Greg Ruby

Greg Ruby was born in Toronto, spent his early years near Pittsburgh, and came of age musically in the Pacific Northwest, where, in the late 1990s, a small but fervent revival of Django Reinhardt's music was beginning to take shape. He co-founded Hot Club Sandwich, later joined Seattle's Pearl Django, and became a familiar presence at the West Coast festivals where a generation of players rediscovered the possibilities of acoustic swing.

Though closely associated with the Django tradition, Ruby's work has often wandered beyond it. His recording Look Both Ways, a collection of original compositions, led Dan Hicks to call it "a soundtrack in search of a movie," a description that captures the music's cinematic drift between jazz, folk, and the American vernacular.

In recent years, Ruby has been drawn as much to forgotten histories as to performance itself. His Syncopated Classic project unearthed and restored the neglected works of 1920's Seattle jazz composer Frank D. Waldron, an important figure in the city's early jazz scene whose music had largely slipped from the repertoire. The resulting recording was named Northwest Jazz Recording of the Year by Earshot Jazz.

That same impulse led Ruby to the music of the Argentine guitarist Oscar Alemán, who played for Josephine Baker and moved through the same Paris circles as Django Reinhardt. Ruby authored The Oscar Alemán Play-Along Songbook and later released Just Like That, a recording in homage to Alemán’s singular blend of swing and syncopation.

Alongside this archival work, Ruby has also explored more vernacular and cinematic idioms, including surf-tinged and beach-influenced guitar music, and has written and composed for music libraries and sync placements across film and television.

Ruby’s parallel life as a teacher and researcher has produced a body of work that blurs the line between scholarship and performance. In addition to his books on Pearl Django, Frank D. Waldron, and Oscar Alemán, he has written for Acoustic Guitar magazine and serves as Guitar Week Coordinator for the Swannanoa Gathering.

He lives in New York City, where he performs, teaches, and writes, pursuing the odd corners of the jazz tradition where forgotten stories have a way of becoming new music.