Paul Kucharski (koo-har-ski) has been playing guitar for a little more than an eternity and had been performing in the Wisconsin area since the 70's as an acoustic soloist. These days you might find him performing in the Phoenix area.
He first started playing
guitar at the age of 10, were he played electric guitar, took all the
usual lessons and learned to read music, but gave that up after a couple
years. "I was bored stiff with electric guitar and if I
had to play "Louie-Louie" or "Wipe Out" one more
time I thought I was going to crack up". He took up guitar
again in earnest in 1970 at the age of 19 while in the Navy and living
in Hawaii. It was there that he discovered the music of John
Fahey and Leo Kottke and discovered there was whole other world out
there besides electric guitar. He was off and running
playing 5-6 hours per day.... he says that except for Scuba Diving there
wasn't much he wanted to do except sit on the porch of the beach house
and play. "I bought every fingerstyle book I could get my
hands on...all three of them". It turned out those
early lessons which taught him to read music allowed him to now teach
himself. By the time he left the Navy in the early 70's he had a
repertoire of fingerstyle tunes he could use to start performing.
While completing college he ran a Coffeehouse at the University of Wisconsin - Parkside, booking folk acts from around the country, opening for many of them as well. When he graduated, he came to the decision point of either working as an Engineer or strike out as a full-time professional musician. "Being a solo fingerstyle guitarist in the 80's was a death wish. I quickly realized that starvation was bad for my health and that engineering offered survival." It proved to be a wise choice since he says he's quite well fed these days. Paul has a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering and even managed to get his name added to a bunch of patents over the years. In real life he worked in the field of Industrial Automation (factory control systems). Paul retired and moved to Arizona in 2016.
"What I love about Fingerstyle guitar is that it crosses so many of the typical music categories. It covers Blues, Jazz, Country, Folk, and even Easy Listening categories. So for me it's more a way of playing the guitar than it is a type of guitar music. What I love about it is that I can play some down and dirty blues tune one minute and play a great fingerstyle swing tune the next. I think fingerstyle guitar opens doors to all kinds of musical possibilities".
Originally Paul is from Racine Wisconsin but is now retired and lives in Goodyear Arizona. He's married and has two step children, five grand children and two great Labs.
YouTube Channel for Paul Kucharski & Eric Brown, a.k.a. Acoustic Blues for the Soul
