During the August 2026 New York trip, Gerbman walked into Rudy’s Music on Broome Street in SoHo to look at guitars. He stayed for almost an hour. What began as browsing a wall of Fenders, Gibsons and Martins turned into a long conversation with Zeke Schein about guitars, tone, and the history behind the music Gerbman plays every night.
The conversation moved the way good guitar-shop conversations do. From the instruments on the wall to amps, strings and tone, then on to the players behind them and the New York music world Zeke has been part of for decades. No hurry. No sales talk. Just two guitar people talking about the music they love, surrounded by the kind of instruments that made that music possible.
For a blues guitarist, Zeke is a rare person to run into. In 2005, while searching for vintage guitars online, he found a battered old photograph he believed showed Robert Johnson, the Delta blues legend at the root of it all. That find sparked years of debate among blues historians and became a book. Talking Robert Johnson in a SoHo guitar shop, with the man who spent years chasing that photograph, brought the whole tradition very close.
Zeke Schein has spent decades as a guitar salesman in New York, at Matt Umanov Guitars and Rudy’s Music, helping players from Bob Dylan and Patti Smith to John Mayer find their instruments. His book Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson’s Lost Photograph, written with Poppy Z. Brite, was published in 2017. The photograph’s authenticity is still debated.
Read more about Zeke Schein’s Robert Johnson research
