THE COMPOSITIONS OF DUCK BAKER FOR SOLO GUITAR
Fulica Records FCD-302
Released: July 2026
Formats: Audio CD, MP3 Download
Also available as Music Book (PDF)
Track List
01 A Short Time To Stay Here
02 B Natural
03 Jail Alley Dream
04 The Same Old Same Old
05 Mind How You Go
06 The Ragtime Samurai
07 Marks of Woe
08 Whose Dime
09 The Deal
10 The Break
11 Debutante Rag
12 Buddy’s Buddy
13 The Skinny
14 Done Broke Down
Produced by Duck Baker
Portraits of Enrico by Giuseppe Vottari
Portrait of Duck by Branco Kukurin
Graphics by Uma Das O’Toole & Saana Baker
All compositions © Richard Baker, Fruia Musica
Tracks 1, 5, 9 recorded at Tyko Runesson Recording Studio, Winterthur, Switzerland
Tracks 12-14 recorded at Spain Audio Studio, Molochio (RC), Italy All other tracks recorded at Studio B Recording, Milano, Italy
Duck Baker’s original music/tablature transcriptions of the tunes are available
from duckbaker.com/online-store/music-books/or from enricoscerra.it
Born in 1991 in Reggio Calabria, Italy, Enrico Scerra began playing music at the age of five, after his uncle gave him a guitar for his birthday and taught him the basics of the instrument. Enrico’s father Sandro was also a devotee of many kinds of music, including fingerstyle guitar. Enrico’s first acoustic guitar hero was Steve Howe, but his musical horizons were expanded as an adolescent by several years of study with jazz guitarist Colombo Menniti. He refocused on fingerstyle guitar after a few years, and his knowledge of jazz harmony is one of the things that has helped raise him to the top level of Italian fingerpickers.
Certainly his father’s interests and activities played a part in this, as Sandro had gotten involved with organizing concerts in Calabria for acoustic guitarists touring in Italy, including Woody Mann, Duck Baker, Peppino D’Agostino, Tony McManus, and Franco Morone. In 2020, Enrico released his first album, Acoustic Journey, which consisted of his own original compositions. B Natural is his second record, and he is already working on his third.
As to the tunes themselves, we can begin at what was literally the beginning for me, a ragtime piece called
“Jail Alley Dream” that I wrote as a 16-year-old in Richmond, Virginia back in 1965. “Debutante Rag” dates from a year or so later. In those days my main influence was a guy named Buck Evans, who was a couple of years older than I and played ragtime piano, something that almost no one our age was doing.
Buck had managed to find a couple of old-timers in Richmond who had played ragtime in houses of ill repute in the years before World War I. “Jail Alley” was the name given to the city’s red light district at the time, and as I recall, Buck suggested the title. The title “Debutante Rag” also relates to Buck, but that’s a long story.
The remaining tracks were all written much later.
Most were composed for a collection called Pareto Sketches, which was commissioned by an Italian patron known as “L. S.” and completed in 2014-15. A
2-CD set produced by Luigi Maramotti in 2017 presented versions of 21 of these tunes by myself and 4 Italian guitarists, and another 16 have appeared on subsequent recordings (mostly on Steve Hicks’ The Oak And The Willow), but since there are over 100 pieces in Pareto Sketches, Enrico’s decision to tackle another 10 of them is very welcome. And he has done a brilliant job, both of interpreting what I wrote and in adding his own ingenious (and often very difficult) variations.
The Pareto tunes range from old-fashioned waltzes and ragtime through to free jazz lines, but the main focus is on modern jazz vehicles, and Enrico’s program reflects this. “Whose Dime,” “B Natural,”
“The Skinny” and “Done Broke Down” are all blues tunes, though only the first uses the 12-bar structure. “The Ragtime Samurai” is dedicated to Takesi Hamada, whom I met on one of my first trips to Japan in the 1990s. Takesi is one of the best ragtime guitarists | ever heard anywhere. I had jazz immortal Clifford Brown in mind when I wrote “A Short Time To Stay Here,” and fans of that short-lived genius will spot a couple of musical references. More oblique references can be detected in “Buddy’s Buddy,” which borrows its harmonic scheme from an older piece of mine called “A Buddy Uptown.” That piece, in turn, took off from one of the earliest of all jazz tunes, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues.” “The Deal” and “The Break” are also jazz pieces. Though both are in 3/4 time, they approach it in very different ways. (The habit of using two-word titles, the first of which is “the,” is itself a tip of the hat to another jazz great, Steve Lacy, by the way.) The remaining Pareto piece here,
“The Same Old Same Old,” is a soul jazz tune, inspired by composers like Bobby Timmons and Horace Silver.
“Mind How You Go” was commissioned in 2017 by Robert Church. And “Marks of Woe” is a recent setting of one of my favourite William Blake poems,
“London.” I very much hope there will be vocalists who want to sing this melody, but also hope they won’t make it too “torchy” – the first fire of London was devastating enough!
Duck Baker
Reading, Berks July 2025