quartet presto movement over a semester. In his third year, he was chosen to take part the the prestigious Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble. With the Oberlin’s Performance and Improvisation(PI) program led by Jay Ashby and Jamie Haddad, he was able to explore further traditional and world music as well as share the stage with many currently active artists such as Becca Stevens, Luis Perdomo, Alon Yavnie, and Camila Meza. It was at Oberlin that he gained his first teaching experience, both as a secondary lessons instructor and as a tutor in music theory. He found the experience of teaching others to be challenging but ultimately rewarding.
Now back home from Oberlin, he does solo guitar background gigs, plays concerts with a rhythm section made of other talented young musicians he met through the Vermont Jazz Center, teaches lessons, and wonders where his next chapter will take him.