Colorado native Michael Isabell is the founder and artistic director of the Rocky Mountain Swing Guitar Camp, created to bring together guitarists who share a passion for swing, rhythm, and lifelong learning. A performer, educator, author, and community builder, Michael is dedicated to fostering a vibrant swing guitar community while creating welcoming spaces where musicians can connect, collaborate, and grow.

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Michael teaches at Sollohub School of Music in Broomfield, Colorado, serves as an assistant coach alongside Yaakov Hoter through the international GypsyAndJazz.com coaching program, and has helped lead immersive gypsy jazz guitar retreats in Tuscany, with another planned for Rochester, England August of 2026. He is also the author of Guitar as a Mirror: Reflections on Learning, Practice, and Play. His teaching emphasizes rhythm, musical communication, and practical musicianship, helping students develop not only technical skill but confidence, creativity, and a deeper connection to the music.

 

As a performer, Michael leads Hot Club of Olde Town, one of Colorado's longest-running weekly swing jams, bringing together musicians, dancers, and listeners in the heart of Olde Town Arvada. He is also the guitarist for the much-anticipated revival of Gypsy Swing Revue, performs with Odessa Rose, and is a frequent guest guitarist with swing ensembles throughout Colorado's Front Range.

 

Whether teaching, performing, writing, or organizing events, Michael is passionate about cultivating the next generation of swing guitarists by honoring the music's rich traditions while encouraging curiosity, creativity, and personal expression.

Lisa Liu is a guitarist based in San Francisco, California and is always on the move playing shows around the world. She plays jazz, jazz manouche, and solo guitar. Liu is an Artist Ambassador for Santa Cruz Guitar Company, Sadowsky Guitars, Larkspur Guitars and Krivo Pickups. Liu is a Teaching Artist and writer for Acoustic Guitar Magazine and has performed and taught alongside Mimi Fox, Martin Taylor and John Knowles CGP. Liu also performs with the acclaimed African-American Poet Cornelius Eady who was the Inaugural Poet for Zohran Mamdani's NYC mayoral inauguration. She has been a Teaching Artist at TrueFire, Django in June, Puget Sound Guitar Workshop, and has also been an Artist In Residence at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, La Maison De Beaumont (France) and Hors Saison (France). Liu also has worked with the San Francisco Symphony Adventures in Music program providing educational outreach music performances in the SF Unified schools.

 

Liu has performed at Birdland (NYC), The Guggenheim Museum (NYC), Django Reinhardt Festival(France), SiX The Musical on Broadway (NYC),  Djangofest NW (WA), Rocky Mountain Archtop Guitar Festival (CO), AAPI Jazz Festival (NJ), The Freight & Salvage (CA), The Music Center at Strathmore (MD),  The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington DC), Academy of Music (MA), Yale University (CT), Princeton University (NJ), Joe's Pub (NYC), Barbès (NYC).

 

Liu has released 2 jazz albums: Introducing Lisa Liu in 2018, and Temperance in 2024, and has composed music for Christine Toy Johnson's Broadway play A Little More Blue in 2023.

 

Liu is the recipient of The Creative Rebuilds New York Grant and The South Arts Jazz Roads Tour Grant.  

 

"Liu performs with a confident grace that reveals an intuitive command of her instrument, and her versatile picking style ranges from a playful nimbleness to straight-up jamming."

-Christa Titus/Billboard Magazine

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Featured article:

Acoustic Guitar Magazine: Teaching Artist

Greg Ruby was born in Toronto, spent his early years near Pittsburgh, and came of age musically in the Pacific Northwest, where, in the late 1990s, a small but fervent revival of Django Reinhardt's music was beginning to take shape. He co-founded Hot Club Sandwich, later joined Seattle's Pearl Django, and became a familiar presence at the West Coast festivals where a generation of players rediscovered the possibilities of acoustic swing.

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Though closely associated with the Django tradition, Ruby's work has often wandered beyond it. His recording Look Both Ways, a collection of original compositions, led Dan Hicks to call it "a soundtrack in search of a movie," a description that captures the music's cinematic drift between jazz, folk, and the American vernacular.

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In recent years, Ruby has been drawn as much to forgotten histories as to performance itself. His Syncopated Classic project unearthed and restored the neglected works of 1920's Seattle jazz composer Frank D. Waldron, an important figure in the city's early jazz scene whose music had largely slipped from the repertoire. The resulting recording was named Northwest Jazz Recording of the Year by Earshot Jazz.

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That same impulse led Ruby to the music of the Argentine guitarist Oscar Alemán, who played for Josephine Baker and moved through the same Paris circles as Django Reinhardt. Ruby authored The Oscar Alemán Play-Along Songbook (volume 1) and later released Just Like That, a recording in homage to Alemán’s singular blend of swing and syncopation.

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Alongside this archival work, Ruby has also explored more vernacular and cinematic idioms, including surf-tinged and beach-influenced guitar music, and has written and composed for music libraries and sync placements across film and television.

Ruby’s parallel life as a teacher and researcher has produced a body of work that blurs the line between scholarship and performance. In addition to his books on Pearl Django, Frank D. Waldron, and Oscar Alemán, he has written for Acoustic Guitar magazine and serves as Guitar Week Coordinator for the Swannanoa Gathering.

He lives in New York City, where he performs, teaches, and writes, pursuing the odd corners of the jazz tradition where forgotten stories have a way of becoming new music.