Poppa,

Bourassa stories could fill a good-sized volume.

One day he got a call to provide back-up accompaniment for a touring musician. It was for a large charity event in Detroit, and Rob carefully didn't say who he was working for, nor the other acts that became part of this story -- he didn't tell the story in order to put the other musicians down in any way. No, the point of the telling was in encouraging the workshop participants that learning the instrument this new way would be actually teaching us to play virtually anything.

Anyway, Rob played the set with this famous touring musician and then returned to the green room where a few more of the acts were waiting for their turn on stage.

At that point, a few of the other musicians congratulated Rob on a great set and then asked him how long he'd been with this act. When Rob said, "Well, I got called yesterday afternoon and we went over the material last night to familiarize me with it"

"?", was the look. "You're shitting me?!"

They, of course, found it hard to believe, given the level of the performance, that Rob hadn't been performing with this guy for some time now.

Well, now these guys were intrigued. They wanted to know how he did this. As one of them happened to be holding a guitar, Rob asked them to play a simple melody (Mary had a little lamb). The guy got a weird look on his face, but tried to play the melody. He couldn't. At least not without a few stumbles.

At that point, Rob gave the guy a shortened version of that workshop demo -- playing anything the guy could name. If it was a song that Rob was familiar with, he could play it. And they could play anything and Rob could play along in real time.