Six strings, five decades
Bill Loughman reviews a composition with student Aaryan Jadhav.
Bill Loughman Jr. performs as a Peters Township High School student in the early 1960s.
Lifelong Peters Township resident Bill Loughman Jr. continues to teach guiltar after half a century.
Back in the mid-1960s, Bill Loughman Jr.’s father basically told him: You’re a guitar teacher now.
The elder Loughman had opened a music store in their hometown of Peters Township, and his son came home for the summer from his studies at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.
“I didn’t know how to teach a damn thing,” Bill Jr. will admit. “I just learned from doing.”
He must have learned well. Half a century later, he continues to teach, with his current crop of students ranging in age from 8 to 64. Among them is Aaryan Jadhav, a Peters Township High School senior who has studied with Loughman for three years after taking lessons off and on with others starting when he was 8.
“He’s back to more rigid rules,” Aaryan said. “Bill always scrutinizes everything. If I play one missed note, he’ll always make sure to nail it, to help me reach perfection.”
His mother, Asawari, a classically trained sitar player, said she appreciates another aspect Loughman brings.
“To me, the most important thing is that Bill installed that motivation of loving music,” she explained. “Earlier, it was just a chore for Aaryan. I’d take him for a guitar lesson, bring him back, take him, and then I had to demand that he practice, practice, practice. And now, he’s getting up in the middle of the night to practice.”
Loughman has been practicing, or at least plunking away on the strings, since he was a youngster who discovered a relative’s guitar in the family home.
“It was a natural thing that just drove me to it,” he said, citing a story he heard from his mother that he was making strumming motions at age 3. But he still had to work at it.
“I remember I had trouble playing the F chord,” he said, “like everybody else.”
Inspired by the likes of Duane Eddy’s instrumental hit “Rebel Rouser” and the album “Chet Atkins’ Workshop,” Loughman started taking lessons at age 15. Not long afterward, he wowed the crowd at the Peters Township High School variety show – he has a photo of the performance, with him playing a would-be-worth-a-fortune-today Gibson ES-330 double-cutaway – with a rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
His skills got him in with the cream of the crop at Berklee, with classmates at the time including saxophonist Ernie Watts, drummer Harvey Mason and guitarist Mick Goodrick. Loughman continued his studies into the ’70s with Brazilian virtuoso Carlos Barbosa-Lima while he was an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Around that time, Loughman made a lifelong friend and mentor in the legendary jazz guitarist John “Bucky” Pizzarelli, who was playing an extended solo gig at a Pittsburgh club.
“I went every night. We had lunch one day, and I took him for a ride in the Morgan,” Loughman said about the distinctive British sports car he owned for decades. “Bucky was so gracious.”
He and Bucky, now 91 and living in his native New Jersey, stay in touch frequently, and Pizzarelli is glad to talk about Loughman’s proficiency on guitar and his devotion to the instrument, be it playing, teaching or talking about the relative merits of various makes and models.
That type of attitude is what inspires students like Aaryan Jadhav.
“I have so much going on,” he said, “but I always find time to play guitar.”