Guitarist Toulouse Engelhardt was born in Milwaukee, WI, grew up in Southern California, and first started to play the guitar at age six. Largely self-taught, he acknowledged two guitar lessons, one when Larry Carlton taught him to play "Walk Don't Run" when he was 13, and the other when Wes Montgomery gave him some tips as he hung around the stage door of the Lighthouse Café jazz club in Hermosa Beach, CA, early one morning. Engelhardt was signed to John Fahey's Takoma Records, which released his debut album, Toullusions, on the Briar Records imprint in 1975. Poor distribution doomed the LP's success, and Engelhardt stayed out of the music business for a time, later returning to work as a sideman for such artists as Adrian Belew, Jack Bruce, the Byrds, Ry Cooder, Dick Dale, and David Lindley. In 1994, Sierra Records reissued Toullusions with newly recorded bonus tracks. In the 2000s, Engelhardt signed to the Lost Grove label, which issued a series of new albums, A Child's Guide to Einstein (with Remi Kabaka; May 18, 2004), Martian Lust (January 17, 2006), Lubbock Lightz (with the production team TEA; 2007), and Perpendicular Worlds (June 8, 2010). ~ William Ruhlmann