Ralphe Armstrong Trio

Ralphe Armstrong got an early start in the music business. In 1973, Armstrong, a 17-year old Detroit kid just out of high school, tried out for and landed a gig with John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. The other person who auditioned at the same time was Jaco Pastorius. “Jaco had a different sound then, he had an old beat up fretted Fender Precision, I got the job because I played fretless,” remembers Ralphe. Ralphe was classically trained during his four years at Michigan’s Interlochen School of Fine Arts, where he studied the Josef Harvey method. Later, he transferred his acoustic technique to electric while also putting up some ferocious funk on a trio of powerful mid-70’s Mahavishnu recordings: Apocalypse, Visions of the Emerald Beyond, and Inner Worlds.

“If you’re going from the double bass to the electric, you have to know the technique in order to figure out arpeggios and come up with fingerings,” Ralphe maintains. “You can’t just look at a composition and make it musical without coming up with some kind of constructive fingering that makes it musical. That’s what I teach today.”