Before guitar Instructor Bradley Ard came to WSU, he was everywhere else.

After decades spent moving around the United States as a musician, playing gigs, and composing songs for himself and others, Ard left his teaching position at Lone Star College in Houston and arrived in Pullman last year to take an open teaching job his wife saw promoted on Facebook.

Ard has performed with musicians everywhere from New York to San Francisco, and from Los Angeles to Miami.

Students can hear how all of Ard’s practice has paid off when he performs a largely solo guitar concert tomorrow in Kimbrough Concert Hall.

“I called it ‘The Pullman Suite’ because these are the impressions that popped into my head while here,” Ard said.

Many of the original songs he wrote for the performance are named after, and inspired by, everyday things that Pullman residents see and interact with, like “Water,” and “Fields of Grain.”

“I worked the ‘Cottonwood’ song when all that stuff was floating all over the place,” Ard said.

Technically his music is defined as programmatic, but many are probably more familiar with the term impressionistic, Ard said.

One unique aspect of the show will be a multimedia art element to compliment the songs Ard composed.

To accomplish this Ard is working with a former student of his, Jonathan Matteson, a fine arts major in his junior year.

“We were talking about visuals and the arts, and the importance of not siloing the art departments,” Matteson said.

One of the goals of the performance is to show how music and the visual arts can interact, he said.

Much of the art will be abstract and based on the topics of Ard’s songs, Matteson said.

“The audience gets to see two different interpretations of subjects,” he said.

The hope is that the audience will find something to connect with in the music and the art, Ard said.

Having been a musician in big cities for many years Ard was used to playing shows three to four times a week, so this performance was a way to keep himself busy and practiced, he said.

Even after all these years of performing live Ard still gets a thrill out of it.

“It’s like walking a tightrope, man,” he said, “There’s no net!”

“The Pullman Suite for Solo Guitar” begins at 8 p.m. Tuesday in Bryan Hall. Tickets cost $10 for general admission, $5 for senior citizens and non-WSU students, and free for WSU students with ID.

Reporting by Dustin VandeHoef