For 31 years, Mike Christiansen has played lead in USU's guitar program, now he's enjoying backup from international recording artist and son, Corey, who has returned home to teach alongside the "master."

IT'S NOT AS IF they've never worked with each other. In fact, you might say they go back a bit. In a way, Corey Christiansen took his sweet time – nearly two decades – to complete the Utah State guitar program directed by his celebrated father, Mike.

He enrolled at age 6.

However, in the 10 years or so since Corey finished the more conventional four-year degree, getting father and son together, if even for an interview, has been easier said than done. Mike describes his schedule as “usually pretty hectic.” When he's not teaching or performing solo, attending clinics or adjudicating world-class festivals, he's holding up his end of the guitar/clarinet Lightwood Duo. (The name is a riff on heavy metal.) And, he adds, there's this other time-eater, a “new hobby called grandkids.”

Corey's calendar, if possible, is even more packed, his stage revolving. By summer's end, it will have stopped in Spokane, Park City, Louisville, London and Atlanta. Sandwiched among these? A brief intermezzo in Smithfield, Utah. World traveler, senior étude editor, educator and recording artist, Corey explains why this is the place:

Cache Valley is his home, his parents' home. Here, as his mother, Kathy, hugs him in one family photo op, the convergence of past and future is corporeal. Any doubts as to why he'd return evanesce like reverberating melodies.

“That's why I moved back,” he says. “I couldn't do that in St. Louis.”

Having traveled as far as Australia, Corey enjoys a global performance flexibility that eludes most musicians: He commands an audience anywhere he chooses.

This fall, anywhere is Utah State. Corey Christiansen returns to the USU guitar department to help shoulder the yoke of professor with his dad, Mike. He brings home a résumé of equal distinction, though understandable abbreviation, to that of his father.

As an undergraduate at USU, Corey earned the Outstanding Music Student and Outstanding Guitarist awards. He taught at the University of South Florida, where he earned his master's degree in 1999. He has performed at many notable venues and festivals, including the Jazz Café at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. His Awakening album, recorded with his quartet, pitched a tent on jazz charts in 2005. In addition, Corey was senior music editor at Mel Bay Publications Inc., in St. Louis before coming to USU.

Mike, meanwhile, was selected as Professor of the Year at Utah State University in 1994. He was named Utah Chapter Outstanding Collegiate Educator of the Year by the American String Teachers Association in 2006. In 2007, he received the Utah State University Artist of the Year award in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. He has authored and coauthored 42 instructional books, including “Mastering the Guitar,” a series in which the first book won Best New Print Publication from Music and Sound Retailer Magazine in 1997. Walkin' My Baby Back Home is the latest of his 29 recordings.

For 31 years, Mike's been like “a one-man wrecking crew” in the guitar department, Corey says. Its first and only impresario, Mike oversees some 25 guitar majors yearly. That's 25 lessons a week; 25 students enrolled in fingerboard theory – the guitar-friendly approach to scale and chord construction is his personal brainchild – and styles courses that run the genre gamut. In arguably the most diverse guitar program in the country, he's taught them all.

Classical, jazz, blues and bluegrass? Corey's absorbed them as a student at USU. Those courses, he says, helped him perform his way through graduate school. (They're also, incidentally, where he met his wife, Nikkol.) The road to success is rarely smooth, but the map is definitive, Mike's philosophy unmistakable: Give yourself a chance to say “Yes.” If you're prepared, you can book any job. If it pays well enough, you will learn as you go. When gigging's their living, great musicians are chameleonic, adapting themselves to the job at hand.

“Can you play rock ‘n’ roll guitar?” Check, Corey says.

“Can you play some finger-style steel string?” Check.

Bluegrass? Yes.

Classical? Yup.

Can you double on banjo? Uh-huh.

Klezmer? I'm not a...Yes.

“You know,” Corey says, “I've probably presented or played or done clinics at every major university – quite a number of them – and I'm always blown away at how amazing the guitar program is at Utah State.”

Utah State's program is comparable, Corey says, to that at the prestigious Duquesne University of Pittsburgh. Duquesne's program has fewer elective classes, but about the same number of majors – and six faculty members.

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