Recorded in 2018, before that word Covid crept into our lives, this solo offering is inspired by the new Guitarp built in New Orleans by Luthier Vince Guidroz (see Instruments/Gear)
Offbeat Magazine Interview/Playing, 2019:
After repeat listening’s I’m blown away as always! This is the first record with the whammy pedal so that’s a whole new thing, and you use it in the coolest places – I’m just always amazed by all the layers of your playing – unbelievable. I hope you’ll come to LA and do a gig out here – there are so many musicians in LA who would love to see you play live!  
~ Scott Henderson
I am listening to your latest offering with awe and not a little envy. Your artistry from the cover, the playing, the choices and arrangements are beautiful and profound. It is one of the best guitarp albums I have heard. Genius.
 ~ Sid Jacobs
Ted would have so loved this. Moreover, Van Eps would have taken low bows. That’s a heavy statement I know but remember how much GVE dug Ted. He knew jazz was a label that too often got in the way of great music. Was Alban Berg jazz? Alban Berg would have loved and appreciated this. This is pure artistry. Ain’t gonna hit any charts anywhere, at least for the next few decades, but it’s flat-out tremendous.
~ Jim Carlton, Vintage Guitar Magazine

Recorded from the end of last century and into this one, released in early 2004, Just Duet features duets with notable guitarists, in eluding Larry Coryell, Charlie Hunter, Mike Stern and more, featuring my first “fanned-fret” Guitarp, made by Luthier Ralph Novak, who was introduced to me by Charlie Hunter

All-Music Guide Review

 

 Phil deGruy

Just Duet

First, the dry background: Phil DeGruy is a guitarist from the Lenny Breau/Chet Atkins school of fingerpicking (he actually studied with Breau) whose Guitarp (a 7-string guitar with 10 additional harp strings to extend the upper register) takes Breau’s artificial harmonics concept/vocabulary to an entirely new level.  His technique is unbelievable and he’s got chops to spare, equally at home playing standards or crazed improv.  He is also an evil punster.
 
 “Just Duet” places him in the esteemed company of several amazing and very different guitar players, playing, you guessed it, a series of duets.  The first track is DeGruy solo (the only solo track), playing a quick version of the Looney Tunes theme.  Virtuosic, almost absurd and highly entertaining, it sets the stage for the rest of the program perfectly.  To be expected, the cuts with players like Larry Coryell, Steve Masakowski and Hank Mackie (DeGruy’s teacher) are relaxed duets firmly in the jazz guitar tradition.  Mike Stern and Charlie Hunter add a bit more grit to the proceedings, while Reeves Gabrels and Tronzo basically throw the rulebook out the window.  The album is stitched together brilliantly, with the songs segueing into each other almost imperceptibly in most cases.  Most of the tracks with Tronzo are fairly brief, acting as interludes (or outer-ludes, more precisely) between longer cuts.  It’s this type of rampant eclecticism that’s equal parts blessing and curse.  Proper “jazz guitar” buffs are likely to be thrilled by the beauty of “Lenny’s from Heaven” with Larry Coryell or the Horace Silver cover (“Barbara”), but might well be frightened by “Opening Arguments” with Tronzo.  People who are led to the album due to Tronzo or Gabrels’ presence might be put off by the opening album cuts, which aren’t particularly adventurous in the avant-garde sense.  However, open-eared listeners are in for a great ride (and a few laughs) and albums like this should be mandatory for aspiring guitar players as it displays a truly broad range of what can be done with the instrument.  But it shouldn’t appeal to only guitar players; “Just Duet” is an album of uncommon breadth and wit, and a simply dazzling display of technique and musicality. ~ Sean Westergaard
Hello Dali Album Cover

Recorded in 2000 by Jim Augustin at The Noise Lab, New Orleans, featuring my first “fanned-fretted” Guitarp, made by Luthier Ralph Novak circa ‘98

The list of stunningly spectacular solo guitarists in the transcendent lineage of Pass, VanEps, Pizarelli, Atkins and Breau has been extended by one. With the release of “Hello Dali”, his indie follow-up to 1995’s “Innuendo Out the Other”, Phil de Gruy rightfully takes his place in the sitting room for the Rushmore-deserving practitioners of the genre. Of that group, he’s most decidedly out of Breau (with whom he studied in the late 70’s), freely employing and superhumanly executing the harp harmonics that were (and are still) Lenny’s amazing/angelic signature.
 
Highlights? Hard to go there, with on average, every third measure of the hour-plus disc being an utter jaw-dropper. But I’ll point you toward the absolutely impossible arpeggiations of “Limbo Jazz”, the plaintive percussiveness of “Drum Negrita”, the condensed homage to the composers and tradition of Samba/Bossa on “Brazilian Medley” and the way the instrument seems to change tune and play itself, coupled with some steroid-propelled chicken picking, on “Merry Medley”. 
By Phil DiPietro
Hello Dali Album Cover

My first record with my first Guitarp, made by Jimmy Foster in 1983, released in 1995 on NYC Records

This unusual outing sent me reaching for records not by Lenny Breau and Chet Atkins — deGruy’s stated departure points, whose influence is certainly audible in his approach — but by earlier generations of guitar hotshots, such as Roy Smeck, George Van Eps, Carl Kress and Dick McDonough. Before guitar was a widely accepted tool for jazz expression, these freakish fretsmen used a combination of technical wizardry and vaudevillian zaniness to captivate listeners. That same combination is what makes deGruy more than merely a dazzling player, which he undoubtedly is.

First, there’s the instrument: called the “guitarp,” it augments a (hardly) standard seven-string guitar (an innovation introduced in 1939 by Van Eps, who commissioned Epiphone to make him one) with an additional 10 harp strings. DeGruy’s loose-nutted sense of humor leads him to string together unthinkable runs of quotations on this monster machine; listen for snatches of Neil Young and the theme to M*A*S*H in the middle of his live crossfade between A.C. Jobim’s “Wave” and “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In.” And his choice of basic material is far beyond the pale of Joe Pass — he cover’s Coltrane’s “Naima” and Bill Evans’ “My Bells,” showtunes like “If I Only Had A Brain” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” pop numbers like “My Girl” and “Blackbird,” and Claude Debussy’s “Claire De Lune.” All these are treated to the same finger-picked stream-of-consciousness free-flow, with the added strings serving coloristic and heightened emotional ends.

Though deGruy often leans toward more impressionistic harmonic territory — brushing the harp strings in a swift stroke — he’s apt to toss in a bluesy lick (check his own, short title tune and his zoned-out “Blues For Rod Sterling”) or run a bass line underneath high arpeggios and linear runs in a stunning way. While the humor on Innuendo Out The Other never slips over the line into simple silliness, it comes perilously close in a couple of places. But deGruy’s musicianship seems to be at the service of a quick and inventive enough mind to keep it from turning into a curiosity or novelty item.
— John Corbett, Down Beat, May 1995

Pop 40 Goes The Weasel, from Esalen “Institute”, 1996