Peppino D'Agostino and the Godin Guitar Bar

Peppino D'Agostino and The Godin Guitar Bar

We used to host an event at the Winter NAMM show in California that we called the Godin Guitar Bar. NAMM is the musical instrument industry’s annual trade show. The show attracts tens of thousands of visitors including manufacturers, instrument retailers and musicians. The Guitar Bar began as an off-site display for our guitars in a bar/banquet room above a local restaurant. It occurred to us that since we had this facility, why not add some live music in the later part of each evening during the show. The first year we brought Canadian guitarist/composer Michel Cusson who played solo and with DAT accompaniment from a small stage that we had installed in the bar. Michel is a musician of phenomenal abilities and his performances caused a significant buzz. By the second evening there was a growing number of musicians—in town for the NAMM show—arriving at the Guitar Bar to hear Michel and in many cases offering to jump up on stage themselves for a few songs. The Guitar Bar quickly grew into a huge success and we returned each year with a growing list of musicians pre-booked for Guitar Bar performances. By the fourth year of the Guitar Bar we hosted an evening that featured, Michel Cusson, Thom Bresh, Buster B Jones, Marcel Dadi, Fareed Haque, the New Power Generation (Prince’s band) and others all in the same intimate setting. This was heaven for us. Any music lover would be thrilled to experience an incredible lineup like this in a relaxed and intimate atmosphere and for us the experience had the added bonus that all of this music was being made with our instruments.

Putting these evenings together involved lots of organizational issues such as, gear requirements and who plays when. Should we make sure that the solo acoustic performers have the chance to play before the electric players? The electric players are more inclined to arrive with band mates or recorded tracks to play with. Would the crowd respond to an acoustic performance after one of the eyebrow-singeing sets from one of the electric players? Not surprisingly the answer depends on the player. This brings us to Peppino D’Agostino. We met Peppino through our friend Lloyd Baggs. Lloyd brought Peppino to the Guitar bar to meet us, try a few guitars and play a short set. As it tuned out, Peppino’s set followed a spectacular set from Michel that had literally left everyone breathless so we felt a little nervous about this guy facing this room full of music industry folks, many of whom still had smoke coming off their eyebrows from the previous performance. So what does Peppino do? He plays a ballad! Here’s a guy with nerves. Surely most musicians—any of us for that matter—would face a situation like this and immediately launch into their flashiest up-tempo material. But then something amazing happened, within the first eight bars of the tune the room had fallen completely silent and we were collectively treated to one of those musical moments that can truly be described as ‘magical’. The song was one of Peppino’s called—appropriately enough—Close To Heaven. A performance that most of us will probably never forget. Peppino went on from there to play a set of amazing original material that included multiple tunings and technical virtuosity that included techniques that we had never seen before. From there our friendship with Peppino grew and he began to play Seagull and Godin guitars as his primary instruments. So here we are eight years later and delighted to announce the arrival of the Peppino Signature model guitar from the New Seagull Artist Series.