Joe Baer Magnant Group

Joe Baer Magnant is an American guitarist, composer, and educator. Although his playing could be characterized as a ghostly and twangy take on jazz (as exemplified by The Joe Baer Magnant Group and his solo projects), he can sit nicely in a earthy raw setting with groups like the soul/R&B group, The M-Tet.

Starting as a self-taught guitarist starting at the age of five in a small town in Vermont, Magnant ended up with a diverse background stemming from his explorations of a wide range of styles during his time in Boston, working with with singer/songwriters, dance/pop groups, rock bands, and jazz musicians. It was also there that he began performing up to 300 shows year in addition to teaching music full-time. Later, in the San Francisco Bay Area, he redefined his technique and approach to playing the guitar and was accepted as a student by two dramatically different virtuosic guitarists, Oz Noy and Mimi Fox, with whom he studied intermittently while establishing a career in the Bay Area.

As an educator, he has taught hundreds of students, some of whom have become accepted at the most prestigious contemporary music schools in the world. He currently teaches and is working on the follow-up volumes to his method book series, The Guitarist’s Palette.