Tuck & Patti

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Tuck & Patti are a jazz and Christian musical duo, comprising husband Tuck Andress and wife Patti Cathcart.

Tuck's style of guitar-playing exemplifies the art of simultaneously playing a bassline, chords, melody, and a percussive back-beat to create a full sound that envelops the listener.

During the 1970s, Tuck was well known in San Francisco jazz circles as a flat pick electric player. It was only after he started playing with Patti that he developed his influential fingerstyle technique.

The band performed at Brooke Shields' wedding.

Both Tuck's father and older sister Sharon played piano. His Father had led a jazz band in college, but later became a lawyer and oil company executive, so he rarely played any more. Whenever he did, it would be Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. Tucks sister studied classical piano, and he says “some of my earliest memories are of me rolling around at her feet as she played. Little did I know that I was getting tremendous ear training that would serve me for a lifetime”. My sister started showing him things on the piano when he was seven, he took formal classical lessons until age 14. His sister was listening to all the pop music of the day. It wasn't until the Beatles and Rolling Stones came out that Tuck knew he had to play rock and roll. He started a little neighborhood band, with him playing piano, the next door neighbor playing electric guitar, and the kid down the street beating on a couple of practice pads and anything else he could find. The songlist was Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals, etc. It was during this period that Tuck decided he must play guitar. This was pre-Jimi Hendrix, so his first playing was reminiscent of Chuck Berry with Beatles/melodic influences. His first electric guitar was a Ventures Mosrite, with a Vox Pacemaker amp.

Tuck had only a few months of guitar lessons with Tommy Crook, a brilliant Chet Atkins-inspired guitarist. Tommy would later become one of the most amazing solo guitarists in the world. But most of Tucks learning was on his own, from playing with other musicians, learning songs from records and a great deal of practice and experimentation. By the time high school started he was becoming one of the hot guitarists in school. Soon he started stretching out and getting into Jazz When he heard Jimi Hendrix's first album for the first time he was dazzled by the sonic textures and so blown away by the power of his playing. The other major influence at that time was blues. In addition to the classic blues greats of B. B. King, Albert King and Freddie King, and rockers they inspired, such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Michael Bloomfield, there was a characteristic, lazy Tulsa blues style, perfected in the playing of guitarists like Steve Hickerson, Jim Byfield and Tommy Tripplehorn. It had elements of all the electric blues styles, with particular emphasis on the nuances of intricate bends and slides, perhaps derived somewhat from pedal steel sounds. There was no emphasis on playing fast, but considerable technique was necessary to accomplish some of the subtle moves these players used.

Tuck enrolled in Stanford in 1970. The musical life there was rock bands, and he was still teaching himself jazz and Jimi Hendrix in every available moment. After the first quarter he dropped out and went to Los Angeles to rejoin some of the members of the band he had played with in high school. Thanks to Dean Parks he was given the opportunity to take over the guitar position for the Sonny and Cher tv show, which was very popular at the time.

Tuck soon decided to abandon the L. A. scene before becoming part of it. He ended up alternating for the next four years between Stanford, where he was halfheartedly majoring in music but playing in rock and jazz bands as well as the Stanford big band and mainly sitting in his room practicing, and Tulsa, where he would play with the Gap Band whenever he was in town

During this period, Tuck was studying Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Jimi Hendrix and John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra and listening to every jazz album he could find, especially early Miles Davis. While in Stanford Tuck had two years of weekly classical guitar lessons, first from Stanley Buetens, then from Charles Ferguson. He already had a lot of classical experience from childhood and piano, a lot of left hand technique from playing electric and enough right hand technique to play the pieces he was learning. Therefore most of their focus was on expression, and learning to hear and experience one guitar as several different instruments at once. How to vary the volume and tone of each part independently of the others and not knowing that this would become an essential ingredient of the fingerstyle guitar he would take up later. Tuck and Patti met in 1978. For chords Tuck worked out a system for generating every possible voicing of each possible chord in all its possible layouts across the strings. Any voicing he liked would be inverted up and down all possible string sets, and harmonized with various scales. He looked at each chord superimposed over every possible bass note. Likewise arpeggios: Tuck devised algorithms for deriving all possible fingerings and predicting the most satisfying ones, as well as superimposing them over all possible bass notes. Similar thinking was applied to rhythms, picking technique, picking patterns, melodic patterns, left hand finger patterns, etc., with the goal of developing a comprehensive knowledge of and familiarity with the resources available. Tuck's style is, at it's core based around the idea of counterpoint - perhaps his interest in Meher Baba influences this style. Rather than treating the guitar as an instrument that can be used to either perform accompaniment or play monophonic lines, he established several different parts simultaneously. He does this to such a degree as to make many a listener marvel as to how all that sound is coming from one guitar!