When he was around 12, John Stropes, director of guitar studies at UW-Milwaukee, started playing his favorite instrument. He began his life’s work learning on his grandmother’s venerable old guitar, one dating from around 1900. Then, when he was in middle school, his maternal grandfather, a music teacher, gave him a Martin 00-18. His paternal granddad was also a guitar and banjo player.

Subsequently, stringed instruments were long a part of Stropes’ formative years. Now a critically acclaimed finger-style specialist and teacher, he likes to say that The Fates from those long-ago growing up years set in motion his latest UWM project, an in-depth study of Milwaukee’s late, lamented Avant Garde coffeehouse. The musical mecca at 2111 N. Prospect Ave. was a fixture on the city’s blues and folk scene between 1962-1968.

"There were places like this in other geographic areas, but in Wisconsin, none as important as the Avant Garde," Stropes says. "It presented local performers and nationally known folk and blues artists, poetry readings, and experimental and underground films. Patrons regarded the music with the same seriousness and respect given to classical music," he points out.

The Avant Garde was also a laid-back classroom, so tyro musicians flocked there to learn and converse with the performers. "Without the Avant Garde, there would have been no centrality for these older traditions or the recasting of these traditions by revivalists," says Stropes, who naturally became a regular visitor there.

All of this input, and the open-mindedness of the 1960s, provided the fertile ground for the development of finger-style guitar as art music, according to Stropes, who later set up a company to publish printed music for finger-style guitar in addition to his teaching.

For the UWM project, Stropes and his students are interviewing those whom he calls "the dramatis personae," plus discovering recordings, establishing a list of performers, cataloging concert ephemera, creating a diachronic study of the historic building which the coffeehouse occupied and compiling biographies and discographies of performers. Much of this is featured on www.avantgardecoffeehouse.com and through a social networking presence. "All this work contributes to the understanding more about both the cultural context and sociological milieu of the club," Stropes says.

Research and many of the artifacts from the Avant Garde were showcased this past April in the Fourth Annual UWM Undergraduate Research Symposium in the UWM Union attended by numerous musicians and fans of the club.

With 50 years having passed since the Avant Garde opened its doors, Stropes says that music lovers can begin to understand the impact that the facility had on culture in Milwaukee. "We can see a direct path from the Avant Garde Coffeehouse to UWM’s Peck School of the Arts," he says.