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I spent a Saturday not long ago in Seth Gamba’s shop, watching wood shavings curl off a spinning block of box elder as it slowly became a bowl. Later that same day, I was in a different room watching him lock into a groove on upright bass while a new blues band worked out its first set list together. Same guy. Same hands. Two completely different instruments.
That’s the thing about Seth that’s hard to capture in a single photograph — he doesn’t really have a “main thing.” He has a way of doing things.
Seth told me he doesn’t buy his wood. Almost all of it — 85 percent, he estimates — comes from the street he lives on. A tree comes down in a neighbor’s yard, or his own, and instead of it becoming mulch, it becomes something. A bowl. A candle holder. A pet urn someone will keep on a shelf for the rest of their life. “I don’t go to the lumber yard,” he told me. He starts with a log and carries it, alone, all the way to something finished — something somebody else gets to use, enjoy, or hand down.
I keep thinking about that phrase: tree to finished. It’s not a bad description of how Seth approaches most things.
His friend Erik Herndon, who’s played music with Seth for close to twenty years, put it more bluntly than I ever could. “I don’t think there’s anything Seth can’t do,” Erik told me. “I know that’s getting harder to say about anybody these days — there’s just so much out there to learn. But this guy built me a guitar pedal from scratch. Soldered it. Did the circuitry himself. He wired up a whole recording studio and taught himself how to run it.” Erik used the word Renaissance man, and honestly, once you spend a day around Seth, it stops sounding like an exaggeration.
What struck me more, though, was something Erik added almost as an afterthought — that Seth has “a good moral and ethical compass,” that he “shoots straight.” That’s not the kind of line you get from an acquaintance. That’s twenty years of friendship talking.
Seth teaches strings during the week and plays professionally on the side, which means he’s the rare kind of teacher who’s still actively doing the thing he’s teaching kids to do. His friend and fellow music teacher Jay Champion talked about why that matters. “Music teachers have to keep themselves musically centered,” Jay said. “I can’t let middle school choral music be the only music in my life.” For Jay, and I think for Seth too, playing outside the classroom isn’t a hobby that competes with teaching — it feeds it.
I photographed the new blues band during one of their first practices together — Seth on upright bass, Erik on guitar, Jay on keys, Jacek Mroczka on harmonica and vocals, and Jay’s son Sam holding it down on drums. They’ve got their first show in August. Watching them work through songs together, trading looks when something clicked, I was reminded that this is really what all the woodworking and the teaching and the composing comes back to for Seth — making something, with people he loves, that didn’t exist before he started.
A bowl from a fallen tree. A song worked out in a garage. A kid who leaves his classroom knowing how to hold a bow. Different materials. Same hands. Same patient, deliberate way of turning something raw into something finished.
