>Thomas, you play guitar? I sometimes hang at Guitarnoise among others. Which one do you use?
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>>The other day I mentioned this to a fellow on a guitar forum and he said that was true until recently, when 70,000 people moved into the city. Now there are traffic jams and it is not very nice, especially when it snows!
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I play about a dozen different instruments, and have been performing since I was 9. I won the Air Force Talent Contest in 1965 playing flamenco guitar. I have played flamenco guitar professionally, and for some famous dancers from Spain, as well as solo all over the West, Mid West, and Southern states. I gave up touring, as I hate to travel! That is not an enjoyable life to me. I still play in the San Jose, California area.

I have played piano since I was 6 and guitar since I was 10. As far as the guitar goes, I play popular, country and western, Latin, Classical, Blues, and flamenco. In the Summer of 1963 I took Masters Classes from Andres Segovia, at UC Berkeley. We had some outstanding students in that class. I never told him that I play flamenco. Somehow I thought that he did not like it.

One of my flamenco guitar teachers is what I call “a teachers teacher”! His name is Juan Serrano, and he moved to Orlando, Florida. We are good friends and we have known him since 1969. By the way my wife was a flamenco dancer, and that is how we got aquatinted.

I love music and I love to teach others. Music is my means of stress relief! I have created over 2500 arrangements of music using TablEdit. I like to take an original recording of a famous artist, and arrange a piece of music to have the feeling of the original. Most of the time my arrangements are based upon my feelings. You can say a lot with music!

Oh, and to answer your question I belong to the BluesGuitarUnleashed.com forum. And by the way, you never know if we are related. My mom’s maiden name was Cummings. The original name was Commons, and if you were from Galway, the accent sounds like Cummins, so in the United States, it was decided by the officials who control such things that your name was Cummings! :)

A last point is that I have a cousin, who is one of 8 siblings, who lives a few miles from me. She was raised in the same house (thatched roof and all) in Moneymore, County Galway, Ireland. That is the same house that my great great grandfather Patrick Thomas Commons was raised in. Patrick moved to San Francisco around 1850. We have a DVD taken of the house, farm, and the nearby town. Now why did they name me Thomas? Oh yes, my grandfather's dad was also Thomas. :)

There is only one member of the original Cummings family from San Francisco (from Patrick’s side) living. He had two girls, so when my cousin Mike is gone, that will be it.

Tom