Brian Rolland

Brian Rolland (born April 16, 1954) is an American guitarist, composer and songwriter raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His instrumental sound is characterized by a mix of Latin/Spanish and North American guitar styles.

Background

Starting out on piano and clarinet as a child, switching to folk guitar at age 12, and continuing as a largely self-taught blues and rock player, Rolland moved into formal training in jazz through summer programs and lessons at New England Conservatory and Berklee School of Music while attending Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school. His first live performance was at age 14 with a rock band at the Club Casablanca in Harvard Square. Youthful influences included frequenting the Club 47 and The Boston Tea Party in the later 1960s, and an appearance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival backing Jazz trumpeter Clark Terry in a big band setting.

His father was an amateur piano and cornet player from Hannibal, Missouri who, as a teenager in the early 1940s, moonlighted playing jazz on Mississippi riverboats, before moving East with his mother after World War II to attend Harvard Medical School under the GI Bill.