Bios

	Judy Gomez – Violin As a young girl, Judith took up violin as part of her public-school curriculum.  As well as playing violin and viola with symphonies, quartets, and theater companies, she has played mariachi music for over 40 years!  She founded, and is the director of, Mariachi Estrellas in the 1990s, the second oldest mariachi band in the DC area.  Mariachi has allowed her to perform for the White House, two Presidential inaugurations, numerous diplomats, governmental dignitaries, celebrities, professional athletes, as well as lovers of Mexican folkloric music.  Thinking about her future retirement from her day job and wanting to keep an active mind in her advanced years (improvisation takes a lot of on-the-spot thinking), she decided to give gypsy jazz a try.  Additionally, she received a sign from Santa Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, when she found out that she shares the same birthday as Stepane Grappelli, Gypsy jazz royalty.  So, in a far cry from her Mexican roots, she placed a somewhat questionable ad in Craigslist looking for “swingers.”  It elicited some non-music related responses, but nonetheless, there were musicians out there who understood the task at hand, and Swingology was formed
	David Lampp – Guitar David gained an early interest in music through his church choir and soon started studying piano and later saxophone. Guitar eventually stuck around age 13, and he has focused on that ever since, including a variety of pop, rock, and heavy metal bands throughout high school and college. David began gigging in the Washington DC area in the early 2000s with an 80s heavy metal tribute band and started focusing on jazz a few years later. He has played in a variety of contexts throughout the DC area since, and is a founding member of Swingology.  In addition to playing the guitar, David is a trained audio engineer who enjoys recording, mixing, and mastering music and spoken word for other artists, and performing with modular and fixed-architecture synthesizers.
	Leigh Oben – Bass Leigh had a few lessons on violin when 6, and piano at 9.  Self-taught starting at 12, Leigh played lead guitar in his first band at 12 ½ and began a career of performing and soon teaching.  For over 60 years, and thousands of gigs, parties, shows, bars, concerts, holidays, inaugural balls, and diplomatic functions, Leigh has played guitar and bass in a variety of styles including Classical, American and International Songbooks, Blues, and Celtic.  Leigh is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory in classical guitar and bass.  He played bass at Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow with the Peabody Orchestra and was a guitar performer at Segovia’s school in Santiago de Compostella, Spain.  Leigh taught bass for the D.C. Youth Orchestra, and guitar for Sweet Briar, Randolph Macon Women’s, Lynchburg, and Frederick Colleges, and still maintains a private teaching studio.  Having been a longtime avid fan of Django Reinhardt, Leigh is thrilled to be playing gypsy jazz with Swingology.
	Zack Friedman – Guitar Zack Friedman has a tendency toward intense, tunnel-like passion for his fairly uncommon intellectual, artistic, and musical interests. Musically, in adolescence, he was all about Bob Dylan, and then jazz more generally, but in early adulthood, he caught the Django Reinhardt bug and, undeterred by a lack of innate talent, has felt compelled to recreate some version of that virtuosic sound ever since. Leading a bit of an itinerant lifestyle, Zack was a founding member of Uganda’s number one (and only) gypsy jazz band, the Rabid Badgers. Upon moving to the DC area in 2020, Zack sought desperately for folks willing to indulge his manouche habit and was grateful to join Swingology in 2022.