This week’s guest is Teddy Kumpel. Teddy is an amazing guitar player who lives in Brooklyn. He’s worked with people like Joe Jackson (he been in his touring band for the last few years), Rickie Lee Jones, Phil Lesh, Feist, Marshall Crenshaw, and a ton of other folks. He also has played on soundtracks to movies well all love like Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and he’s also a great engineer.

Teddy and I became friends sometime back 2013. He had this cool weekly residency at Rockwood Music Hall between 2011 and 2018 where he did this thing called the Loopestra. Basically, it was Teddy, his guitar, his voice and some looping equipment and he’d have a different rhythm section every week. There were no rehearsals. The idea was just to play. It was awesome to hear great bass players like Tim Lefebvre, Andy Hess, James Genus, Jonathan Maron, Fima Ephron, and great drummers like Aaron Comess, Shawn Pelton, Jojo Mayer, Aaron Steel, Josh Dion do their thing in the context of Teddy’s Loopestra.

I had the honor of doing 2 of them. Many of those gigs are on YouTube. It’s a goldmine of stuff to check out.

Teddy and I spoke a couple of weeks ago and here’s how our conversation went.