At present I play live throughout the state of California. However, I frequently play out of state and even out of the country (Canada, for example). In fact, I'll play wherever a contract takes me. If this means having to travel to Japan or Europe, well, I will.

Several years ago one of my songs reached number 7 on the AM Radio Pop Charts. Getting a song on the charts isn't easy and often demands a lot of work, not to mention a lot of travelling for promotional purposes.

I've been performing for more than 30 years and have had my own bands playing different styles of music, including my own compositions. Currently I do a solo act but am working to put together The James Richards Blues Band.

Musical influences include: jazz, blues, classical, folk, country, and just about all styles. Basically I started seriously listening to other guitarists in the 70's. Some of my favorites were Robert Fripp (King Crimson); John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu); Django Reinhardt; Joe Pass; Johnny Smith (with his "fat" jazz guitar sound); George Benson; John Williams (the English classical guitarist); and hundreds of others (including some whom many people have never heard of, like Los Indios Tabajars -- the smoothest guitarists on the planet!). Flamingo guitar (Paco DiLucia) has also been a favorite style of mine, although I still have a hard time executing the technique on the nylon string guitar. When I was 15 or 16 I liked some of the tunes by the Rolling Stones for a while but outgrew them rapidly when I heard Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. I was also into folk music for awhile (Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Cat Stevens). The blues, of course, have always been in the picture for me, and some of my favorite bluesmen include B. B. King, Jimmy Reed and, of course, Stevie Ray Vaughn. In short, I love almost all kinds of music and think one lifetime is simply not enough to learn all the techniques in many musical styles I'd like to learn. Jazz is one of my favorite styles of music because of the improvisational aspect. I believe my strongest point in playing the guitar is the ability to freely improvise over almost any song, regardless of the style. Almost every song in my recent two CD releases ("The BLUES" and "14 Brazilian and Latin American Favorites") has solos which are spontaneously improvised. Such improvisation adds freshness to a tune because the music is created on the spot and comes from the heart.

I've travelled quite a bit in my musical career. One of my favorite cities is Montreal, Canada. Every summer they have the The Montreal Jazz Festival and that is truly a wonderful and grand event. Vancouver, Canada is also a great place to play. Toronto, Canada, is a lousy place for good musicians, as far as I'm concerned. Canadian audiences are very different than American audiences; they're more the passive, attentive types who don't get too emotionally involved with a show. They have more of an intellectual approach to music, it seems to me. My visit to New York City was a disappointing one and I don't have many nice things to say about it. I've played in Vermont and Maine where audiences were very receptive. But of all the places I've perfomed my favorite place has got to be California, USA. It is a great place to play. Californians are very receptive to good music and most people are very open-minded. Anything goes in California! I have yet to go to Europe and experience the audiences there. I look forward to playing there in the future.

With respect to my musical instruments, I use a 335 Gibson semi-acoustic ( I did away with my Les Paul because it was simply too heavy on stage); an Ibanez jazz semi-acoustic; an Ovation acoustic-electric; a nylon string classical guitar; a WK3500 Casio keyboard, and a Marshall tube amp (warm sound with the characteristic Marshall distorion and great spring reverb) . My sound system is a Peavey head with Yamaha speakers. I don't use any sort of pedals (I hate them!). And, of course, I also use CD players and several other things necessary for my midi setup. As for microphones, well, I use many different types including Shure, Sennheiser, Audi-Technica, and so on.

I do a lot of recording on my Tascam 8-track (DP-01FX) and then transfer the songs to a CD which I'll play on stage to accompany me as background music to my vocals and guitar/piano playing. For example, I'll record all the instruments to a song and leave out the instrumental solo parts and the vocals. When I play the tune live I'll sing the vocals and play the solo lines on my guitar or piano. It is a long processes to prepare the tunes on my 8-track machine but the end result is that a song will sound and feel exactly as I want it to sound and feel. The drawback to this is that I have to carry a lot of equipment to each gig, including a briefcase full of CDs, floppy disks, etc. And it takes me a long time to setup on stage. In fact, when I arrive at a gig most people say, "Gosh! You've got a lot of equipment!" But when they hear me play they finally understand why I have so much equipment :-)