Craig Ventresco

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Biographical Info

Craig Ventresco is a San Francisco-based guitarist and revivalist of early 20th Century jazz, pop, and folk material. He grew up in Maine, but established himself as a guitarist specializing in older styles of American popular music by playing on the street every day for tips in San Francisco, beginning in the late 1980’s. Craig formed the band Bo Grumpus, which gained a cult following among the more daring ragtime enthusiasts, and with whom he released five records.

Craig specializes in playing popular music that was written during the ragtime era (circa 1890-1915). And in Ragtime-influenced finger-style Blues. And Blues-influenced Ragtime. And Ragtime-and-Blues-influenced Jazz. He’s largely self-taught and employs a one-of-a-kind pick-and-fingers technique on the acoustic guitar, which is loud and punchy and brings a pianistic quality to his solo performances. He’s come by his virtually encyclopedic repertoire via 78 records, piano rolls, and old sheet music. He also plays mandolin, ukulele, and other stringed ephemera.

Craig’s unique approach to ragtime guitar reached a national audience when he provided much of the soundtrack to Terry Zwigoff’s acclaimed 1995 documentary “Crumb”. The Past is Yet To Come, his 2000 release of solo guitar recordings, furthered his reputation among guitarists as a brilliant and somewhat mysterious anomaly in the Ragtime world. Craig was asked again by Zwigoff to provide some music for the breakout 2001 feature film Ghost World. A full accounting of his recorded output has eluded discographers, and his own recorded work he says “I don’t save recordings of my own playing because I hear myself enough, but I suppose that I have recorded over 30 of them, both solo and with other musicians.”

In recent decades Craig has continued to freelance between San Francisco, New York City, and Points Unknown, occasionally working with artists like Janet Klein, Barbara Rosene, Terry Waldo, and the S.F-based band Gaucho, but most often performing solo shows. Currently he can be seen and heard most evenings on social media, live-streaming performances with his partner in music and life, Meredith Axelrod.