Jan Hammer is nothing but appreciative when it comes to considering the roster of guitar players he’s recorded and toured with since joining the original Mahavishnu Orchestra back in 1971.

“I must have done something right to get them all interested,” the Czechoslovakian-born, Grammy Award–winning keyboardist tells us via phone from the New York suburb where he resides. “I listened to guitar players, and obviously I was influenced as far as playing on the synthesizer by the approach to melodic improvisation and the tone. It just brought me into the whole big family of guitarists, and I have always been amazed that if I was playing somewhere, how many guitar players would come and see me play.”

Hammer was born in Prague. His father was a doctor who played music to help him pay for medical school, while his mother was the well-known jazz vocalist Vlasta Pruchova. Hammer started playing piano when he was four and began touring and recording professionally as a teenager.

His time at the Prague Academy of Musical Arts was cut short by the Warsaw Pact’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia; he finished his studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, after which he became part of jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan’s band and moved to New York City. (He became a U.S. citizen during 1978.)

Hammer says the allure of guitar players — including Mahavishnu’s John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck (with whom he recorded six studio albums), Al Di Meola (four), Journey’s Neal Schon (two) and others — was their ability to do something he could not.

“There’s a certain flow I couldn’t achieve on a keyboard, meaning a piano, even electric,” he explains. “It’s something to do with vibrato and bending and slides and these things I kept hearing in my head but couldn’t translate until I got deeper into electronic stuff and using some pitch-shifting gizmos on my electric piano.

“But it wasn’t until I got my hands on a Mini Moog [synthesizer] where I said, ‘Okay, this is it’ and found my recognizable voice. Then I could start improvising and trading solos in a way that wouldn’t be possible on a piano. It really allowed me to play with these guitarists in a different way.”

Beyond those collaborations, Hammer has released nearly three dozen albums of his own and won Grammy and Emmy Awards for his work on TV’s Miami Vice. These days, the 78-year-old considers himself “pretty much retired,” but he’s certainly satisfied by his legacy and is happy to share stories about some of the artists he spent time with during his career.

Miles Davis

“I had just moved to New York City to go on the road with Sarah Vaughan, and I’m at home and get a call: ‘Come over tomorrow morning. Miles’ house.’ I said, ‘Okay.’

“I’d never met him before, but coming from eastern Europe, for me Miles was basically God. I knew every single record, every note he ever played. He was probably the strongest influence on my approach to improvisation.

“So I went over to his house and John [McLaughlin] was there, Steve Grossman, and it was very smooth, just workshopping something. It was exciting. He gave these cryptic directions — like, for instance, he was really into the rhythm section of Crosby, Stills & Nash. He said, ‘Make it feel like that groove,’ and I said, ‘Wow, great. That’s totally up my alley,’ because, among many other rock bands, I loved Crosby, Stills & Nash. I don’t know if people realized how much that groove had to do with their appeal, so it was really a very positive sign from Miles.

“There was all kinds of recording going on, but Keith Jarrett was the first call [for Davis], so I tried not to get my hopes up. But after I spent a year on the road with Sarah Vaughan, we ended up putting together Mahavishnu, and that made up for not being able to play in Miles’ band. He would come to see us, and I remember hanging out in the dressing room, talking about stuff, which was cool.”

John McLaughlin

“I didn’t know about him until I saw him with Tony Williams in Boston when I first came over, and he totally blew my mind. And then later, in New York City, we would meet; there was the loft scene, which was sort of like jam sessions where people would come over, and we had a nice place with a drum kit, electric piano and everything.

“One time we invited John and Billy Cobham, and it went really well, and eventually I was asked to join the band that was being formed, Mahavishnu Orchestra.

“Once we started going we knew exactly what was happening and what we were doing. The impact was immediate. It’s hard to predict, but you feel things, profound things changing around in the music. Some musicians, jazz musicians, were looking down on it, like, ‘Oh, you’re just trying to be rock stars,’ or whatever.

“But it was all music, and the type of improvisations were doing and the fresh influences we included made it a big revolution.

“Playing with [McLaughlin] was, again, totally smooth. I knew what he wanted and he knew what I wanted, and the five of us were really clicking so well. It was an amazing combination of people. John was super dedicated, like obsessively so, and it shows up in his incredible virtuosity and technique.

“You cannot do anything else but just follow him — I don’t mean in a religious sense, but to put up on what he was doing, musically. You have to be on top of everything, so I tried to do that, and I discovered something in my musical history that was very valuable to the whole enterprise of the band that I didn’t know I had. I had these trains of musical history that I learned about, and it was very valuable.”

Jeff Beck

“Jeff and I were inspiring each other for many years. We met in Switzerland. I was there with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jeff was there with Beck, Bogert & Appice, and it happened to also be Jeff’s birthday. We ended up staying at the same hotel and at his birthday party, and Jeff and I started talking about different things we have in common, what kind of music we liked.

“And it was really interesting that we had so much in common; people think I was much more of a jazz player, but I liked rock and rhythm and blues, and Jeff was really intrigued and we talked about possibilities of working together on something.

“It wasn’t until a year or more later that we ended up recording on Wired. There was no need to develop anything; it was all organic, and we just clicked right away. He came over and I had picked up his instruments at the airport, and when he opened the guitar case, it was empty. His guitar got stolen. In my studio we had a nice little Strat, probably early ’70s, blond wood, for anybody to use, so Jeff picked it up and played it on ‘Blue Wind’ — it wasn’t even his guitar.

“That was the first thing we did together, and the first take, the first layer was just me playing drums and Jeff playing the rhythm, and the lick. We played the whole thing through, just me and him, and we overdubbed whatever else was needed. He did the solo. I did the bass on a Moog. It was just an amazing experience.

“When we worked together was usually up to him, because he had periods where he wouldn’t be interested in doing anything, and then all of a sudden he would call up and we’d go out on tour. In ’76 we did a big tour, did a live record and everything, and in ’77 we went to Australia.

“And then a couple of months later we were supposed to be going to Japan and God knows where else, and he just pulled the plug, totally unexpected. Me and my group were left hanging. That was kind of a drag, but I was ready to do it, any time he wanted, because he was just a fantastically gifted person — but mercurial.”

Al Di Meola

“We had these parallel groups, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return to Forever, so we were aware of each other. Then Al invited me to play on [1977’s] Elegant Gypsy, and everything grew out of there. He kept asking me to play on following things. Again, I don’t know how to describe it, but Al is an incredibly gifted guitarist, and we worked together really well.

“Al always had this Spanish undertone to what he did; he worked in the Phrygian mode, which is the basis of a lot of his approach to music with the Spanish guitar that’s electric. One time we were rehearsing and one of the guys said, ‘I think I’ve got Phrygian poisoning,’ which was very funny.

“The most interesting thing we worked on was Electric Rendezvous [1982], with just the two of us with electronics and synthesizers. Phil Collins played drums on one tune and Bill Bruford played on one tune. That was really interesting, and then also playing live on tour with Steve Gadd, which was just an amazing treat.”

Tommy Bolin

“He was a revelation. He was one of the people who can actually play amazingly, without any effort. He was really not working at it, and it just came out totally naturally.

“I met him through Jeremy Steig, the flute player. We went to the studio once with Tommy and Billy Cobham, and then I ended up playing on his album [1975’s Teaser]. It was funny: we were supposed to start and the studio was all set up, and Narada Michael Walden was late because he was stuck in traffic. The drums were all miked up, so I said, ‘All right, let me have a go,’ and I ended up playing drums on the album as well, which was great fun.

“Bolin was just an amazing creature, and I cannot get over how terrible it was that he went away so soon.”

Neal Schon

“Neal is a complete beast, a natural source of incredible music. It just bursts out of him; he cannot help it. He cannot stop.

“We met when I was touring with Jeff, and Journey was the opening act. We’d go to sound checks in the afternoon, and after we finished they were setting up for Neal, so I just got on Billy Cobham’s kit and we started jamming, me on drums and him playing all these incredible rhythm riffs. I don’t know if people realize that, as great a lead player he is, he’s also an amazing rhythm player. I guess you have to be to write all the Journey hits.

“After we did it a couple of times, that’s how the idea of Neal and I making a couple of albums together came about [1981’s Untold Passion and 1982’s Here to Stay]. We were unfortunately... I don’t want to say pulled back, but there was competition. Journey’s big album [Escape, featuring “Don't Stop Believin’”] was coming up at the same time, so the label didn’t put their best effort on our behalf. I was really disappointed. Over the years I played on a couple of things with him, together, but over long distance. I did the same with Beck, too.”

Eddie Van Halen

“We did a one-off [the Les Paul & Friends concert August 18, 1988 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music] that was just fantastic. I got involved, again, because it was all about guitars and I loved it, even though I was not playing guitar. With Eddie, it was breathtaking; the energy coming out of him. He can walk into the room and he’s already going. I was really impressed.

“He was telling me he knew my records and he was talking about how much he liked this and that. He kept going on about the tune called ‘Jetstream,’ which was the Black Sheep album [1978]. He was going on and on about the solo I played on that, and I was just thinking, Wow, you really do know my records. I did not expect that.”

It goes without saying that John McLaughlin is an outright legend. A jazz-fusion hero on steroids, the electric guitarist has worked with everyone from Miles Davis and Carlos Santana to Tony Williams and Al Di Meola.

But when asked which of his many moments onstage and on record he’s most proud of, McLaughlin hesitates.

“It’s such a hard question,” McLaughlin tells Guitar Player. “I really have no idea. You’d have to give me at least a day to think about it. I have so many memories that are engraved in my mind.”

One of his earliest comes from his days in the Graham Bond Organization, which he helped found in 1963 with organist Graham Bond and a combustible rhythm section: bass guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker. Within a few years, the pair would go on to form Cream with guitarist Eric Clapton.

McLaughlin had a front-row seat to Bruce and Baker’s infamous clashes.

“They were unbelievable together, but they just got under each other’s noses all the time,” McLaughlin says, laughing at the memory. “It was unbelievable. I mean, the second I heard them play together with Graham Bond, I thought, ‘That’s it. I’m in.’ And those two, man — onstage they were kicking my butt. They were wonderful, and just what I needed.

“But every now and then, during the bass solo, which was done with an upright bass, Ginger would get impatient and start making commentary.

“He would say, ‘Come on, get a move on!’ And then there would be other times, onstage and off, where Ginger would say to Jack, ‘Your time is all fucking wrong!’

“And Jack would say, ‘You don’t fucking tell me my time is wrong!’

“And I remember one night, Ginger got so bored with Jack’s bass solo that he started throwing drumsticks at him.”

McLaughlin says he wasn’t present when Bruce finally got his revenge on Baker, but by all accounts the moment was explosive.

“Ginger was throwing the sticks at Jack too hard, and Jack turned around, took his upright bass and smashed it down on Ginger’s drums.

“I know when Eric Clapton was with them in Cream, he didn’t like it. I know Eric suffered, and I did, too.”

Despite his efforts, McLaughlin found it impossible to make the two men get along.

“I’d say, ‘Shit. Relax. Just play music and be happy.’ But they couldn’t stop.”

And yet, somehow, Bruce and Baker managed to turn their animosity into musical gold.

“When they worked together, they were dynamite,” McLaughlin says. “Ginger had a groove, and Jack just jumped on it, you know? I loved the beat they’d put down, and I know Eric did, too. They were amazing together.

“And their fighting was absolutely, without a doubt, part of their chemistry. I mean, emotions run high — and listen: music needs emotion. It needs strong emotions, and one of the things about them was that they had some strong emotions.”

"There are so many great guitar players I've been blessed to work with," Narada Michael Walden tells us from his home in San Rafael, California.

Dude is not kidding.

Walden is, of course, best known as a hit-making and Grammy Award–winning producer for the likes of Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Starship and others. But his first big gig was drumming in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, playing with John McLaughlin and company over the course of three albums between 1974 and ’76.

Walden moved on to play with Tommy Bolin on Teaser and on tour; with Jeff Beck on Wired; on Allan Holdsworth's first solo album, Velvet Darkness; on three songs for Robert Fripp's Exposure, and with Carlos Santana.

A Michigan native who's released a dozen albums of his own, Walden was even in Journey for a minute, playing with the group at Lollapalooza in 2021 and co-producing its latest album, Freedom, in 2022.

That's a formidable track record of legends to play behind, and Walden has love for every one of them — which he expressed broadly on this trip down memory lane.

John McLaughlin

“I was living in Pasadena in '71 when they dropped that album The Inner Mounting Flame. I just happened to be in a record shop and had just enough money to buy it, and when I heard McLaughlin and Billy Cobham going, it was something like I'd never heard before, so precise, just killer. It just blew my mind. I would woodshed on that record and get introduced to that sound, practice my drums and just soak it in.

“When I moved to Connecticut I was able to go to a show. I knew John was into prayer and meditation life; his guru was Sri Chinmoy. After the show I was fortunate enough to meet a disciple, and he walked me around the back of the stage, where I met McLaughlin.

“I said, ‘I’m Michael Walden, and I want to be like you. I’ve never seen anything like that.’ He said, ‘It's largely to do with my prayer life, my meditation life. I’m going to see the guru at six in the morning back in Queens. Give me your number. I'll give you a phone call.’

“A week later, I'm living out in the middle of the woods in Canaan, Conn., and it's John on the phone. He said, ‘I want you to go to meditation and meet the guru in Norwalk, Conn.’ It changed my life. He wanted me to come down for weekly meditations, and I did.

“John would call me every now and then to meet him at this restaurant in Queens where I played on his guitar case, in 7. He realized I could hang with him a little bit. We played again at another meditation in the Village. The third time we jammed at my band's barn in Canaan, with Billy McCoy on piano and Ralphe Armstrong on bass.

“John scared the hell out of me. He looked at me with a stone face, playing so incredibly — but it was a stone face. I had to close my eyes to not get thrown by him and just keep up with him.

“Not long after that he said, ‘I want you to join my band.’ It happened over time; I think it's because I became a disciple and got in the same groove, meditation-wise and prayer-wise. And musically we hit it off because I was a real fan of his. I always wanted to be Jimi Hendrix's drummer, but Mahavishnu became my Hendrix. When I joined the band, it was a dream come true.

“I'm very indebted to Mahavishnu for opening the door to get me in. I didn't know how to make it; it's the hardest thing in the world to know how to make it. He opened that door. It was like he anointed me; without that I'm not even here. I went out to do great stuff in my life because of Vishnu.

“People don't understand that the love for music is so high. What McLaughlin taught me was to listen. And I learned to watch his body; his body would just rock when he got high. I saw him get out there and just become the music. It was so inspiring.”

Robert Fripp

“Robert Fripp came on my scene around '77, '78, when I was still in New York before I moved to California. I played a little club, McHale's, that all the musicians played in New York, a little bar up towards Harlem. Some heavy cats would be in there. I was in there playing one night and right by my bass drum was this little English-type gentleman with glasses on who reminded me of Robert Fripp. And it was him, with my bass drum right in his face!

“He said, ‘Would you come play on a recording with me?’ I said, ‘I’d be honored,’ ’cause I was really inspired by King Crimson when I was in high school; it was part of my DNA. So I went to the session the next day with myself and the great Tony Levin on bass, and Robert showed me a song called ‘Breathless.’ I just tore it up with everybody. It was just a little trio — electric guitar, bass and drums.

“[Fripp] was very grounded and very staid and kinda quiet. But when he'd say something it was like dropping a bomb. There's a section in ‘Breathless’ that goes into this odd meter and you had to really keep counting it — it'd go even meter, odd meter, even meter, odd meter, and you had to keep counting. I wanted to get over it so I could be free in it, but I wanted to make sure I didn't mess it up for him ’cause my love for him was so deep. I wanted to make sure I did good for him.”

Carlos Santana

“I met him in '73, in Mahavishnu's living room, when I went to his house the first time. Out of the kitchen, into the living room, walks the superstar Carlos Santana. When I was at Western Michigan University for three semesters, all the black kids from Detroit, when they wanted to get high and do their exams and study, Carlos Santana's first album [the Santana band’”s 1969 debut] would be on their stereos. That was their music of choice — funky and Latin and get-high music.

“So Carlos was a damn superstar, and here he is in John's house saying hi to me. I was just flabbergasted by meeting these great champions together; it wasn't long before they did the Love Devotion Surrender album.

“Carlos has always been the kind of guy that would talk about God all the time. You never meet anyone like that; a lot of people talk about God, but Carlos would talk about God all the time — ‘I’m just so grateful to be alive. I'm so grateful to have God in my heart…’

“That's his name: Devadip — the eye, the lamp, the light of God. That’s how he lives, and that's how he plays. He's crying. Those long notes, I equate it to holding lightning; he could hold lightning in his hand like Jimi would do, those long, crying notes. He'd be crying for God. He's very sensitive that way.

“And he wants you to cry with him. He doesn't want no bullshit. He doesn't want cute and clever. He wants the snot out of your nose. He wants your sweat out of your brow. If you can bleed, he wants you to bleed. He's one of those kinds of cats.”

After building a career as a pop and jazz session guitarist in 1960s London, John McLaughlin crossed the Atlantic in 1969 to join Tony Williams’ group Lifetime.

The move dropped him in the center of New York’s music scene, where he would spend time in Greenwich Village jamming with Jimi Hendrix and absorbing the city’s jazz culture.

It also resulted in him performing on an album that would become the foundation for the 1970s jazz-fusion genre: Miles Davis’s 1969 release, In a Silent Way.

As McLaughlin recalls, that session date came a mere two days after he arrived in America. It proved to be a decisive moment in his career when, at Davis’s urging, he was told to take the lead on Joe Zawinul’s title composition.

“Miles just happened to scoop me up, because he wanted a guitar player,” McLaughlin explains. “I was just at the right place at the right time. I’d been in New York for 48 hours, and suddenly I was in a studio with Miles, and, man, it was just unbelievable.

“This was a pivotal moment for Miles, and he’d never heard me play. But since I was playing with Tony Williams, I guess that encouraged Miles.”

Even so, McLaughlin admits he arrived at the session unnerved by Davis’s reputation.

“I came into the studio, and I was shaking," he recalls. "There were all these heavyweight session guys there. They looked at me and said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m the guitar player,’ and they said, ‘We’ve got another guitar player on this session.’”

Assuming Davis had a reason for bringing him in, the musicians handed McLaughlin a photocopied piano score. ”Which I couldn’t read,” he adds.

“And then Miles came in. We tried ‘In a Silent Way’ a couple of times, and he didn’t like it. I could feel the sweat pouring down. I knew there was no way I could do this piano score on guitar.”

Then, unexpectedly, Davis turned to him.

“He asked me to play it alone on the guitar.”

The only instruction he offered was characteristically opaque.

“Miles goes, ‘Play like you don’t know how to play guitar.’ It was the kind of thing he was known for saying. He’d make these cryptic statements and never really told anyone how to play.

“But it wiped my mind, and from that point I thought, ‘I’m here in a Miles Davis session. It’s do or die.’

“I basically threw out all the harmony and played it in E major. The recording light was already on, and the tune just went its own way from the start.

“I sweated a lot, but in the end, the actual direction of the recording of the tune was left to me by Miles himself.”

The result shocked even McLaughlin.

“Afterward, I was not only surprised that Miles really liked what I had done, I was astonished that he had been able to pull something out of me that I would never have imagined.”

McLaughlin would go on to appear on a run of Davis’s landmark recordings from the 1969–1972 fusion era, including Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner.

Despite his own groundbreaking work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, he still credits Davis as the pivotal force in his career.

“Where would I be without Miles? I don’t even want to think. He’s been my hero since I was 15 or 16. He was my hero of heroes. The last thing I expected was to be playing with him.

“He was beautiful. I know he has a reputation for being very caustic, but he was just honest with everybody. He loved his musicians, and he took care of them.”

When John McLaughlin’s prized double-neck guitar split in two on tour, Jeff Beck stepped in with a loaner. By the end of the run, McLaughlin repaid him with a white Stratocaster — one that would change Beck’s playing forever.

It was 1974 when McLaughlin and Beck decided to tour together with their quartets. Beck was riding high on the success of his album Blow by Blow, while McLaughlin was enjoying fame for his pioneering jazz-rock fusion group the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

He was also well known for playing an impressively elaborate guitar: a Gibson EDS-1275. Already a striking guitar, it was further customized by luthier Rex Bogue with intricate tree-of-life inlays running the full length of both fingerboards.

Unfortunately, shortly into the tour, the guitar was destroyed.

“I was alone with it when it fell over,” McLaughlin recalls. “It was laying flat on a table. There must have been a tremor that caused it to fall. It hit the floor on its face, but it was so heavy that the body split down the middle!”

Beck stepped in to help.

“I didn’t have a second guitar, but Jeff did,” McLaughlin continues. “He was playing Gibson Les Pauls at that time, and he loaned me that Oxblood Les Paul that later sold for something like $1.3 million.”

Indeed, the modified 1954 Les Paul — which Beck acquired for $300 in 1972 to replace his damaged 1959 “Yardburst” Gibson Les Paul — became the most expensive Les Paul sold at auction when it went on the block at Christies on January 22, 2025 as part of the Jeff Beck Collection auction.

“So I played it for the rest of the tour,” McLaughlin continues. “And just to say thanks, at the end I gave him a white ’60s Strat.

“He’s played them ever since. Isn’t that nice!”

It wasn’t Beck’s first Strat — he had begun experimenting with the model around 1969 — but the gift marked the moment he fully committed to it.

“The Strat changed the way he played,” McLaughlin says. “From that point, he dropped the pick and started working with his fingers, and the tone he got was unbelievable. It was like butter. It was beautiful.”

Beck put the Strat to immediate use on his next album, Wired, where it also appeared on the cover. That particular guitar was later stolen, and Beck went on to experiment with other finishes — including a “Graffiti Yellow” prototype in 1986 — before ultimately settling on Olympic White as his signature look.

For the final decades of his career, his main stage instrument was typically a Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster in Olympic White, most often paired with a rosewood fingerboard — the version most closely associated with him today.

Reflecting on the 1974 tour, McLaughlin recalls the musical chemistry the two guitarists shared.

“The thing I enjoyed about Jeff on that tour was that we both played a 45-minute set each night, and we both had a quartet,” he says. “After that, we’d come together for a one-hour jam with both bands. We did that every night.”

Sadly, McLaughlin’s EDS-1275 wasn’t the only casualty of the tour. As he explains, those performances from his tour with Beck are gone forever.

“I don’t have a single recording from those shows,” McLaughlin says with regret. “Unlike now, people didn’t walk around with portable recording devices then. But you never know —maybe something will surface.”

He does have his memories, however.

“And so did Jeff. We used to talk about those days whenever we met. He was a beautiful guy. I really do miss him.”

He also misses his old guitars. McLaughlin attended Christie's Beck auction and was struck by how much of his gear Beck had preserved over the years.

“I really should have kept all the guitars I’ve had, like Jeff did!”

John McLaughlin had a chance to jam with Jimi Hendrix. It could have resulted in glorious meeting of two supremely talented guitarists. Instead, he says, it was a “disaster.”

And it was all because of money.

McLaughlin and Hendrix met in New York City in March 1969, a transitional period for Jimi. By then he had released three albums with his first group, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which featured drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding. By the time he and McLaughlin met, the Experience was in the slow and painful process of breaking up. That would ultimately lead Hendrix to the creation of his next group, Band of Gypsys, with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles.

McLaughlin, meanwhile, had recorded his debut solo album, Extrapolation, two months earlier. Before that, he'd played with Ginger Baker in the Graham Bond Quartet — a band which Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson credits as a precursor to progressive rock — given guitar lessons to Jimmy Page, and played alongside Experience drummer Mitchell in Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. His stock wasn't quite as high as Hendrix's, but he arrived in New York that spring with a fierce reputation, nevertheless.

The jam happened during a party at the Record Plant studio, where Hendrix had tracked portions of Electric Ladyland the year before. McLaughlin, who was in the city performing with Tony Williams at the Village Vanguard, had been invited by Mitchell, who had attended their show.

“It was a bit of a disaster,” McLaughlin tells Ultimate Guitar of the scene at the Record Plant. “I walked into the studio with Mitch Mitchell, and it was loud. There was a big party going on, and that's where I met Buddy Miles for the first time. We hooked up and became friends."

McLaughlin says "quite a few guitar players" besides Hendrix were present.

“The problem is, the only guitar I had was a Gibson Hummingbird,” he says of Gibson's first square-shoulder dreadnought acoustic guitar. It was an instrument more typically found in the hands of folk players than one brandished for late-night jam sessions with Jimi Hendrix.

“I'd run out of money when I was in the U.K. and Europe,” McLaughlin explains of his atypical instrument of choice. “I'd moved to Europe by that time, and I had to sell my really nice Gibson guitar because I didn't have any money." The Hummingbird, he notes, "was pretty cheap," and he had outfitted it with a DeArmond sound hole pickup.

"At that volume, I plugged my guitar in, and it was instant feedback. It was really hard to play. It was unfortunate, because I needed a solidbody guitar on that session.”

Fortuitously, a portion of the jam was captured on tape and is available on YouTube. Dave Holland features on bass, with Buddy Miles behind the kit. Above all, Hendrix's instantly recognizable phrasing cuts through the mix. It might not have gone down as McLaughlin's finest showing of his talents — at least in his eyes — but he nevertheless cherishes the memory.

“I met Jimi,” he says with a smile. “He was a sweet guy. And I met him again, subsequently, where we had a chance to talk. And he was just totally unpretentious.

“I think he knew he was causing quite a revolution on the electric guitar. He certainly affected me, and about another five million guitar players. He was a one-man revolution on the guitar. It was unbelievable what he was doing, with a wah-wah pedal and a Marshall amp. That was it.”

In a previous interview, McLaughlin claimed that the jam took place between 2 am and 8 am, making it one for the night owls and party animals, in true rock and roll fashion.

Speaking of Hendrix's inspiration, Pete Townshend has stated that the virtuoso led him to write the Who's breakthrough album, Tommy, in 1969, and a rare clip that resurfaced in January of a young Jimi Hendrix proves he was destined for greatness.

McLaughlin released his latest live release, Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2022, last month.

John McLaughlin’s short-lived power trio with Jaco Pastorius and Tony Williams had all the ingredients to achieve Cream-like notoriety. It brought together three musicians from the upper echelons of their genre for an all-star explosion of talent.

Except that their Trio of Doom, perhaps cursed by their name, didn’t stand the test of time. Anger and egos got the better of them.

All three musicians were esteemed virtuosos. McLaughlin was celebrated for fusion-guitar work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Pastorius for his genre-bending bass skills with Weather Report, and Williams for his ground-breaking drumming with Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet.

But together, the three visionary musicians couldn't seem to ... the tumult that was the three of them together, however, proved to be something out of their reach.

Columbia Records assembled the group in 1979 for a spot at the Havana Jam festival. It would be their only live performance, having proved to be the most “embarrassing” gig of McLaughlin's career, and an attempt to reconvene in the studio ended in violence and chaos.

McLaughlin met Pastorius prior to the bass player's coming-of-age gig in Joe Zawinul's Weather Report, and was impressed his attitude and skills. But it would be a little longer white before they could get their teeth in a project together.

“The first person Jaco Pastorius came to see in New York was me, and we jammed together at SRI [Studio],” McLaughlin told Jazz Times in 2016. “He found me and asked me for 20 bucks to fix a flat — money I never got back!

“He walked in and said, ‘I'm Jaco Pastorius, the greatest bass player in the world.’ I said, ‘Oh, I like the way you talk. Let's play,’ and we played, and it was marvelous. I told him, ‘If I didn’t have a great bass player already I'd hire you.’

"But I called Tony Williams that night and said, ‘See if there's something you can do with this guy Jaco, because he's amazing.’ Within six months Joe Zawinul had snatched him up, fired Alphonso Johnson and the rest is history.”

Pastorius was taken under Zawinul's wing in 1976. But three years later, as the first rumblings of the doomed Trio of Doom began, the bassist had begun to show signs of his emerging bipolar disorder, which wouldn't be diagnosed until late 1982.

“In 1979 we were booked for the Havana Jam," McLaughlin recalled. "And Jaco had already started his descent — so sad. But we went to rehearsals, and the rehearsals were just amazing.

“I'm so sad those rehearsals weren't recorded, because they were outstanding.”

While those preparations suggested to all that something great was about to happen, exactly the opposite happened at their festival debut.

“The performance was not good at all," McLaughlin recalled. "Jaco went on a star trip, and musically it was a bit of a disaster.

"The three of us are onstage, and all of a sudden, Jaco, in the middle of a C minor blues, starts playing in A major, real loud, and going up front [and showboating]. [Tony and I] did what we could, as best as possible.”

Evetually, McLaughlin's irritation got the better of him.

“When we get offstage, Jaco says, 'You know, you're a bad motherfucker.' And I said, 'I have never felt so ashamed to be onstage. If I never see you again, it's too soon.' And all the rats and snakes came out. I was so angry because I felt he betrayed Tony and me. I just let it all out. I told him to fuck off.”

Williams internalized his rage, McLaughlin recalled. But it rose to the surface a few weeks later after they agreed to try again, this time in the studio.

“We went in, and Tony was very angry, still,” McLaughlin recalled. “He should have gotten it out, really, because it was boiling over. In the studio, he wouldn't talk to Jaco, he wouldn't even look at him until finally Jaco said something and that was the trigger. Tony flipped.

“Jaco thought he was gonna die that day in the control room of CBS! Tony was furious. He didn't touch him, but Tony, in anger, was a volcano in activity.

"I thought it was funny by this time because I'd let [all of my anger] out. But he let it all out, and Jaco was afraid. Tony went in and destroyed his drums in the studio." McLaughlin laughed. "And walked out.”

Pastorius was just 35 when he died, in 1987. Williams passed in 1997, and a decade later the trio's album would finally get released, with McLaughlin wanting to honor their memory and the band's meager flash-in-the-pan legacy.

McLaughlin nurtured those tapes from the studio and the ill-fated Havana set to ensure that the Trio of Doom got the very best, and very belated release possible.

“When Sony called me and said, 'We'd really like [to put this out],' I said, 'Give me all the tapes. Because I love them both, I miss them both, and only I know how this should be mixed,'” he says. “And so I did. But it was very tricky, because you've got two versions of things [live and in studio].

“I wanted to get the Havana part in as well, as part of the story, because it's interesting. Trio of Doom is a document; it's not just a record. These two giants, they're gone. And I told Sony they had to give the money to their widows. I've lost a lot of friends over the years. More than friends — people I loved.”

John McLaughlin’s steel-string work in Shakti is some of the all-time most astonishing acoustic virtuosity, right alongside his hugely influential nylon-string playing with Paco de Lucia and Al Di Meola in the Guitar Trio. 

McLaughlin and tabla master Zakir Hussain are celebrating a half century since joining worlds as Shakti by releasing This Moment (Abstract Logix), the group’s first new studio album in 46 years, and going on tour. In September, Guitar Player and SFJAZZ welcomed McLaughlin back to San Francisco, where he has a storied history. 

The City by the Bay was the site of McLaughlin’s latest live album, 2018’s Live in San Francisco as well as the Guitar Trio’s celebrated Friday Night in San Francisco album, recorded in late 1980 and released in 1981. In 2022, Saturday Night in San Francisco finally saw the light of day after spending more than four decades gathering dust in Di Meola’s basement. It was recorded the night after the legendary Friday show, and Di Meola produced the project during the pandemic lockdown. 

McLaughlin says, “Al called me up and told me about finding the tape of the second show, and it was exciting that the program on Saturday night was different enough to make another album.” Via a Zoom connection from GP’s origin in the Bay Area to McLaughlin’s longtime home in Monaco, the virtuoso goes on to connect the dots of how Shakti and the Guitar Trio have shaped his acoustic career through the lens of the various instruments he’s played, right up to the new, long-awaited Shakti album.

McLaughlin’s playing in Shakti is remarkable on a number of levels. His highly evolved technique pervades impossibly complex compositions that mostly follow unpredictable Indian raga forms full of next-level improvisations. Perhaps most incredible is how the twisting, turning melody lines are so intricately linked with the rapid-fire percussion rhythms. As impressive as the GP Hall of Famer’s playing remains, Shakti serves a higher purpose. The stratospheric level of collective expertise creates a mystical musical vessel designed to take the listener on a transcendental celebration of life. The current lineup includes violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan, percussionist Selvaganesh Vinayakram and vocalist Shankar Mahadevan. 

To have a fully functional Shakti at this time is miraculous. Mandolin guru U. Shrinivas passed away in 2014. McLaughlin’s arthritis became so severe that he announced his retirement from touring in 2017. Then the pandemic hit. But rather than let his world stop spinning, McLaughlin took it all as inspiration to keep his wheels turning. Using deep meditation techniques described in his 2021 GP interview, he healed himself. 

He recorded the solo effort Liberation Time during lockdown and challenged Shakti band members, who live on different continents, to learn digital recording and video conferencing technology so they could finally collaborate remotely on a new one as well. The result is pure sonic joy, full of fresh tones.

This Moment presents a contemporary take on the classic Shakti sound, and was — ironically, given its title — carefully crafted rather than recorded live in the moment. It sounds refined, with 21st century elements layered into Shakti’s signature Indian/jazz fusion. 

Shakti means “power” and McLaughlin re-energizes the timeless ensemble ina modern way, playing electric guitar and guitar synth in the otherwise acoustic affair. He makes pristine tones from his new signature PRS guitar sound at home in the worldly mix, and he uses a Fishman MIDI guitar controller and software system to conjure an array of sounds, from bamboo flute to synth bass to strings. 

How did you come to play electric guitar and guitar synth in Shakti?

There are a couple of reasons. Of course, Shakti was originally acoustic, and I played a very special guitar with 13 strings and a scalloped fingerboard. [The original Shakti guitar, built by Abraham Wechter during his tenure at Gibson, was based on McLaughlin’s favorite model, the J-200, with the addition of seven tunable sympathetic strings running underneath the main six at a 45-degree angle.] Then there was a period that started in 1978 when Shakti percussion player Vikku Vinayakram had to go back to India to run the school his father founded, after his father passed. 

It just so happened that I ran into Paco de Lucia when I was in Europe that year. We started to hang out, and that was the beginning of the Guitar Trio. I went from playing the steel-string Shakti guitar to a nylon-string guitar for a classical tone, because Paco was playing a beautiful flamenco guitar. I must have spent 10 years playing the nylon-string. I loaned out my Shakti guitar, because I believe instruments must be played, otherwise they get sick, just like humans. When the Shakti guitar was brought back to me, it was broken.

That was a big tragedy. I kept in touch with Zakir, and all the while I was playing a very fine Wechter nylon-string acoustic. When Shakti got an invitation to tour, I started playing a big-bodied Gibson Johnny Smith [archtop]. At the end of the tour, I was sitting with Zakir and I said, “Shakti is such a beautiful form. We have to find a way to keep going.” We ended up inviting Shrinivas to join us, and he played an electric mandolin with a solid body. He was a genius. I was playing the Johnny Smith Gibson, which has a very sweet, clean sound that went very well with the electric mandolin. We continued like that until we lost Shrinivas in 2014.

That was a bad year. We also lost Paco, and I got zapped with arthritis in the right wrist. It took me until 2019 to cure myself. At my tender age, when I try to play the big Wechter nylon-string, I feel a stress because of the right-hand position. I have to sacrifice playing the acoustic, because I don’t have any problems playing the electric guitar, and musically I’ve never felt better. The other good thing about playing the new PRS is that, through MIDI, I’m able to bring more orchestral sounds from my Western world into the Shakti group.

It makes me happy, and it makes them happy too, because they love Western music as much as they love Eastern music. That’s why we’re here today.

There is so much rapid-fire energy in the music of Shakti, and it’s nice to hear that the PRS is helping facilitate that. This is, technically speaking, your first signature PRS, correct?

Yes, although I first met Paul over 20 years ago at the Frankfurt Musikmesse. Finally, last year, he called up saying that he wanted to make me a signature model. Oh, the tone! He chooses wood like Stradivari, who used to walk around the Dolomites in Italy tapping on trees, saying, “I’ll take that one, not that one.” Paul has got the most astonishingly beautiful wood. The neck of my guitar is made out of hormingo, which is a wood used in marimbas for its sound-producing tines. As a guitar neck, it’s extraordinary. I’ve got three other PRS guitars, but there’s something magical about this one. Paul is a maniac. He’s as crazy about what he’s doing as I am about what I’m doing.  

Do you ever miss having a scalloped fretboard, like on the Shakti guitar that allowed you to do bigger bends?

That came about in around 1971 or ’72, when I started studying the South Indian veena, which has got a huge neck with big frets embedded in beeswax. When you bend a string, you don’t push — you pull it, like sitar. But the veena is not curved like that. It’s flat. I spent two years with my guru, Dr. Ramanathan, at Wesleyan University, before I realized my guitar playing was suffering. That way of bending the string, which they call a gamaka, you can do all the way up the fingerboard, but you’ve got to have the space under the strings, and that was the whole point of the scalloped fingerboard on the Shakti guitar. But then I ran into Paco in 1978 when we formed the Guitar Trio, and after 10 years of playing the nylon-string classical guitar, I kind of lost that bending technique. 

Can you substitute glissando?

No. That’s a Shrinivas technique. It’s more like a vocal approach. [Imitates a quivering vocal] That’s what I loved about the veena, too. And one of my first adventures coming out of Shakti was I had a luthier make the scalloped fretboard on my 1968 Gibson 345, which is big, but it’s thin. 

I’m going to try when I get some time… Well, I don’t have time at the moment, because we started touring India in January, and in rehearsal we started changing and re-arranging the tunes from the new album. We’re crazy. So now I’m busy learning the new arrangements. 

They’re so worked out, especially the lengthy melodic runs that you play in unison with the vocal and the violin. Are they written down?

No. Everything is oral. That’s the Indian way. Crazy, huh?

It seems truly impossible. 

Everything is sung in India. When you learn, even the percussion players sing the rhythm. In South India, it’s called konokol. I started studying it with Ravi Shankar in the mid-70s. Every time he came to New York, I’d go to his hotel. He taught me the rhythmic theory, and it’s all vocal. Once you get a handle on the konokol system of rhythm, you understand exactly what a drummer from anywhere in the world is doing, because, in a way, it’s all mathematics. It’s mathematics with soul, you know? 

And the biggest musical difference is the Western sense of harmony, correct?

They are as developed in rhythm as we are in harmony. That’s how crazy they are. You can hear it on the album in some of the compositions that Zakir and Selva [percussionist Selvaganesh Vinayakram] do in unison. It’s phenomenal. 

And it’s apparent when your compositions come from a different place. Las Palmas sounds a bit flamenco in a Paco de Lucia kind of way, and then there’s a bluesy turnaround. 

Las palmas is Spanish for clapping. That’s what they call it in flamenco, which is a direct influence, because it was just late last year when they finally did the memorial concert for Paco de Lucia in Madrid. All the greatest guitar players, dancers and singers were there. Oh, it was fantastic. Al [Di Meola] was there too, and we played with Paco’s nephew, Antonio Sanchez. What a monster player! At some point maybe he’ll take the crown. Las Palmas is kind of an homage to that world I love and experienced with Paco.

And what a world of difference it must be playing ragas with Shakti.

Right, there are no chord changes in Indian music. I’m the only Western musician in Shakti, so triggering sounds with the Fishman MIDI pickup and substituting another harmonic structure that gives them a completely different view of the raga are ways that I can bend the rules. 

Those guitar synth elements are clear to hear on the introduction to the appropriately titled Bending the Rules. Do you ever break from standard tuning?

I can only play in standard tuning. Don’t ask me to de-tune a string; I will be in deep trouble. 

Can you speak about how the improvisational cycles flow in Shakti?

Improvisation is the heart and soul of a band. And it’s one of the great connections Indian music has with jazz, because they’re masters of improvisation. An improvisation is like a moment of truth. You stand up to do a solo, and your trousers are down by your ankles. You cannot hide, so you have to go with it and let it all hang out. You have a structure. You take risks.

And it’s exactly the same for the Indians. They have the raga, but if I slightly modify some harmony underneath, they’ll hear it and go with it. 

Another aspect that’s so close to jazz is the rhythm. God bless Ravi Shankar for all the lessons he gave me in konokol, because as soon as we start to play the drummers are on my case, “kicking my butt” as they say. But that’s exactly what I want in music. I want somebody to stimulate me — knock me out of my little niche. All of a sudden, you’re on a tightrope. What are you going to do? You abandon yourself to the spirit, and you go with it. That’s the point where things start to happen. 

How did improvisation factor into a remote recording process?

That’s one of the reasons it took two years to make the album. We’d put down some basic files and send them around. Then I’d get files back, and holy smoke, I’d have to redo my part, and the improvisational section too. That would happen with everybody, reacting by abandoning their parts and redoing them three or four times. There was a lot of excitement going on. It didn’t feel at all like I was alone. I’d put on the headphones, close my eyes, push play, and they were with me in the room. We basically went until we couldn’t work anymore. It’s wonderful. We wanted to do a studio album because we hadn’t done one since 1977, but we’ve made some live albums because in a way we’re a live band. 

In the Equipment section of your website, there’s a re-creation of your Shakti acoustic from the ’70s credited to master luthier Mirko Borghino. Does it sound like the original Wechter, and have you considered sampling it? 

It was about three years ago when the Italian luthier came to see me. He built a Shakti guitar based on photos, and it’s so well made that it does sound like the original. It’s unbelievable. I have thought of sampling its sound. I’m fascinated by that aspect of it, but I’d need some technical training. I do miss the acoustic guitar. I miss the Shakti guitar. My problem is what I mentioned before. That’s what happens when you get old. The attack is wrong on the acoustic guitar samples that I’ve heard. It sounds artificial, and it bothers me. But I enjoy using the guitar synth to get anything orchestral, or perhaps a flute or something to accompany the voice or the violin. I use the Fishman Triple Play Connect system in conjunction with my laptop, and it works like a dream. 

What’s the main signal chain for the PRS?

I’m still in learning mode with the new PRS, because it’s got two toggle switches that engage high-pass filters, one for each pickup. So there are a lot of configurations. I like to use different tones for, say, playing arpeggios or strumming chords, but the music happens so fast in Shakti. I have to plan when to switch pickups and when to switch the EQ into the position that I want. I use a [Hermida Audio] Zendrive 2 pedal, and I’m currently experimenting with a [DSM Humboldt Electronics] Simplifier amplifier simulation pedal. You can control the amount of preamp or power amp drive and the sound of the speakers. The fact that it’s all analog is very nice, because I really like the tone. It’s different, very pure. I’m going to try it out for sure. After the Shakti tour when I’m at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Los Angeles [September 24 and 25] I’ll be playing with an amp, of course. 

What’s the plan?

I spoke with Carlos Santana, and we’re planning to play together on Sunday night. Maybe we’ll do a couple of golden oldies from Love Devotion Surrender, or from Welcome. Joe Bonamassa invited me to play a tune. I like Joe, and he can sing too, so I’ll probably do a number with Joe on Saturday night and just, you know, jam. 

Shakti is very different, eh?

Shakti is a totally different trip. 

Shakti's This Moment is out now and available to buy or stream

Musicians often fall into ruts when relying exclusively on Western scales and sounds.

But there’s a great big world out there, full of music from other countries and cultures that can be easily added to your repertoire.

Scales from around the world can add an intriguing twist to your playing. You can hear many of these tonalities in the ax work of players like John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola, Marty Friedman and Yngwie Malmsteen. 

This lesson will serve as a guided musical tour of select world sounds.

Harmonic Minor (1-2-b3-4-5-b6-7)

Pioneered in the '70s by Michael Schenker, Ritchie Blackmore and Ulrich Roth, neoclassical metal rose to the rock forefront in the mid '80s when chopsmeister Yngwie Malmsteen stepped onto the scene. 

The Bach rocker’s scale of choice was harmonic minor, played in Figure 1 in the key of G# minor (G#-A#-B-C#-D#-E-G). 

Anchor your hand in 7th position for the duration of the figure, and use alternate picking (down, up, down, etc.) throughout.

Japanese (1-b2-4-5-b6)

Lacking a 3rd or 7th, and therefore tonally ambiguous, the versatile Japanese scale works well in a variety of situations, including major- and minor-key progressions, as well as Phrygian-based contexts. 

Figure 2 is based on the E Japanese scale (E-F-A-B-C). Take a rubato approach here – that is, let the tempo fluctuate, altering your phrasing in a way that feels right to you.

Chinese (1-2-3-5-6)

Many of you are already familiar with the Chinese scale. You just know it by its Western name: major Pentatonic. 

In the Western world, this sound is heard perhaps most famously in the work of the Allman Brothers. 

Figure 3, on the other hand, has a distinctly non-Western sound, courtesy of the timbre (sound quality) of its notes and how they’re phrased.

Derived from the B Chinese scale (B-C#-D#-F#-G#), this ethereal line uses harp harmonics to evoke the sound of the zither, a traditional stringed instrument. 

To execute each harmonic, lightly rest your pick hand’s 1st finger on the octave of the pre-fretted note (i.e. 12 frets higher), and pluck the string with your pick-hand’s thumb.

Phrygian Dominant (1-b2-3-4-5-b6-b7)

The fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale, Phrygian dominant provides the exotic ambience heard in Al Di Meola’s “Egyptian Danza” and Iron Maiden’s “Powerslave.” 

The G-rooted (G-Ab-B-C-D-Eb-F) lick in Figure 4 combines slurred note groupings with static open-string drones to create a distinctly Egyptian sound. 

Make sure you pay close attention to the fret-hand shifts here. Measure 1 is played in 3rd position, while measure 2 dips into 1st position.

Gypsy (1-b2-3-4-5-b6-7)

The Gypsy scale differs from the Phrygian dominant by using a major rather than a minor 7th for additional color. 

Both the Phrygian dominant and the Gypsy scale provide excellent soloing options over chord progressions containing major chords a half step apart. 

For example, try playing the E Gypsy scale over an E-F vamp. The E-rooted (E-F-G#-A-B-C-D#) riff in Figure 5 calls to mind Rainbow’s “Gates of Babylon." 

Be sure to palm-mute the 6th string throughout, so that the above melodic line really comes across.

Hungarian Minor (1-2-b3-#4-5-b6-7)

If you’ve been searching for a cool scale to play over a minor(maj7) chord, then the Hungarian minor scale is just what you need. 

The majority of the A Hungarian minor (A-B-C-D#-E-F-G#) passage in Figure 6 is rooted in 7th position, with the exception of the closing chromatic phrase, which sits in 11th position. 

In learning this figure, you might want to first isolate the 16th-note slur on beat 3 of bar 4. 

To get this legato turn to sound as smoothly as possible, use your 2nd, 3rd and 1st fingers, respectively, on frets 12, 13 and 11.

Persian (1-b2-3-4-b5-b6-7)

We’ll close things out with the E Persian scale (E-F-G#-A-Bb-C-D3), which gets its dark Middle Eastern vibe from its b5, or tritone, interval. 

Because it contains both a major 3rd and a major 7th, the Persian scale serves as an interesting option for Lydian-based chords (maj7#11). But it can also be used as a basis for sinister metal riffs like the one in Figure 7. 

For the last two beats of bar 2, use your fret hand’s 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers in consecutive order.

John McLaughlin has lots of reasons to celebrate. Winning his battle with arthritis and honoring an incredible 50 years since joining forces with table master Zakir Hussain to form Shakti, the jazz guitar icon is back on the road supporting Shakti’s very long-awaited studio album, This Moment (Abstract Logix).

On September 9th at Davies Symphony Hall, Guitar Player Presents helps SFJAZZ welcome McLaughlin’s return to San Francisco where he’s got storied history.

The City by the Bay was the site of McLaughlin’s latest live album, 2018’s Live in San Francisco as well as the Guitar Trio’s infamous Friday Night in San Francisco album recorded with Al Di Meola and Paco de Lucia in late 1980 and released in 1981.

In 2022, Saturday Night in San Francisco finally saw the light of day after spending over four decades gathering dust in Di Meola’s basement. It was recorded the night after the legendary Friday show.

McLaughlin played nylon-string acoustic in the Guitar Trio and historically played steel-string in Shakti, but in order to manage arthritis issues he’s playing electric these days, specifically a new signature PRS equipped with a Fishman Triple Play Connect system.

In his Frets feature for Guitar Player’s November issue, the virtuoso connects the dots of how Shakti and the Guitar Trio have shaped his acoustic career through the lens of the various instruments he’s played, right up to This Moment. He says:

“At my tender age, when I try to play the big Wechter nylon string, I feel a stress because of the right-hand position. I have to sacrifice playing the acoustic because I don’t have any problems playing the electric guitar, and musically I’ve never felt better.

“The other good thing about the playing the new PRS is that through MIDI I’m able to bring more orchestral sounds from my Western world into the Shakti group. It makes me happy, and it makes them happy too because they love Western music as much as they love Eastern music. That’s why we’re here today.”

Shakti means “power” and McLaughlin has re-energized the timeless ensemble in a modern way. This Moment represents a contemporary take on the classic Shakti sound, which was ironically recorded less so live in the moment and is instead more carefully crafted. It sounds refined with 21st century elements layered into Shakti’s signature Indian/jazz fusion.

McLaughlin’s playing in Shakti is remarkable on myriad levels. His highly evolved technique pervades impossibly complex compositions that mostly follow unpredictable Indian raga forms full of next-level improvisations. Perhaps most incredible is how the twisting, turning melody lines are so intricately linked with the rapid-fire percussion rhythms.

As impressive as the GP Hall of Famer’s playing remains, Shakti serves a higher purpose. The stratospheric level of collective expertise creates a mystical musical vessel designed to take the listener on a transcendental celebration of life.

The current lineup includes violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan, percussionist Selvaganesh Vinayakram and vocalist Shankar Mahadevan.

To have a fully functional Shakti at this time is miraculous. Dates are selling out across the country, so don’t hesitate to secure yours at the nearest location. Find tour information at shakti50.com.

GP Presents will be onsite in San Francisco at Davies Symphony Hall where we’ll have free Martin strings and copies of the November issue with McLaughlin’s Frets feature. Make sure to stop by if in you’re in the Bay Area over the second weekend in September.

Click here for SF show information.

WIN TICKETS!

For a chance to win a pair of tickets to see GP Presents Shakti, email gp@jimmyleslie.com and put “Shakti” in the subject of your email. Include a sentence about yourself and why you want to go. Phone contact greatly appreciated for confirmation.

Winner must provide his or her own transportation to Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, California, on Saturday, September 9, and have his or her own accommodations in the Bay Area.

Best of luck!

EVENT DETAILS

GP and SFJAZZ Presents Shakti

Saturday, September 9

Davies Symphony Hall
San Francisco, CA, 8pm

Free GP magazines and Martin strings

PRS has joined forces with electric guitar great John McLaughlin to create a new signature Private Stock model.

Even within the luxurious ranks of Private Stock guitars, the McLaughlin signature – of which only 200 examples will be built in 2023 – is truly something else, with a raft of eyebrow-raising appointments, not the least of which is the guitar legend's autograph on the backplate.

You can hear the guitar in action below.

The PS McLaughlin guitar features a maple top, mahogany back, and a unique neck made from hormigo, a tonewood most often associated with marimbas. Its 25” African blackwood fretboard features 22 frets, with striking abalone “Celtic“ knot inlays featuring holly spikes and ovals made of crushed opal.

Sonically, the model boasts two TCI pickups, tweakable by volume and tone knobs, a three-way pickup switch, and a pair of mini-toggle EQ switches that – when activated – give players a cleaner, more defined high-end. Hardware, meanwhile, comes in the form of PRS Phase III locking tuners and the company's Gen III tremolo.

Aside from McLaughlin's signature on the backplate, the Private Stock model also features the signatures of PRS head honcho Paul Reed Smith and the company's Private Stock Director, Paul Miles, on the back of the headstock, plus a Private Stock Eagle headstock inlay, and a McLaughlin-labeled truss rod cover.

“Playing music is a way of being. Playing an instrument requires you to move out of the normal level of consciousness. If you’re thinking, you’re not playing. If you’re playing, you’re not thinking,“ McLaughlin said in a press release. 

“If you have problems with your instrument, you’re not going to move out of the thinking zone and into your own world. This is why I love my guitar. For me, it’s perfect.“

The exact price point for the PRS Private Stock John McLaughlin model – which is is finished in Charcoal Phoenix with a Smoked Black back – has yet to be revealed as of press time, but, given its limited numbers and top-tier features, it probably won't come cheap.

For more info on the model, visit prsguitars.com.

Debashish Bhattacharya is truly a player’s player. It’s not unusual for guitarists to heap praise on their pals, but when luminaries gush like an atmospheric river, one must pay attention to what they say, and Bhattacharya inspires an impressive array of artists. His 2013 album, Beyond the Ragasphere, featured world jazz maestro John McLaughlin and Americana Dobro icon Jerry Douglas, and both are passionate in their praise.

“Debashish is the master of the slide guitar,” McLaughlin proclaims. “From his soulful playing in the introductions to his compositions, to the brilliance of his up-tempo playing, he has no equal. A must for all guitarists!”

Douglas adds that Bhattacharya is “at the forefront of a new body of Indian slide players. His sense of melody is uncanny, and he has all the tools and history to back it up. Debashish has no peer in the depth of his technique and it is very obvious that he has put in the time listening to the masters that came before him. Now he is putting it all to good use on this new recording.”

The Sound of the Soul (Abstract Logix) features four transcendent, all-acoustic tracks, and players of all styles can learn a lifetime’s worth of lessons by immersing themselves. Playing in a lap-steel style on singular instruments he created for himself, Bhattacharya offers an enticing escape from Western worries and the trappings of familiar guitar tropes.

Derek Trucks is perhaps the most iconic example of how studying Eastern players can help players transform a style. By examining the music of masters, including one of Bhattacharya’s mentors, sarod guru Ali Akbar Khan, Trucks took down-and-dirty bottleneck blues to mystical heights.

Likewise, Steve Kimock and Ben Harper adopted numerous Eastern techniques into their lap-steel styles, as evidenced on their Last Danger of Frost and Winter Is for Lovers albums, respectively. Kimock sums up his feeling about Bhattacharya with awe and humor: “If the aliens came and said, ‘Bring us your champion,’ you’d bring Debashish. He’d play and they’d go, ‘Oh, okay. We’ll let you guys live.’”

Can you explain the root connection between Eastern and Western guitar through the story of influential Hawaiian steel guitar pioneer Tau Moe?

Tau Moe was a prime entertainer for the British and American army allies during World War II. Tau and his wife, Rose, stayed and lived in Kolkata [Calcutta] doing wonderful concerts. Hawaiian music and culture became so popular that generations started playing electric pedal-steel guitar as well as ukulele and fingerpicking on the 12-string guitar.

But a few traditional Indian music families took the lap Hawaiian guitar and started playing contemporary music on it. And out of all of them, my guru, [father of Indian classical guitar] Brij Bhushan Kabra, and a couple more people took in lap to play Eastern raga music. Almost around that same time, as a three year-old boy, I took up lap guitar. I’m now 60, and I’ve spent my whole life extending the slide guitar, brought from Western mode to Indian mode.

How did you start playing at such a young age?

Music is in my veins. My ancestors were generations of stage performers. My father was a classical vocalist who started working as an accountant after marrying my mother, and a year later someone gave him a Hawaiian guitar. My mother was also a great vocalist, and she put it in my hands when I was three. She showed me the major scale and how to hold the bar. The rest was fun. I started playing all the songs I heard everywhere. Gradually, it became my life partner.

The next year at the age of four I played on the National Radio program [All India Radio]. At age seven, I was denied a national scholarship, even though I stood first in the Indian national scholarship competition. My only disqualification was I played raga music on a Hawaiian guitar, not on a sitar or a veena. That made my relationship with Hawaiian guitar go further, stronger and forever. It made me desperate to what I do today and what I will do tomorrow – living on slide guitar.

Slide has been a big part of Western playing ever since the Delta blues. Can you draw a correlation?

Delta blues is based on human emotion, but for the same emotion, expression in Indian music has different ways of bending or accentuating notes. I’ve found many connections that would take a long time to explain, but in a few lines, blues scales are related to Indian mountain folk melodies. All along the Himalayan range from West to East, mountain songs from Tibet to Eastern Asia have the same pentatonic blues scale.

Can you explain Ali Akbar Khan’s influence on your own playing?

In Kolkata, at the age of two on a winter night, I was seated in my parents’ lap behind 5,000 people on the floor for an all-night concert. My father later told me that I was super excited to see and hear him playing, even at such a tender age. I followed his music and technique on slide guitar all my life. His melodic emotive expressions have stirred me so much since childhood until now. The appeal of such soul made me into what I’m doing today. Study was not easy with him. Since my guru, Brij Bhushan Kabra, was his student, I was recommended by my guru to him. After his father Acharya Allauddin Khan’s life, he was and is my primary inspiration.

What’s the intention behind building your own instruments, incorporating elements from Hawaiian lap steel and Americana-style Dobro to the sarod and perhaps other influences?

My instruments are extensions of myself. They were created to make a musical connection between East and West, and eventually a way to connect the world from the Eastern sound of a guitar-like instrument. They are guitar plus!

But they are individually unique. You can hear a blend between all those genres and instruments you named in my four instruments. The chaturangui is a 22-/24-string combination sitar/sarod/violin/rudra veena. The gandharvi is a 12-/14-string guitar/veena/santoor/sarangi. The anandi is a four-string slide ukulele. And I’m proud of my latest creation, the pushpa veena, which is the result of such humble lifelong work to utmost extension. But I only played chaturangui on the whole new album.

What is the tuning and time signature on the first track from The Sound of the Soul, “Ever the Flame Burns”?

It’s D minor tuning: [from low to high] D A D F A D. The time is 10 beats per cycle at a fast tempo. The name of the rhythm is Sool Taal.

Can you explain the sense of song in an Indian raga compared to the Western sense?

Western melody is simpler and in one line, where changes in chords, harmony and the chorus are the highlight. Indian raga is the ancestor of diatonic and semi-diatonic music. It’s modal. The relation and value of notes are created by the multi-note melodies and sub-melodies in a natural progression, where endless possibilities are confined into different scales.

Out of each scale are many different melodic progressions, and each progression can make hundreds of songs. Compositions are either lyric-based or instrumental. There are at least two stanzas, or sometimes four. It’s completely different, yet universal music.

One of the wildest aspects for a Western listener is the drone of one tonality, rather than chord changes. It seems that you don’t actually play chords yourself, only single notes. Is that accurate?

Yes. Another most important observation is that the two classical musics are extremely polarized, since Western classical music is very much dependent on each individual note, whereas in Indian classical music the space between two notes and the nuances around the notes make the music.

What slide do you prefer?

I play a John Pearse bullet bar named the Bhattacharya Hindustani Slide because it’s made for my music. It’s lighter and smaller, with fatter tone and more sustain. I also like the crystal bar from Ian McWee [Diamond Bottlenecks’ hand-blown lead crystal slides]. They are round and small in length.

How did you develop your distinct slide technique?

I learned slide from the Western technique of the early ’60s, but I have developed unique wrist techniques coupled with three-finger picking that made my approach a better close-circuit servant of slide guitar and raga music. My slide hand became extremely amiable and fluid as my fingers and wrist developed faster and bolder playing technique. After 50 years, it has more body involvement than a strictly fingers approach on the frets and strings. I’ve written a 16-chapter training course, and am looking forward for young slide guitarists joining the course and creating a new world.

What are your thoughts about fretted guitar?

Fretted guitar is mostly suitable for staccato notes, whereas music with fluid modal melodies is more suitable slide guitar, violin or flute. I have worked with many fretted guitarists like Bob Brozman, Martin Simpson, John McLaughlin and Hawaiian guitarists Jeff Peterson and Ledward Kaapana. The soul and story of the music is the commonality, which attracts me among all the differences.

Can you share some insights on the second track, the 40-minute “To His Lotus Feet”?

That is played with a bigger, hollow-neck chaturangui, which has a deeper, baritone sound, and the tuning is G modal [all Gs and Ds]. I use a Dorian scale, and the second and fifth notes are weaker – less played – when ascending, whereas descending has all of the notes. The rhythm has a slow, seven-beat cycle.

Our ancestors like Baba Ali Akbar Khan played ragas that are hours long. Raga is like a movie. It has scripts, stories, characters, incidents and different dialogues built in. A master portrays the raga in its details via melodic and rhythmic improvisation, and cross improvisation between melody and rhythm. It’s been said that a longer performance makes the music deeper and more powerful. It’s more like a live performance for the divine.

Can you address the final two tracks on The Sound of the Soul?

The title track is the same raga and same instrument as the second track, but at a faster tempo with a bit higher energy. The time is a 12-beat cycle. The final track, “Colors of Joy,” is also the same instrument and open G tuning. The melody draws inspiration from a melodic scale in a folk song of Kashmir.

What recommendations might you have to inspire players to develop more profound musical connections?

Music is a vast ocean if you dive into yourself deeper! A “guru” can help you define yourself as a music practitioner, scholar or performing artist. A playful childhood experience of universal music and practicing the games of music will help a kid to grow in the vastness fearlessly. In youth, he or she has to take only one path and one faith for at least 20 years to achieve the power to see music from a 360-degree perspective, and an overall awareness is achieved.

John McLaughlin’s work with Shakti is perhaps the most prominent connection point our readership has to Indian music. Can you share a thought on him?

John is the biggest East to West gateway after Pandit Ravi Shankar. His continuous divine works with giants of Indian classical music over decades has inspired generations of musicians in millions of ways. Watching his musical approach with Mahavishnu Orchestra as a young guitarist in 1984 was a stupendous milestone. Being a slide guitarist, it was impossible for me to follow his licks, but the aura and soundscape was inspirational. Seventeen years later, the Great invited me onstage. I feel blessed, and proud of the 17 years of hard work.

How about Jerry Douglas?

Jerry is known as the master of Dobro and bluegrass, but his musicality is astounding! His melodic expression touches me the most. Many heard his magical touch on my composition “JD2 Pillusion” [from Beyond the Ragasphere].

Who are some other Western guitar players that you appreciate?

B.B. King, for his total music and guitar playing. Al Di Meola, for his master musicality. Paco De Lucia, for the magical moments he created in every appearance. Ry Cooder, for his songs and slide guitar.

What are your goals for The Sound of the Soul?

I’m a professional guitarist, and if you call me “musician,” I give you a smile. I definitely want to see commercial success for the album, but it’s definitely my humble service, along with everyone involved, from the musicians to the label, the sound recordist to the journalist. The goal is to service to the musical minds, hoping this can enlighten their souls.

How do you use the guitar as a tool for spiritual growth, and how might we all?

Spirituality is like other elements of life: Some are visible and some are unseen. My music is not physically visible, per se, but my guitars send the soundscapes with the scent of spirituality. One can learn and grow his own spiritual atmosphere by diving into one’s self. “Nobody teaches better spirituality than yourself” is a message for every child. Bonding with your own guitar can help you to see that path.

Visit the Debashish Bhattacharya website for more information.

In 1974, Jeff Beck found himself in a repeating cycle that rivaled the predicament of Bill Murray’s character, Phil, in the movie Groundhog Day.

After being booted from the Yardbirds in late November 1966, Beck formed three different bands – two iterations of the Jeff Beck Group, and the power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice – that enjoyed moderate popularity primarily as touring acts.

But no matter how much Beck varied his approach with the three bands, the outcome was always the same. Each managed to release two albums (in BBA’s instance a studio and a live album), but none of those records delivered any hits, and commercial success remained elusive.

All three groups lasted only a few years before Beck became frustrated or disinterested in the projects and moved on. Work on the second Beck, Bogert & Appice studio album began in January 1974, but that May, Beck pulled the plug before it was completed and disbanded the group.

The guitarist had grown tired of recycling the same old blues-rock riffs and licks he’d been playing for most of his career, and realized that he needed to make a radical shift in direction, if only to preserve his own sanity.

The music that excited him the most during this period came from the burgeoning jazz-rock fusion movement, and he soon found himself pulled in that direction. Following his fusion muse, Beck recorded Blow by Blow, his first entirely instrumental solo album, which was released in March 1975.

To Beck, his journey into jazz-rock fusion made perfect sense as he considered it a logical progression of rock music. “A handful of tapes knock me out,” he said in the November 1975 issue of Guitar Player, “things like Billy Cobham, Stanley Clarke – all the great rock and rollers. I call Billy Cobham a rock and roller because he’s so forceful. Rock’s an energy to me. It’s more complex now than it was, but it’s rock just the same.”

In addition to Cobham and Clarke, Beck was highly impressed with the work of his good friend guitarist John McLaughlin and his band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, particularly their recently released album Apocalypse. Indeed, Beck’s decision to hire George Martin to produce Blow by Blow was influenced almost entirely by Martin’s work on that album, and not the producer’s legendary work only a few years earlier with the Beatles.

Beck entered London’s AIR Studios in October 1974 accompanied by keyboardist Max Middleton, his former bandmate in the second version of the Jeff Beck Group, and session players Phil Chen on bass and Richard Bailey on drums. Stevie Wonder, in addition to writing two songs Beck covered on the album – “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” and “Thelonius” – played clavinet on the latter.

“Blow by Blow marked an important change in my life,” Beck said in 1999. “I was exploring an entirely different direction, but it came together almost by accident. I always fed off of singers or guitar riffs before, but Max Middleton kept throwing these beautiful chords at me, and Stevie Wonder had come up with some beautiful melodies, so I had no choice but to follow them. It was like starting all over again, like I had never played the guitar before.”

Although Blow by Blow is hailed by many as a jazz-rock fusion classic, only a handful of songs on the album truly fit that description: “Freeway Jam,” “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” and the orchestral string section-accompanied songs that close each side of the album, “Scatterbrain” and “Diamond Dust.”

Jazz-funk fusion is a more accurate description, as funk plays a prominent role on most of the album, particularly Beck’s rhythm playing on “You Know What I Mean,” with its obvious nod to Jimmy Nolen’s scratchy chords on James Brown’s “Sex Machine,” Wonder’s low-down and dirty clavinet on “Thelonius,” and the relentless syncopated grooves of “Constipated Duck” and “Air Blower.”

With its reggae-inspired feel, the instrumental cover of the Beatles “She’s a Woman” is a bit of an outlier, but Beck’s expressive phrasing makes it fit in.

The funky feel of Blow by Blow was inspired by another often overlooked source, the band Upp, which Beck discovered in June 1973 while rehearsing for his appearance at David Bowie’s Hammersmith Odeon farewell concert.

When Beck heard the band jamming to some James Brown grooves in an adjacent room, he “kicked the door open” and introduced himself. Over the next year, he produced and played guitar on the band’s debut album, although his name didn’t appear in the credits.

Beck’s involvement with Upp became public knowledge when he performed with the band on the BBC’s Five Faces of the Guitar special recorded in August 1974 and broadcast the following month, only a few weeks before he started recording Blow by Blow.

The arrangement he performed of “She’s a Woman” is almost identical to that heard on the album, with the exception of the absence of Middleton’s keyboards. The gear that he used for the BBC broadcast – including his modified 1954 “Oxblood” Gibson Les Paul, an Ampeg VT-40 combo amp, Colorsound Overdriver, Cry Baby wah, ZB Custom volume pedal and Kustom “The Bag” talk box – was likely the main rig Beck played on the album.

He also used two Stratocasters – an early ’70s Olympic White model and one with a stripped-finish early ’60s body and mid-’70s rosewood neck – and his “Tele-Gib” 1959 Telecaster with two PAF humbuckers installed by Seymour Duncan, most famously employed for the Roy Buchanan-inspired performance of “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers.”

Three singles from the album – “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” “She’s a Woman” and “You Know What I Mean”– were released in Japan, the U.K. and the U.S., respectively, but all three failed to chart. However, the first two songs, along with “Freeway Jam,” received frequent airplay on FM radio, which helped the album quickly climb to a peak position of number four on the Billboard album chart and achieve RIAA Gold certification.

More than 10 years later, in 1986, Blow by Blow was certified Platinum.

By following his heart instead of prevailing trends, Beck was unexpectedly rewarded with his most commercially successful album ever. But Blow by Blow’s success was much bigger than sales figures. It earned him a new level of respect from his peers, fans and critics, and gave him more creative freedom to express himself with his guitar as the focal point instead of as an accompaniment to a vocalist.

Beck knew that Blow by Blow was going to be a hard act to follow, but it also wasn’t a fluke. Perhaps to absorb even more inspiration from John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, he went on a co-headlining tour in 1975, where Beck’s band – featuring Middleton, drummer Bernard Purdie and bassist Wilbur Bascomb – and McLaughlin’s latest outfit traded opening slots.

Beck gained more than musical ideas from the venture as McLaughlin gave Beck an early ’60s Olympic White Stratocaster that was an upgrade from the ’70s model Beck had been playing for several years.

A nice Strat wasn’t all that Beck got from McLaughlin. When the Mahavishnu Orchestra broke up shortly after completing the Inner Worlds album, Beck poached drummer Narada Michael Walden to play on the sessions for his follow-up to Blow by Blow, replacing Richard Bailey who had already recorded two tracks – “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and “Head for Backstage Pass.”

Walden’s songwriting skills were as adept as his drumming, and he contributed four songs to the album later titled Wired – “Come Dancing,” “Sophie,” “Play With Me” and “Love Is Green” – and played piano on the latter.

Former Mahavishnu keyboardist Jan Hammer, who left the band in December 1973, also joined the sessions a few months after they initially got underway. In addition to Mahavishnu, Hammer had previously played on Billy Cobham’s Spectrum and Stanley Clarke’s eponymous sophomore solo album, so landing a musician who was heavily involved with all three of the artists Beck appreciated the most during that era was a major triumph. Hammer’s guitar-like synth lines profoundly inspired Beck’s tone and phrasing.

“[Jan Hammer] gave me a new, exciting look into the future,” Beck told Guitar Player in a 1975 interview after the release of Blow by Blow, but before he joined forces with the keyboardist. “He plays the Moog a lot like a guitar, and his sounds went straight into me. So I started playing like him. I didn’t sound like him, but his phrases influenced me immensely.”

“We were very, very similar, even though we were coming from opposite ends of the musical universe,” Hammer said in a 2020 interview. “He was a rock icon, a rock and roll giant, and I was a pretty well-known modern-jazz musician, but I was trying to get more into rock and he was trying to get more into jazz. We met right in the middle. That’s why our collaboration worked so well.”

George Martin returned once again to produce Wired, but this time around he saw no need to add flourishes like orchestral strings and instead let the band’s performances and arrangements stand on their own. Most of the songs were recorded with musicians playing together live in the studio, recording multiple takes until Beck and Martin were satisfied with the performances and arrangement.

However, Beck repeatedly second-guessed his own work throughout the project. “I was never happy with the solo on ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,’ the Mingus tune,” Beck told Rolling Stone. “I rang George up and said, ‘I’ve got a great idea to modulate that,’ and he said, ‘The album’s been out for two weeks!’ That’s how loose things were back then.”

Martin produced the entire Wired album with the exception of the song “Blue Wind.” That track was recorded at Hammer’s studio in upstate New York over a period of about a week when Beck traveled there to talk the keyboardist into working on the album. Beck and Hammer performed dueling solos throughout the song, and Hammer provided all of the accompaniment, including the driving bass line and drums.

Wired was decidedly heavier than Blow by Blow, with Max Middleton’s riff-driven homage to Led Zeppelin, “Led Boots,” kicking off the album, and most of the songs having faster tempos and more aggressive arrangements. This time around, the funk elements, while still present, were toned down and less prominent.

Beck’s version of the Charles Mingus composition “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” was a bona fide jazz performance, although his bluesy, slow-tempo approach was more obviously inspired by the acoustic version John McLaughlin recorded in 1971 than the original 1959 Mingus recording. As a result, Wired was more of a true jazz-rock fusion effort than its predecessor, and it inspired the sound and dynamics of numerous jazz-rock albums that came out afterward in the late ’70s.

Although Wired did not enjoy the same level of commercial success as Blow by Blow, reaching a peak position of number 16 on the Billboard album chart, it sold well and earned Platinum certification. More importantly, Wired proved that Blow by Blow’s success was not a fluke, and the one-two punch of those stellar efforts established Beck’s status as one of the world’s greatest guitarists – a standing that endured throughout his career.

His previous work with the Yardbirds was certainly revolutionary, but his foray into jazz-rock fusion delivered performances that were more timeless and lasting, earning him both lifelong fans and well-deserved respect for his tone, touch and taste.

When the Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, it inspired a generation of Boomers to pick up the guitar. But it was a much earlier TV broadcast that helped turn Bill Frisell on to the instrument, when he was a boy growing up in Denver.

Credit Jimmie Dodd, host of The Mickey Mouse Club, with planting the six-string seed in Frisell’s young brain. Dodd was Head Mousketeer during the televised show’s initial 1955 to 1959 run, when it was shown five days a week on ABC stations across the country. He wasn’t just an actor; Dodd also wrote the program’s theme song and premiered his Mousegetar on the November 11, 1955 show, which aired just a few months before Frisell’s fifth birthday.

Dodds’ adeptness on the instrument was immediately evident in the crisp, Django-esque filigrees he played between strummed chords on the tune “I’m a Guitar.”

It may have been that very song that first captured the imagination of young Billy Frisell. “Right there is what got me wanting to play the guitar,” Frisell tells Guitar Player. “I think I was about four. Wow!” 

Frisell’s guitar journey followed a path that began in earnest at age 13, when he took lessons with Bob Marcus at the Denver Folklore Center. In high school, he got hooked on Wes Montgomery and as a senior began studying guitar with Dale Bruning, who recorded a series of jazz standards with Frisell decades later on their 2000 duo album, Reunion.

At Colorado State, now the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley, Frisell studied for one semester with jazz guitar great Johnny Smith, whose clean articulation and impeccable picking technique on 1956’s Moonlight in Vermont, with sax great Stan Getz, had also influenced young Pat Martino.

Smith’s 1962 solo guitar album, The Man with the Blue Guitar, recorded at his Johnny Smith Guitar Center in Colorado Springs, may have served as a template for Frisell’s own 2018 solo guitar debut, Music IS.

To date, Frisell has made more than 40 albums as a leader, starting with 1982’s In Line for Manfred Eicher’s ECM label. Prior to that, he had served as a kind of house guitarist for the imprint, appearing on albums by German bassist Eberhard Weber (1979’s Fluid Rustle), American drummer Paul Motian (1981’s Psalm), Norwegian bassist Arild Anderson (1982’s A Molde Concert) and Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek (1982’s Paths, Prints).

He has since racked up appearances as a sideman on more than 300 recordings that cover a remarkable range of artists and styles. He’s cut pop and rock sessions for the likes of Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Marianne Faithfull, Rickie Lee Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Jackson, Loudon Wainwright III, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

He’s accompanied jazz legends like pianists McCoy Tyner and Paul Bley; bass players Ron Carter and Gary Peacock; trumpeter Chet Baker; drummers Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Andrew Cyrille; and saxophonists Charles Lloyd and Lee Konitz.

Some of Frisell’s most potent and revered recordings came as a member of the bass-less trio featuring saxophonist Joe Lovano and led by the late jazz drummer-composer Paul Motian, with whom he made 20 albums during their more than 30 years performing together.

Frisell was also a pioneer of the current craze for looping. He pioneered looping-delay-backward effects in the ’80s, then in the ’90s had some edgy encounters with distortion pedals during his time in the services of John Zorn’s cacophonous avant-noisecore improv band, Naked City.

He’s famously known for using the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay early in his career before switching in 1999 to the Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler, the looping pedal that has remained in his arsenal ever since.

Frisell has cut back on effects considerably in recent years, allowing his innate musicianship and melodic gifts to shine through with stunning clarity and intention. As ever, what he plays is surprising, rendered with a tasteful, painterly approach.

GP talked to Frisell about his latest Blue Note release, 2022’s Four, with pianist Gerald Clayton, saxophonist-clarinetist Greg Tardy and drummer Johnathan Blake. He also shed light on his philosophy of the instrument, his approach in a band setting and his current arsenal of guitars, which includes a blue Telecaster that belonged to his late friend and colleague Robert Quine, who made his mark with proto-punkers Richard Hell & the Voidoids (their 1977 album, Blank Generation, is a definitive anthem for that era) and during the early ’80s with Lou Reed (circa Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts and Live in Italy).

In Philip Watson’s recent biography on you, Beautiful Dreamer, he brings up your meeting with Robert Quine in the early ’80s at music journalist Chip Stern’s apartment on the Upper West Side. So essentially, we have Chip to thank for bringing you and Quine together, which led to your early experiments with the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay pedal. And the rest is history.

Yeah, Chip was right there when Quine brought it to a jam we had. And as soon as I saw it working, it was sort of this instantaneous thing. I just knew what to do with it. It was like it was made for me or something. And Quine was sort of amazed when I started playing it. His mouth was hanging open just watching me play. I swear, it was like... Somehow it was just all laid out. It just fit with the way my brain was working.

You’ve done so much over time with looping and backward guitar. But on the new album, Four, you only dial up looping on one tune, “Dog on a Roof.”

Well, I thought I was going to make it through the whole record without using that thing. I’ve been using it less and less lately.

Your 2019 album Valentine had some backward effects on it.

Yeah, a little bit. But the last few months of being out there playing, I haven’t used any effects at all. Reverb is about the only effect that I’m using these days.

What pedal do you currently use for looping?

It’s a Line 6 DL4 pedal. I had the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay for quite a while before that bit the dust. Then I had a DigiTech 8 Second Delay, which was also another thing that Quine introduced me to. He always was the first guy to get that new stuff. Then I got the Line 6, and that’s pretty much been it for me for 20 or more years.

But really, I’m sort of getting pretty burned out on effects. The last few months I haven’t been using anything at all. I did a solo gig a couple of months ago, and that’s the kind of situation where I always would rely on it so much. But I was proud of myself: I did the whole gig without using any pedals or anything, just playing by myself. That was sort of the true test, I guess.

It affected the way I hear structures in the music, so you carry that over into how you play without them. So if you take the box away, the effect is still in your imagination. Now it’s almost like I’m trying to get at some of that stuff that I would have done with the delay, but I’m just doing it with my hands.

You’re emulating the effect to the point where it becomes part of your vocabulary.

Yeah, which is kind of great. It’s like you learn something from the machine. It will teach you something that you figure out how to do yourself.

I went back and listened to your first album from 1982, In Line, and that is a startlingly singular statement at that moment. On the title track, for instance, there’s layers of guitars, lots of loops, no discernible time. It’s like a different language for the instrument back then, and it sounds as amazing and refreshing today as it did 40 years ago.

Wow. I haven’t listened to that in so long.

And that debut album introduced a tune that you would continue to play over your career, “Throughout.”

Oh, yeah. I feel like that was sort of the first song that I ever wrote that was like an actual bit of inspiration. It just came out in a couple seconds. I don’t know how that happened and I keep trying to get back to that. Something like that happens and you think, Man, it’s so easy to write a song. But then it’s like, Okay, try to write another one.

On the new album, you reprise your compositions “Good Dog, Happy Man,” “Monroe” and “Lookout for Hope.” What is your attitude about approaching your own tunes that you had previously recorded before?

As I get older, I notice that happening more. For example, I first tried to play “The Days of Wine and Roses” maybe 50 years ago, and as the years go by you keep discovering more and more about the tune. It keeps revealing more and more stuff. So I was aware of that happening with standard tunes.

But what’s weird about getting older, it starts happening with my own tunes. So if I come back to one of my own tunes that I haven’t played in a while, I’ll see it in a completely different way or I’ll notice things that are in it that I didn’t even know were there before. In this case of playing some of my old tunes on Four, it’s really thrilling for me to hear someone else interpret them.

I don’t know if these guys ever even heard those tunes before. I know Greg Tardy played “Monroe” before, but to hear what the other guys’ take on it would be hearing it for the first time, it just brings a whole new life to the song.

With anything I write, I don’t have any hard and fast idea of what it’s supposed to be. I just want it to be a way to get us into playing some music together, and I want to be surprised, and even startled sometimes. So it’s just nice to see what these guys have to say about it.

I’ve noticed that whether it’s you playing a standard or reinterpreting a tune of your own, you do this thing where you’ll leave out fragments of the melody or parts of a chord. Rather than a Joe Pass approach, where you’re putting all of the information in the tune – the basslines, the full chords, the melody – you’re picking and choosing a triad to suggest a chord or part of a line to imply a harmonic shape. It’s kind of a Monkian approach. Jim Hall did that too. Where does that come from for you?

Probably in everything I do there’s going to be some sort of Jim Hall influence in there. But also Monk. I think about Monk every day. He’s like the master of how you can stick with a melody and find infinite variety in that without leaving it, really. And that idea of leaving space: You don’t have to say everything. If the melody is really internalized in you, you begin to hear it the way Monk plays it, where you might just play a piece of the melody and internalize the rest. And it never goes away, but it becomes this springboard for all this other stuff to happen.

The other thing about leaving space in a song is that you want to hear what someone else has to say about it. You know, you can’t just keep pumping it out yourself. You have to leave room for other people to get a word in too. Like with this new album, it’s really more about four people just having a conversation. It’s not like there’s a real soloist anywhere. It’s more about just four people talking.

Four may be one of your least guitaristic albums, in a sense. You don’t even play on “Always,” which is a solo piano piece. And the tune “Claude Utley” is almost a drum showcase for Johnathan Blake. So the album is very conversational, and in some cases you leave the conversation entirely.

Yeah, and that’s the way it would be if you’re sitting around with some people and having a conversation. You know, you’re not talking all the time. You sit there and you check out what somebody else has to say. And then maybe you get your own thing in there at some point.

The dialoguing that you do with Greg Tardy on the Americana piece, “The Pioneers,” reminds me of the intimate duo album you did with him, More Than Enough. Maybe that one got overlooked when it came out in 2019 on the vinyl-only label, Newvelle Records, but it was a fantastic album.

Yeah, that was so great. And it is a little hard to find. Actually, the deal with Newvelle is, the masters revert back to the artist after a few years, so Greg was talking about putting it out as a CD in the near future. So probably more people might get to hear it, eventually.

It has some beautiful examples of you two playing on jazz standards, like Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” and Thelonious Monk’s “Ask Me Now,” as well as two of your own tunes, “Monica Jane” and “Worried Woman,” the latter which you also recorded on Four.

Yeah, Greg’s been such a great musical partner. I love playing with him. He played on that History, Mystery album that I made a while back [2008]. And we’ve done a lot of gigging together over the years. He’s amazing.

Your very tender “Waltz for Hal Willner” on Four is for the late producer, who you first worked with in 1981 on his Nino Rota tribute record, Amarcord Nino Rota. He subsequently produced several albums that you played on, including Marianne Faithfull’s Strange Weather, the Disney tribute album Stay Awake, Allen Ginsberg’s The Lion for Real, David Sanborn’s Another Hand, the Charles Mingus tribute album Weird Nightmare, Laurie Anderson’s Life on a String and Lucinda Williams’ West, not to mention your own albums that he produced, Unspeakable and The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.

Yeah, Hal passed so quickly from COVID during the pandemic, within the first month or so. Such a shock there. This piece “Waltz for Hal Willner” is actually an older thing that was part of this Allen Ginsberg tribute project that I did with Hal called Kaddish [which had its world premiere in 2012 at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory and was later performed at UCLA in 2013]. It was an almost nursery rhyme kind of song that appeared in this piece we had done for Ginsberg, and somehow that melody kept coming back to me. And I kept thinking about Hal with that one.

Kaddish was the first time where he specifically said, “I don’t want you to play guitar on it, I just want you to just write the music.” And that was Hal’s way of acknowledging that I could write music. It seemed like everything I did with him would present me with some opportunity, and it was like something that I didn’t even realize that I could do myself.

But Hal would just push me through the door, and I’d have to deal with it. It was always like that with Hal. He knew more of what I was capable of than I did. You know, he trusted me like crazy, from the very first meeting with him in 1980, when no one knew who I was and he asked me to play on that Nino Rota record he produced. He didn’t know me; he just had a feeling about me.

Another song on your new album, “Lookout for Hope,” was the title of your 1987 album. You also recorded it with bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron on 1991’s LIVE. Then you did it again with Victor Krauss and Jim Keltner on 1998’s Gone, Just Like a Train. It seems like a work in progress.

Yeah, originally the actual form of it was kind of complex. There was something in the form that was kind of odd and sort of awkward, so we didn’t really play it live very much back then. When I did that album with Victor Krauss and Jim Keltner, I completely dispensed with the whole counter line that was going underneath it. So I super simplified it and just opened it wide open, and that just made it easier to just play.

But then later on, I felt like I missed some of what I had originally written. So finally now, 35 years since I wrote that tune, I feel like I finally got it straight the way I wanted. It sort of solidified into this form that we’re playing on this new record. So “Lookout for Hope” was more of this struggle over all this time before I finally felt like I got it right.

It’s like “The Days of Wine and Roses.” You’ve probably played that a hundred different ways on gigs over time.

I hope so. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

You said in an interview with John Schaefer from the 2022 New York Guitar Festival, “Every note I play is like a question.” That’s a really interesting way to think about it. So in essence, you’re doing call-and-response with yourself.

Yeah, I really believe that: Every note is a question. It’s like on a micro scale and on a macro scale. If you take your instrument and just hit one note on one string, it’s like, “Okay, what are you going to do next?” But it will lead you to something else somehow.

And it’s the same thing even with a song: You learn one song and it’ll lead to something else. Like when we were just talking about “The Days of Wine and Roses,” I immediately started thinking about Henry Mancini’s other great tune, “Moon River.” It’s like they keep talking to each other somehow.

You play a phrase or play a little bit of a melody, and it’s like a conversation. Even with yourself, it’s a conversation. You play those first couple of notes on “The Days of Wine and Roses”… that’s a question. And then you answer that question, and it starts snowballing from there.

So the question could be, “The days?” And the answer could either be, “Of wine and roses,” or just, “roses.”

Yeah! Or just a blank response, like, “I don’t know.” Or think of some other completely unrelated response.

That’s what Monk did. He left out a lot of notes playing “Sweet Lorraine” or “Sweet and Lovely” or “Dinah.” When he was playing any standard, especially solo, he really was having a call-and-response with himself.

Definitely. With him, I started noticing how leaving out notes of a chord also is like a huge thing. That happened with Monk. I’m always learning from him. It’s like he’s constantly giving you a lesson or something.

A few years ago, I was playing his tune “Well You Needn’t” and I kept finding all these little details in it that I hadn’t noticed before. I’d find new things. Like I discovered that I was messing up one chord on the bridge. I was playing a Db7th chord, because that’s what everybody plays and all my schooling tells me that. And I thought, Okay, I think I’m finished now; I got everything totally together.

I finally learned this song. But then I found this Blindfold Test with Monk from Downbeat where they played him other people playing his songs. And so that chord in question – I think it was Phineas Newborn playing the song, and Monk goes, “No, no, you can’t play it that way. That chord shouldn’t have a seventh in it.”

So I was thinking it’s C, E, G, Bb, D, but he says it’s gotta be C, E, G, D. And when you leave out that one note, it sounds totally different. And that’s the opposite of what they teach you in Berklee, where it’s this thing about stacking everything up from the bottom to the top, like a pile of books or something. You just keep stacking the notes on top of each other. But if you start taking away some of the notes in the middle, all these other amazing things start happening.

Is it possible to teach a Bill Frisell methodology? Maybe the first lesson is: Leave out notes in the middle of a chord.

Yeah, with a lot of guitar books, it’s about, “How can you make this G major chord something or other sharp this, flat that, and make it into this gigantic six-note chord?” I mean, there’s so much information there. Again, I go back to Jim Hall. He played that way, where you try to pick out a couple notes within that whole rainbow of possibilities, and then it starts to set up a whole other rainbow, just with one or two notes.

Or take Monk: He’s just a master of the idea of you play the root of the chord and one or two other notes that can say so much. And that’s what makes Monk sort of almost possible on the guitar. It’s not like he’s playing all 10-fingered chords on the piano all the time, which kind of wipes out what you can do on the guitar. Instead, he makes it more accessible to where you can actually play what he played.

He played a low A, then he played a C# and a D#, and I can actually do that on the guitar. Part of that comes from just my limitations technically. If I could, maybe I would stick all the Joe Pass stuff in there too. But I can’t really do that, so I just try to make little stabs at it.

We all have to deal with our limitations. For me, I can’t actually physically play everything that I wish I could, so I’m going to just imply it or try to take a stab at something that hits close to home.

I guess the comparison would be Oscar Peterson, where he’s just blazing on the piano on every tune, filling in so much information, and Monk, where he’s leaving so much out that it’s hip. Two entirely different aesthetics on the same instrument, like you and Joe Pass.

I mean, I wish I could do that Joe Pass stuff. I remember one time I heard John McLaughlin in the mid ’70s. Now, I love John McLaughlin. He’s just a huge hero for me, right? But I went and heard him with Shakti, and I almost quit playing. I was like, I give up. It’s too much. I can’t. There’s no way I could ever do this. It was a terrible moment for me.

Then after a while, I was like, Well, fuck it! Whatever it is that I can do, I’ll just try to do it anyway. So I sort of gave up trying to play like John McLaughlin in that moment and I said, Okay, I’m going to just try to do the best I can do with whatever little bit I’ve got. And it sort of got me back playing again.

There’s quite a bit of room there between Jimmie Dodd and John McLaughlin.

[laughs] Yeah! And there are so many ways to express yourself. I mean, Robert Johnson couldn’t play like Segovia. And they’re both about as heavy music as you could possibly imagine.

That’s what’s so incredible about the guitar. When you think about it, Segovia, Robert Johnson, John McLaughlin, Jim Hall, Sonny Sharrock, Johnny Smith, Johnny Winter, Derek Bailey, Wes Montgomery and Jimi Hendrix are all playing the same instrument, tuned the same way. And it’s like, “What?!”

That Quine guitar that you recently played on tour, the blue Telecaster: Did you ever record with it?

The only time I recorded with it was on that McCoy Tyner record [2008’s Guitars]. On that record it was just a straight, normal Telecaster. But since then, I put a humbucking pickup in it. I don’t know if that’s sacrilegious, but I think Quine would be okay with it.

How many different instruments did you play on the new album?

Just two. Mainly, I played my Jay Black Telecaster. I also played a 1966 Telecaster on “Monroe,” but all the other stuff is done with that Jay Black Tele. I got it at the beginning of the pandemic, and it has these Jeff Callahan humbucker pickups in it, so it’s quiet. But they sound more like P-90s. It’s really a good guitar.

You saw Jimi Hendrix in concert, didn’t you?

Yeah! I saw him twice. The first time was in a gymnasium kind of room at a college near where I grew up. The audio of that gig [on February 14, 1968 at Regis College Fieldhouse in Denver] is actually available on YouTube.

It wasn’t the tour he did with the Monkees; it must’ve been his second tour in the States. Soft Machine was opening for him. Are You Experienced had just come out, and I didn’t know what was going on at this concert. It was just so shocking. I don’t even know if they had much of a PA; you’re just hearing the amps coming off the stage, basically. And the whole combination of the way he sang with the guitar and the massiveness of the sound... It was just too much to comprehend, for sure.

Then I saw him again the following year at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver [on September 1, 1968]. I think it might have been the last gig that he did with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, and I remember there was something going on, like he was upset about something during the concert.

By that time, my parents had moved to New Jersey and I was going to school in Greeley. I came to visit them during the Christmas break and ended up going to the Fillmore East to see Blood, Sweat & Tears [on December 28, 1969]. And the amazing thing was, some unknown band from Georgia was opening that night for Blood, Sweat & Tears called the Allman Brothers Band.

This was before they had recorded anything. They came out and were like, “Oh, hi, we’re kind of nervous being in New York for the first time.” It was their Fillmore East debut and they just fuckin’ kicked ass!

This was just a few days before Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys played the New Year’s Eve concert, which became the famous live album from the Fillmore East. I remember noticing on the Fillmore marquee, it said: “Jimi Hendrix, Dec. 31,” and I’m thinking, Oh, I already saw Jimi Hendrix. I don’t need this. Man, I wish I had gone to that!

You once told me of another eye-opening guitar encounter: seeing Larry Coryell for the first time at Red Rocks.

Yeah, that was another amazing experience. He was playing a Super 400 with a DeArmond pickup, and he was getting it to feedback and everything. At one point during his solo, he walked back to his amp and just sort of rolled the volume knob on the amp with his forearm. It was so loud and wild!

Hearing Coryell and having heard Jimi Hendrix just a few months before that too… Talk about having your brain explode!

Order Four by Bill Frisell here.

***The following originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of Guitar Player***

Certain guitar solos are infused with magic. They may or may or may not be technically challenging, flashy, or otherwise virtuoso, but they have that special something that sets them apart from what came before, and they typically alert guitarists everywhere that their world has forever changed. 

What’s more, those magic solos tend to inspire legions of guitarists to attempt to unlock their technical and tonal mysteries, and permeate the six-string community’s collective unconscious, re-emerging later as direct and indirect influences on individual players’ styles. Somewhat paradoxically, however, there is no consensus on which solos have achieved this iconic status.

When we began working on this story, we came up with a lengthy list of solos to include. Our first task was to set up some guidelines. We decided to limit the list to electric rock solos, along with blues and jazz-rock fusion solos that influenced rock. We also set a limit of one solo per artist.

At that point, there were still many more than 40 solos on the list, so we had to make some hard choices. To start, guitarists who were hugely influential overall, but couldn’t be tied to an ultra-influential solo – such as Tony Iommi and George Harrison – were cut. 

We then had to narrow down our selections to just one for each artist, which was difficult for someone like Eric Clapton, whose entries at that point included “Crossroads,” his cover of Freddie King’s “Hideaway” on the Blues Breakers album, and his historic wah workout on “White Room.” Once the smoke cleared, however, we had reached consensus. 

The solos are organized chronologically – including those that fall within the same year – because we thought it would be instructive to see how they relate to each other historically. 

We hope that you like we came up with and perhaps even discover an overlooked gem or two for yourself...

1. Elmore James “Dust My Broom” (1951)

Jimi Hendrix originally called himself Jimmy James and Maurice James in homage to Elmore, and every bluesman since the ‘50s – particularly slide players – owes something to the King of the Slide Guitar. 

Played in an open-D tuning (D, A, D, F#, A, D, low to high), probably on a Kay flattop or Harmony Sovereign with a D’Armond pickup, the slide hook on this tune, and the solo based on it, reappear countless times throughout blues and rock music.

2. Les Paul “How High the Moon” (1951)

The super-syncopated, slap-back soaked runs, chukka-chukka doublestops with bluesy bends, plucky cascading figures, and idiosyncratic ornamentations in Paul’s two solos helped propel this standard up the charts, and further established Paul as the most creative electric guitar player of his generation. 

It was recorded with his “old Epiphone” – a.k.a. “the Clunker” and “the Breadwinner” – with custom-wound hot pickups and other major modifications.

3. Scotty Moore “That’s Alright, Mama” (1954)

Armed with his Gibson ES-295 through a ‘52 Fender Deluxe, Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and their bud Elvis, had no idea what a firestorm they were about to create with this early single. 

Moore’s simple, to the- point style covered the drummer-less bases quite easily with a fat tone and swinging musicality, giving this rather hillbilly ensemble some dangerous sonic heft.

His break on “That’s Alright, Mama” inspired everyone from George Harrison to Keith Richards to Jimmy Page, as well as Danny Gatton, who never missed an opportunity to throw a Moore homage in the middle of one of his famed rockabilly rave ups. 

Moore’s barking double-stops and approximation of a tic-tac bass line on “Mama” are as hooky as it gets, making this solo one of the most important ever.

4. Eddie Cochran “Sittin’ in the Balcony” (1957)

Slinging a 1955 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins Hollow Body 'G'-branded guitar with a Gibson P-90 in the neck slot, Cochran, with his iconic presence and echo-drenched tones, hugely impacted early rockers – such as Lennon and McCartney, who bonded over Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” upon meeting in 1957 – and innumerable players thereafter, particularly Brian Setzer. 

The twangy solo on Cochran’s first hit, “Sittin’ In the Balcony,” crackles with the influence of his heroes Chet Atkins, Joe Maphis, and Johnny Smith.

5. Chuck Berry “Johnny B. Goode” (1958)

While some people might not consider this song’s intro a “solo,” it might be the most important rock guitar part ever recorded. 

The doublestops essentially usher in the post-Elvis rock era, and the tone and balls of this iconic part would echo in the playing of George Harrison, Keith Richards, Eddie Van Halen, and Angus Young... and that's just one tenth of one percent of the players who have copped these licks. 

Listen to it again. You’ll see.

6. Hank Marvin “Apache” (1960)

A primary influence on nearly every British guitarist of a certain age, Marvin created a dreamy, echo-y sound on this #1 U.K. hit that was achieved by playing his Stratocaster – the first in England – through a Meazzi Echomatic tape delay and a Vox AC30 tube amp. 

Marvin mostly used the bridge pickup, but picked near the neck, and palmed the vibrato arm to impart his trademark twang.

7. Freddie King “Hideaway” (1960)

Freddie (a.k.a. Freddy) King cobbled “Hideaway” out of parts lifted from tunes by Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy McCracklin, Robert Lockwood Jr., and even Henry Mancini. 

Between the breaks where he recycled bits of “The Walk” and “Peter Gunn,” King played stinging solos that he plucked on a P-90 equipped Les Paul using a plastic thumbpick and metal fingerpick. 

Eric Clapton did his own version of the tune on John Mayall’s 1966 album, Blues Breakers, and the success of “Hideaway” made it a launch pad for a number of other King instrumentals that would further his notoriety as one of the top blues guitarists of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

8. James Burton “Hello Mary Lou” (1961)

Having turned pro as a teenager on the Louisiana Hayride, Burton was a seasoned vet by the time he became the lead player in Ricky Nelson’s band, which was featured regularly on the TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. 

Burton was a great rock and roll player, as evidenced by his Chuck Berry-style solo on “Believe What I Say,” but he also inspired legions of pickers with his explosively twangy lead break on “Hello Mary Lou.” 

Burton’s playing on Merle Haggard’s early ‘60s hits like “Mama Tried” and “Swingin’ Doors,” inspired the late, great Roy Nichols, who said, “I learned a lot from Burton, and I copied some of his licks, but I couldn’t copy him to a ‘T’.”

9. Jeff Beck “Over Under Sideways Down” (1966)

Along with the Rolling Stones, no band inspired more hard-edged guitar-wielding maniacs than the Yardbirds. Beck’s playing on their classic garage rock anthem is, like much of his playing at this time, inspired by the groovy sounds of the sitar. 

Equal parts spacey modal madness and meth-infused pentatonic fury, it still ranks as some of Beck’s most inspired playing, and that says a lot. 

And not only was Beck’s otherworldly playing inspirational to a generation of guitarists, but his punky stage demeanor and nasty sonic streak (a ‘54 Fender Esquire into a Tone Bender fuzz and AC30), served notice to everyone that a new sheriff was in town, and he was kicking ass.

10. Albert King “Born Under a Bad Sign” (1967)

If Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix lift your licks lock, stock, and barrel, your influence has been spread very far and very wide. In fact, one can make the case that Albert King was the most influential King, just by virtue of the not-so-subtle tributes by his admirers. 

King Albert’s authoritative bends and economical phrasing are required study for anyone who wants to play blues-rock guitar. On this cut, the Velvet Bulldozer lives up to his nickname, making his Gibson Flying V moan, scream, and move mountains with sweeping bends and a stinging tone that delivers all of the nuances in his playing. 

It also proves that, even though SRV and Clapton could “do” Albert, they were never really even close. 

11. Eric Clapton “Crossroads” (1968)

This one is a giant among giants. Little did Slowhand know, after he walked off the Winterland stage in San Francisco, he had created a template setting the standard for expressive, lyrical, howling blues-rock guitar. 

Armed with a ‘64 Gibson ES-335 and a couple of non-master volume 100-watt Marshall stacks, Clapton’s first break is a textbook example of how to build a solo’s intensity, while the second manages to kick it up one more notch for maximum climax. 

Not a duff note in the bunch, impeccably phrased, and with a vibrato that’s as classy as they come, Clapton could have never played another note and he’d still be one of the most influential players ever. 

12. Jimi Hendrix “All Along the Watchtower” (1968)

One can only guess what sort of “light bulb” moment Jimi experienced when he first heard this tune from Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Maybe it was the biblical references in the lyrics, or the great melody – or perhaps just the wide-open space for improvising afforded by the four-chord progression. 

Whatever it was, the version that appeared on Hendrix’ Electric Ladyland album gave rise to one of Jimi’s most memorable solo outings. Playing soulfully and inventively using a wah and fuzz, Hendrix reinvented “All Along the Watchtower” to such a degree that it’s sometimes easy to forget who actually wrote the tune!

13. Peter Green “Black Magic Woman” (1968)

B.B. King once said of Green, “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” After establishing himself as a masterful blues stylist in John Mayall’s band, Green quickly evolved both as a player and a songwriter with Fleetwood Mac. 

On his D minor tour-de-force “Black Magic Woman,” Green pulls off an incredibly captivating melody, and his beautiful phrasing and soulful bending on a Les Paul with “magnetically out of phase” pickups was pure gold. 

Carlos Santana made the song a huge hit on Abraxas, and Green was also influential on Irish blues rocker Gary Moore, who would own – and eventually sell – Green’s famous Gibson. 

14. Robert Fripp “21st Century Schizoid Man” (1969)

Fripp’s serpentine solo on this alarmingly virtuosic track combines a supersaturated sustained tone with atypical intervallic movement, non-bluesy bends and trills, and note choices and phrasing that had more in common with Coltrane than Clapton. 

Playing a three-pickup ‘59 Les Paul Custom through a Marshall stack and probably either a Burns Buzzaround or a Colorsound Tone Bender, he recorded the seminal progressive rock solo.

15. Jimmy Page “Heartbreaker” (1969)

Selecting the most influential Page solo led to a heated debate. 

But the squawking tone of a ‘58 Les Paul into a Marshall SLP 1969 Super Lead, maniacal cluster picking, wicked hammer-ons and pull-offs, and behind-the-nut G-string bending in the first solo on “Heartbreaker” – not to mention the smoking second solo – explain why everyone from Brian May to Steve Vai to Steve Morse have hailed it as a definitive guitar solo.

16. B.B. King “The Thrill is Gone” (1969)

With a tone sweeter and thicker than molasses, B.B. King graced this song with one of his most emotive blues solos of all time. King knew what the tune called for in context of the highly produced album Completely Well (his first with strings), and it wasn’t about showboating. 

Far from it, judging by the way he grooves so succulently behind the beat. Besides being a big hit for B.B., “The Thrill is Gone” showed guitarists the power of playing slow and cool. 

In an era when Johnny Winter was introducing blues-rock shredding, B.B. King’s huge vibrato and deep soul defined what “playing from the heart” was all about. 

17. Leslie West “Mississippi Queen” (1970)

Leslie West’s massive and massively influential tone on Climbing! – which included “Mississippi Queen” – was created by playing through a Sunn Coliseum P.A. head and four 4x12 speaker cabinets. 

“The head had four microphone inputs and a master volume control, huge transformers and gigantic KT88 tubes, and the cabinets were loaded with Eminence speakers, which never hurt your ears, even with the treble all the way up,” West told GP in 2010. 

He was playing Gibson Les Paul Juniors at the time, and used a single-cutaway 1956 Jr. with a single P-90, strung with La Bella Electric Guitar strings (with a .010 banjo string for the high E and the other strings moved down one to create a light-gauge set) on the track. 

The song reached #21 on the Billboard charts, assuring that West’s signature sound was heard across the country and around the world.

18. Duane Allman “Statesboro Blues” (1971)

By 1970 Duane Allman and Dickey Betts had forged one of the most iconic guitar sounds of all time with their harmonized melodies on songs like “Revival” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” 

But as far as slide players went, few at the time got more acclaim than Duane himself, after the 1971 release of The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East. Duane’s slick phrasing and fat, singing tone on the opening track of the double live album was inspired by hearing Taj Mahal’s rendition of the song with Jesse Ed Davis on slide. 

Sonny Landreth, who remembers seeing the Allman Brothers at the time, recalls: “That huge tone that Duane got when he played slide on a Les Paul through a Marshall was a real game changer. I don’t remember anyone else who had a sound like that back then.”

19. John McLaughlin “Meeting of the Spirits” (1971)

Although he had already done revolutionary work with Tony Williams’ Lifetime, Miles Davis, and as a solo artist, McLaughlin’s combination of molten Gibson-through-cranked-Marshall distortion, impossibly fast and complex yet ultra-precise picking, and unique phrasing on The Inner Mounting Flame shattered all existing concepts of “electric guitarist” and lit the fuse of fusion.

20. Ritchie Blackmore “Highway Star” (1972)

Actually a harmonized pair of solos, the tasty bends, rapid-fire triplets, and whammy manipulations on this Strat-into-a-Marshall-amp (via a reel-to-reel tape recorder preamp) solo make it one of Blackmore’s most memorable.

The Deep Purple guitarist’s influence on legions of rock and metal shedders from Morse to Malmsteen to Mustaine is undisputable.

21. Billy Gibbons “La Grange” (1973) 

Gibbons made his mark on this classic shuffle with two solos. 

The first, done on a ‘55 Strat, enters screaming with that classic rear pickup Fender bite, before Gibbons flips to the front pickup for a swinging double-stop workout and some liquid pentatonic runs delivered with his impeccable sense of time and swing. 

But it’s the track’s second solo that the guitarist is most famous for, and the one that every hard rock player would study, due to Gibbons’ insane pinch harmonics. With his “Pearly Gates” ‘59 Les Paul, the Reverend squawks, grunts, and chokes out so many pinch harmonics that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so damm bad ass. 

22. Brian May “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975) 

Brian May’s touch, tone, and orchestral instincts have proven impossible to imitate, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. 

His majestic lines on this classic are quintessential May, with precise picking, impeccable phrasing, and a bold, loud sound. 

The solo’s placement in the mix was influential, informing how bands such as Boston and Styx featured their solos. You’ve got to assume Dr. May’s harmonized lines at the end of the song got Tom Scholz’s attention as well.

23. Larry Carlton “Kid Charlemagne” (1976)

Carlton was already a session legend known for his smooth-as-silk lines that were reminiscent of Wes, Pass, and Trane when he cut this Steely track. 

But when Mr. 335 combined a rock dude’s tone with a jazzer’s harmonic sensibilities, he created the standard by which every jazz rocker would be judged. 

Ask Steve Lukather, Robben Ford, or Mike Stern what impact this solo had on them. 

Alright then.

24. Carlos Santana “Europa (Earth’s Cry, Heaven’s Smile)” (1976)

Santana masterfully caresses the tune’s main melody with his trademark singing sustain and thick tone, never quite giving up the goods until the outro solo where he lets it all hang out in an outpouring of soulful yet wicked playing. 

He displays a fluid, tactile control at all times, and his tone is more open-sounding and less compressed than in recent years. 

And when he kicks the wah on, look out – he ratchets up the intensity tenfold, just when you think it can’t go any higher. Simply put, “Europa” is a study in pace, melodicism, and space – as well as good, old fashion burning!

25. Al Di Meola “Race with Devil on Spanish Highway” (1977)

Sure, there were people who could play fast before Di Meola, but nobody had made it such a central part of their deal before Big Al came along. 

Di Meola’s picking ability coupled with his sick, self-described “mutola” technique raised the bar for audacious shred and players interested in pushing the limits of picking. 

Far from being a pattern-minded monotone shredder, Di Meola’s Latin influences and his compositional sense have always made his displays of virtuosity supremely musical. 

And for all of the shred haters, Di Meola proved that the emotional impact of many notes is just as valid as a few well-placed ones. 

26. Eddie Van Halen “Eruption” (1978)

What can you say about this cadenza from hell? Cut in 1978, this has to be one of the most influential pieces of guitar playing ever. 

EVH took a Strat with a humbucker, an MXR Phase 90, and a plexi Marshall, and then played some supercharged Clapton licks that boggled just about every 6-stringer’s mind in the world. 

It was Van Halen’s two-handed tapping that truly grabbed everyone’s attention, however, and made this the most recognizable solo of the next two decades. “Eruption” made an impact on millions of rock dudes and seemingly every kid who set foot inside a Guitar Center.

27. Allan Holdsworth “In the Dead of Night” (1978)

As Bill Bruford put it, this solo was, “94 seconds of liquid passion married to a blinding technical facility that was to go down in the annals of rock guitar history. 

"All the hallmarks of his brilliant playing were there in this solo: poise, pace, melody, the Slonimsky interval jumps, the whammy bar, and all over a killer groove.”

28. Mark Knopfler “Sultans of Swing” (1978) 

When Mark Knopfler released this fingerpicked two-pickup masterpiece, he showed guitarists that you don’t need distortion or a plectrum to rock. 

With a Strat on the bridge and middle pickups, a Fender Twin Reverb and a Roland JC-120, Knopfler played two deft, bouncy solos that referenced Chet Atkins with snappy popped notes, crying bends, and clever arpeggios. 

Along the way he influenced just about every clean tone for the next 20 years. When people talk about an “out of phase” Strat tone, they’re talking about this tune.

29. Michael Schenker “Rock Bottom” (1979)

The 1970s was a great time for live records, with classics from Frampton, Lizzy, and Ted Nugent, but one of the sweetest solos to grace a double LP came from UFO’s Michael Schenker. 

The extended break on this tune has everything great about Schenker: melody, dynamics, tone for days, and burning. 

This lead would fascinate rockers all over the world, including George Lynch, Vinnie Moore, Akira Takahashi, and Kirk Hammett.

30. David Gilmour “Comfortably Numb” (1979)

Few solos can match the vibe of Gilmour’s work on this iconic piece. 

Playing a ‘79 black Stratocaster with a ‘62 neck and DiMarzios through Hiwatts and Yamaha RA-200 rotating speaker cabinets, Gilmour transformed what are essentially blues licks into a signature statement that affected the molecules in myriad musical minds. 

This is arguably his crowning achievement as a soloist.

31. Angus Young “You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)

It serves to reason that a song that is all about getting it on should have a solo that is sexy, right? 

Damn straight. 

Young’s turn on this global hit finds him harnessing his kinetic blues tendencies into a steamy, attitude-laden solo that is actually kind of funky. 

His tasteful major pentatonic flavorings as well as his gorgeous tone – thanks to a wound up old Marshall and a Gibson SG – are the icing on the cake of his impeccable groove, intonation, and phrasing.

32. Randy Rhoads “Crazy Train” (1980)

After Van Halen, it wasn’t easy for an L.A. rocker to make a mark, but Randall Rhoads did so in a big way on his debut with Ozzy. 

Rhoads took what he had gleaned from Mick Ronson, Gary Moore, and Bach, and synthesized it into this metal tour de force. 

He wasn’t the first guy to blend classical music and rock, but he was absolutely the gateway drug for players like Zakk Wylde and Tom Morello.

33. Stevie Ray Vaughan “Pride and Joy” (1983)

The second cut on SRV’s debut album, Texas Flood, “Pride and Joy” blasted onto the airwaves courtesy of a great melody, catchy lyrics, and a gamechanging solo in which Vaughan threw down a barrage of killer licks with a gargantuan tone from his Fender/Dumble rig. 

SRV’s deft songwriting and his Albert King/Hendrix-influenced style succeeded in making what was fundamentally a classic “tay-hass” shuffle into a huge AOR hit that every classic rocker is expected to cover in perpetuity. 

Bottom line is, after SRV came along, anyone who thought they could play blues with fire and passion got a schoolin’ the size of Texas.

34. Yngwie Malmsteen “Black Star” (1984)

Mike Varney’s rep as a finder of great guitarists was already solid when he wrote about a kid from Sweden with a funny name in 1983. 

Many players’ first exposure to Malmsteen was on this shred fest. With his blinding speed, dazzling classical arpeggios, gorgeous Strat-into-Marshall tone, and larger than life vibrato, he didn’t raise the bar for rock technique – he obliterated it. 

Yngwie changed the game forever with this one, just ask any rocker who has swept an arpeggio since then.

35. George Lynch “The Hunter” (1985)

Dokken's George Lynch has inspired countless rock and metal players for nearly 30 years with his perfect blend of structured melodicism and off-the-rails fury – all in the space of a 16-bar solo. 

This solo is a perfect example, as he eases into it with memorable, understated melodic motifs that are helped along with some thick-ass tone and sick vibrato. 

Halfway through, however, Lynch begins to turn up the jets. Alternate picking, sweep picking, and legato playing become one within a single winding phrase, giving him a sound and style that are difficult to ape. 

However, Lynch did show the way for shred-obsessed guitarists on how to structure a meaningful statement in the middle of a tune and leave an everlasting mark. In fact, his solos are the only thing that don’t sound dated about Dokken.

36. Kirk Hammett “Master of Puppets” (1986)

Kirk Hammett’s influences include his teacher Joe Satriani, Michael Schenker, and Thin Lizzy. And nowhere are those influences more prominent than on this tune. 

Hammett’s whammy bar work and speed picking would inspire countless kids to notch their mids, cram their theory, and play blazing solos over chugging grooves.

37. Joe Satriani “Always with Me, Always with You” (1987)

Satriani is obviously known as a master technician, but it’s his melodic side that has left the biggest imprint on guitardom. 

This sweet ballad showcases Satch’s singing tone, skillful ornamentation, and ability to blend the tasty with the jaw dropping. 

The reach of this solo is apparent in hundreds of instrumental guitar records, country ballads, movie soundtracks, and car commercials.

38. Kurt Cobain “Come As You Are” (1991)

Although he took about as many solos and Johnny Ramone, the late Nirvana guitar anti-hero played a memorable one in this song from 1991. 

Presumably using a Boss DS-1 for dirt and an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone chorus for the warbly modulation, Cobain simply quoted the vocal melody in a snotty, vibey way, and the kids went crazy. 

Suddenly, young players – many with a sanctimonious disdain for ‘80s-style wanking – were taking a break from strumming through songs and trying their hands at playing single-note lines.

39. Zakk Wylde “No More Tears” (1991)

Logic dictates that Zakk Wylde was doomed to failure when he got the gig with Ozzy. 

A blond kid with a Les Paul? Really? 

But then people got a taste of his huge tone, squealing harmonics, and rapid-fire pentatonics and a new star was born. 

On this tune Zakk channeled Rhoads, Billy Gibbons, and Frank Marino into a solo that was emblematic of the new generation of metalheads.

40. Dimebag Darrell “The Great Southern Trendkill” (1996)

The post-Van Halen, post-Randy Rhoads world was in dire need of a champion when Darrell Abbott came on the scene. 

He took the styles of those guys, mixed in some Ace Frehley, some Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a heapin’ helpin’ of moonshine and created the ass-kicking solo here. 

Dime made it cool to love Holdsworth, EVH, and Billy Gibbons all in the same song.

Jimi Hendrix has gone down in history as one of the most significant musicians of the 20th century. Even today, over 50 years on from his death, his influence on the electric guitar is still profoundly felt. 

For many he was the ultimate electric guitarist. Hendrix was a musical visionary, a virtuoso, and an incendiary live performer (literally), accomplished songwriter and a skilled wordsmith. He was perceived as a social and cultural icon, lauded by both music fans and by his not insubstantial peers and followers.

We asked an array of phenomenal guitarists about the influence that Hendrix had on their own guitar development and music in general. So enjoy this special tribute to a master as some of the greatest guitarists in the world explain what Jimi means to them. 

Starring, in alphabetical order: Jan Akkerman, Jennifer Batten, Joe Bonamassa, Kirk Fletcher, Marty Friedman, Eric Gales, Brett Garsed, Paul Gilbert, David Grissom, Steve Hackett, Allen Hinds, Greg Koch, Michael Landau, Ronni Le Tekro, Steve Lukather, Hank Marvin, John McLaughlin, Steve Morse, Oz Noy, Orianthi, Uli Jon Roth, Joe Satriani, Kim Simmonds, Andy Timmons, Walter Trout and Carl Verheyen.

But which one of them isn't even a Hendrix fan?

JAN AKKERMAN

JAN AKKERMAN

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I think he was a great musician and showman, but I had very different influences like Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery or the first rock pioneers, and all different styles because I used to play the accordion when I was six years old. So in short, NO second-hand blues licks. 

So in the beginning I didn’t pay too much attention. I did like "Hey Joe" and "The Wind Cries Mary" as compositions, but didn’t think much of it until I hooked up with Joachim Kuhn, a monster keyboard player and friend and totally into free jazz and a big fan of Hendrix. He emphasised the freedom of Jimi’s playing, which I loved, also especially the albums Electric Ladyland and Axis: Bold As Love. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

His style was very expressive to say the least. It is difficult to describe his technique because he didn’t care for that. I liked his tone on the Stratocaster. I like the sound of single-coils like Fender or my Gretsch White Falcon. One of the reasons I couldn’t play a Fender is because the controls are always in the way. Jimi didn’t have that problem because he played upside-down so the volume pot was on the other side of the guitar. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why? 

I still like "Hey Joe," "Spanish Castle Magic," etc, but I heard some experimental stuff which was pretty out as well. All in all he was one of the greatest artists in any scene. 

JENNIFER BATTEN

JENNIFER BATTEN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

He represented a movement in electric guitar of breaking the boundaries of what had gone before, and challenging expectations in the role of the guitarist in a band. With his presence the guitar’s potential became adventurous, dangerous, exciting, and wild. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar? 

He brought a renewed creativity as to what was possible with guitar effects, harmonic composition, tremolo bar use, and manhandling the instrument for a totally new level of entertaining engagement. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite Hendrix moment was going to a double or triple bill movie of all Hendrix films. It was total immersion when I was a young teen. My parents wouldn’t let me go see him live at my age, when my sisters went and saw a double bill with Jimi and Joplin. So it was as close as I could get. I’m sure that was a chunk of inspiration that pushed my desire along to continue down the guitar rabbit hole. 

JOE BONAMASSA

JOE BONAMASSA 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi Hendrix meant the world to generations. He was the total package. Player, showman and writer. As innovative and revolutionary as his playing was it’s the songs that stand the test of time. Great guitar playing needs a vehicle for it to do that. Jimi has great songs... period. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Jimi brought fire... He used his guitar as a weapon. Up until that point only Buddy Guy had weaponised the electric guitar. It was visceral and almost terrifying to listen to and watch as a young kid in his formative years. Beautiful tone, phrasing and use of chords. Game changer. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Jimi at Monterey... Black 1965 Fender Strat, a Marshall stack and a blackface Fender Showman amp covering Bob Dylan’s "Like A Rolling Stone." A life-changing moment for those lucky enough to witness it in person, and life changing for me. 

KIRK FLETCHER

KIRK FLETCHER 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi Hendrix has meant many things. When I was a kid I saw Hendrix as an amazing guitarist both in and out of the studio. A sonic genius way ahead of his time. His command of sound with this deep understanding of soul. 

As I grew older I started thinking about how he came up with his guitar parts and his lyrics, and also studio techniques. And then for myself becoming a songwriter, it made me view his work in another light. When I listen to Are You Experienced the man could write a song three minutes long, like "Purple Haze" or "The Wind Cries Mary," and it’s still played somewhere on radio to this day. 

Imaginative storytelling lyrics with the most beautiful melodic guitar in a three-minute pop song? I mean, wow! 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I feel he brought a whole new language to the guitar. His command of playing and blending so many styles and influences. There are so many branches to the Hendrix tree. For rock guitarists you have his use of the whammy bar and overdrive. 

I feel that the great funk movement of the 70s, groups like Funkadelic, were definitely inspired by Hendrix. I feel he wrote the book on funk-rock guitar soloing. His use of double- stops and rhythm guitar is a whole language. His melodic phrasing on ballads. It would be difficult for me to think of a music world without Jimi Hendrix’s contributions. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Picking one Hendrix song is like saying which one of your kids you love the most! I would say "Are You Experienced." I mean that song is from the first LP. It has poetic, lyrical content. Completely amazingly orchestrated guitar parts. And it still sounds so fresh to my ears. 

I think I love that album so much because I have often dreamed about hearing it when it first came out in 67. It’s like that great line in that Joan Baez song Diamonds And Rust: “You burst on the scene already a legend!” 

MARTY FRIEDMAN

MARTY FRIEDMAN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

When I was a kid, I was a massive fan of Uli Roth, Frank Marino and Robin Trower. I loved their playing and learned so much of it, inside and out. I was told that those guys were heavily influenced by Hendrix, so I checked him out. 

I understood the connection, but Hendrix just sounded very weak and undeveloped compared to those guys. Kind of like being used to an iPhone 11 and then someone tells you that if it weren’t for the iPhone 1, there would be no iPhone 11. This is true, and very important. But I’d still rather use an iPhone 11, figuratively speaking, especially as a teenager discovering music. 

I wasn’t there in the 60s when he did the things that inspired literally all of my guitar heroes. So I just never ‘got’ it. I was never into hippie, psychedelic, druggy mind-altering motifs in music so there was just never anything about him that attracted me to his music. How I filtered these same elements out of Trower’s and Marino’s music is anyone’s guess. Had I been around when Hendrix came out I might have felt differently. 

So even though I certainly know, respect and admire his monumental influence on music and great musicians, his music never connected to me personally. 

Recently I was on a long flight and listened to a huge collection of Hendrix to try to find something that I could get excited about. Believe it or not, I still couldn’t hear what everyone else is hearing. Maybe I’m missing something. 

People have this magical unconditional love for the guy, which is fantastic, but they never seem to point me towards some great piece of music that I need to hear from him. I’m always open to suggestions. I feel like it’s in the ‘you had to be there’ category.

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought so many great things to the guitar. Fashion, charisma, beautiful noise, aggressive blues playing like never before, wonderful angelic clean chord voicings, wild showmanship, and was an early innovator in experimentation with guitar sounds. 

You have to respect these things. He was a pioneer and was the first to do a lot of guitar things that are taken for granted 50 years later. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

In my first band, Deuce, we covered "Purple Haze" and I sang and played it. You can believe this or not, but I had never heard Hendrix at this point. The Mahogany Rush Live album was on loop in my world at the time, and could not have cared less that most of that album was cover songs. 

I adored Marino (still do) and when I discovered him, I probably got the same feeling that many guys in the 60s got when they discovered Hendrix. It’s all good. 

ERIC GALES

ERIC GALES 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It's hard to sum up. But what I can say is that he brought to the world things that had never been explored in music, period, and also the guitar. He was a major influence on every guitarist in the world that came after him and even during him. That was a domino effect that added to a lot of others’ styles, that led to them carrying on the inspiration and influence. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought things to the guitar that even still today leaves great minds puzzled. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

It’s hard to give a single answer as to what’s my favourite Hendrix song. But I’d have to say my earliest memory of "May This Be Love" was and still is one of the songs that emotionally moved me, even as a young lad. And as I said it still does. 

BRETT GARSED

BRETT GARSED 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

My older brother had the Isle Of Wight album and also the Woodstock soundtrack which I was listening to before I even attempted to play the guitar. So Jimi was feeding the urge to give it a go. 

I went on to learn the version of "All Along The Watchtower" from the live album note for note, and was astonished when I heard the studio version with all the overdubs. The live version sounded massive to me and it was incredible to think it was just three musicians creating that wall of sound. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

The obvious things are the authentic R&B influences and his experimentation with effects which he pretty much set the standard for. The level of musicality that he achieved using the simplest of tools is still a high bar that most players strive for. 

But, the thing that astounded me was the way he intertwined his voice with his guitar playing, almost creating a third instrument. He had total independence between what he was playing and what he was singing, and the two would weave in and out of each other, sometimes in harmony, unison or total counterpoint. It’s an incredibly difficult skill to develop and, once again, Jimi had it mastered. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

It’s Jimi’s performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" from Woodstock. Not because I listen to it constantly for enjoyment but because of what it taught me about the power of music and sound to make an emotional statement. 

At first I was intrigued with the feedback, whammy bar divebombs and just the overall pyrotechnics of it, but when I discovered that the whammy bar was imitating actual bombs and inside the other sounds were machine gun fire and people screaming, I learned that he was superimposing a song of national pride over the horror of the Vietnam war and all conflict in general.

I never listened to that song the same way again and it became so much more powerful to me, as did the man who created it. 

PAUL GILBERT

PAUL GILBERT 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi’s rock songs grabbed me first. I liked "Foxy Lady," "Purple Haze," "Spanish Castle Magic," and "Crosstown Traffic." My uncle Jimi (who changed the spelling of his name to match Hendrix), recommended an album called War Heroes. I bought that, and listened to an instrumental called "Midnight" a lot. 

My parents also had a live record from the Monterey Pop Festival. One side was Otis Redding. The other side was Jimi. So I heard Jimi’s live versions of "Like A Rolling Stone," "Rock Me Baby," and "Wild Thing." 

When I was around 12, my mom took me to a midnight movie showing the Jimi Hendrix documentary. The clip of Jimi playing "Rock Me Baby" at Monterey was one of those breakthrough moments, when I suddenly ‘got it’. 

As time went on, I started to love Jimi’s rhythm playing with a cleaner sound as well. "Wait Until Tomorrow," "Castles Made Of Sand," and the intro of "Bold As Love" are all so beautiful. 

Now that I’m older, I love to listen to Jimi as an improviser. He was fearless, soulful, melodic, angry, gentle, and seemed to be singing through the guitar. Sure, there were some noises and ‘wrong’ notes. But when you blast a hole in the side of a mountain, some boulders are gonna fall. And he was ‘chopping it down with the edge of his hand’. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought a voice to guitar. He used enough volume and distortion to make the guitar sustain in the way that a human voice can. And he brought the elements of expression that a voice has; sliding, bending, contrasts of volume, texture, and length, and the best vibrato anyone had heard in 1966. 

Traditional guitar was NOT built to do this. The guitar is designed more like a lute, where chords are fretted, and the strings are plucked. It’s sort of a portable harpsichord, and the great fingerpickers from Segovia to Chet Atkins, played it masterfully like that. 

B.B. King, Otis Rush, Freddie King, and other early electric blues players certainly opened the door for what Jimi did. But Jimi’s songs, live performances, and use of sustain, took the guitar ‘as a voice’ into sounds that made everything before him seem outdated. 

Jimi said, “And you’ll never hear surf music again.” And when you hear the guitar intro of The Beach Boys’ "Surfin’ USA," it sounds pretty stiff, compared to the world that Jimi created. 

I still love The Beach Boys, and I don’t mind when guitar players play guitar like a guitar. But I must admit that a good portion of my time is spent trying to get my guitar to sing, like Jimi did. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

The first that comes to mind is "Killing Floor" live from Monterey Pop. It was Jimi’s chance to win an audience in the USA, and he was in competition with The Who. 

With that much pressure and adrenaline, most players would get thrown off balance. But Jimi launches into his opening number like a rocket. His aim is perfect. He is painting with a big brush, but still achieving detail. 

I can just imagine Pete Townshend watching in the wings, and thinking ‘Holy #$%!’ And Jimi hasn’t even turned on his distortion pedal yet. Look out! 

DAVID GRISSOM

DAVID GRISSOM 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I was in junior high deep into The Stones and Beatles when I got Hendrix In The West. It was like finding the Holy Grail. I immediately got a wah-wah and obsessed on the live version of "Voodoo Chile" until I got close to copping some of it. 

I dreamed of having a Stratocaster and dug into the studio albums. Just as important to me was being inspired to discover Jimi’s influences. I was lucky to take lessons from a guy who turned me onto the three Kings and helped me connect the dots to Jimi. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I think he changed electric guitar playing the same way Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker changed jazz. He drew from a very deep well. Not only was his playing mind blowing, he wrote really great innovative songs that covered a huge range of styles, tones, and dynamics. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

How do you pick just one? On the more intense side of things, the studio version of "Spanish Castle Magic" slays me. The moment that nearly brings me to tears every time I hear it is the solo on "May This Be Love." I love that softer, melodic side of Jimi. 

STEVE HACKETT

STEVE HACKETT 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Initially I thought he came across with a rare animal power, but when you look more closely, his lyrics are full of poetry. Sometimes the words are very dark with lots of references to imminent death and allusions to the next world. He played like a reanimated zombie, with a haunting otherworldly aspect. 

His showmanship seemed to come naturally to him. No-one ever moved as gracefully with the guitar in hand, as if he possessed this extra electric limb. I feel it was his fluidity as well as his innovation and risk-taking that impressed and influenced me. His playing was heady stuff for me as an aspiring teenage rocker. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Hendrix was a bluesman with a very big difference. I knew his guitar tech, Eric Barrett, who said that Jimi played through feedback constantly, like a weapon permanently set on stun. The spacecraft aspect of his playing was hugely inspiring. He was always going to take you on a trip to some uncharted part of the universe. His playing skirts the limits of earthly experience. It’s virtually a shamanic inner journey. 

He also brought many production ideas to the guitar. Somehow you feel at Woodstock that he was trying to register his protest at the falling bombs on Vietnam, managing to say as much with his guitar as other protest songs had done with words. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

I think "Purple Haze" is my favourite Hendrix song. It’s a very cleverly written tune, and is full of unexpected twists. It defines the term psychedelic. Both the angular guitar riff and the opening dissonant chords give you that feeling of Iron Man Cometh. 

But there’s vulnerability too in the lyric, with the idea 
of confusion running through it. Although "Purple Haze" is a short song, he often played it live with extended moments which sometimes literally did "kiss the sky," to quote the lyric. 

His impact on music was huge. A man who didn’t need a light show. For me it was just enough to watch the alchemy of his fingers, his dexterity and the way he danced with his instrument. 

ALLEN HINDS

ALLEN HINDS 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I remember my older brothers and sisters buying Are You Experienced. First thing was, “holy crap, this is the coolest guy I’ve ever seen”, so the nostalgia factor is high. He could play really well and I fell in love with the songs. Even though I loved the Beatles, he was the first guitarist I wanted to emulate. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought a Marshall amp and psychedelic sensibility to the blues and R&B. I suspect even to him the acceleration of volume and feedback with amplification was overwhelming. I think he was just holding on for dear life, in a great way. No one had heard anything like that before! 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

For the playing alone I love Band Of Gypsys the most. Listen to his solo in "Machine Gun." He was so creative. You could extract some of his improvised phrases and make complete song melodies. 

He was like a jazz player in that sense and could create something from nothing. You just waited on the edge of your seat for the next burst of emotion. Still the very best! 

Some confuse his curiosity and adventurism as sloppy at times, but I don’t hear that at all; he was searching and going where no man had gone before. 

Just imagine if he were here now! 

GREG KOCH

GREG KOCH 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi was and is my main inspiration. He was a true innovator as a guitarist, songwriter, performer and purveyor of sonic mayhem. My chordal approach as well as blues playing is heavily influenced by Jimi’s. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Of course the way he manipulated the whammy bar, or Mr Wiggles as I like to say, along with feedback and his creative use of effects from the Octavia to the Uni-Vibe greatly expanded the emotive range of the electric guitar. 

His greasy blues phrasing and extraordinary rhythm playing really has left an indelible mark on everyone since. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

It’s hard to narrow it down to one. Let’s just say if I had to bring one record to a desert island it would be Axis: Bold As Love. 

MICHAEL LANDAU

MICHAEL LANDAU 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I first heard the song "Purple Haze" when I was eight years old. We were driving around in my mother’s car and when it came on the radio it scared me to death. But after I heard the song a few times, it started to have a calming affect on me and I couldn’t get enough of it. 

His music and his guitar playing demonstrated all of the different sides of human emotion in such a beautiful way. His influence has always been enormous. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He reinvented it, plain and simple. He showed everyone a completely new and fresh approach to playing techniques and sonic possibilities that had never been done before. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"Castles Made Of Sand" would be one of my many favourites. Here Jimi was mixing R&B style guitar playing with abbreviated jazz voicings as only he had done, and the tone was just so raw and beautiful. The sentiment of the lyrics on that song are beautiful as well... it’s almost like a nursery rhyme, but for grown-ups. 

I also love the out-take of "Blue Suede Shoes" from the Loose Ends record. You can really hear the joy, the energy, and the fun he was having with Buddy Miles in the studio. Such a great moment. 

RONNI LE TEKRO

RONNI LE TEKRO 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I started playing the electric guitar in 1976, just a few years after Jimi passed away. At the time 1970 seemed like 100 years ago, being 13 myself. My uncle gave me "The Wind Cries Mary." It was a revelation. 

I loved his voice, playing and image from day one. Later, when I was able to hear more material I instantly understood that Jimi was one of a kind. His ability to push the guitar into new landscapes stunned me and has been a big inspiration. Especially his extensive and abusive use of the vib-bar as well as implementing large doses of feedback. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Jimi revolutionised the electric guitar. Still I haven’t heard another guitar player with such rhythmical feeling. His solos and playing are so incorporated into his compositions. It’s reaching a higher dimension when you play, sing and compose like that. He was driving the band to magical heights. 

My favourite line-up must be with Mitchell and Redding. Those guys certainly knew how to play freely on the highest level. It sounds like it’s out of control. 

I love that Jimi also gave all guitar players a warning about what could happen to you if you indulge in chemical drugs. Some didn’t take the warning, unfortunately. They sensed that drugs where the driving force in Jimi’s music, but like Jimi they couldn’t handle it. 

His image and live performances inspired and inspires most of us. That being said, I have always been trying to create my own sound and way of playing the guitar. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite song is "The Wind Cries Mary," simply because it was the first track I ever listened to. It’s something about that song that still gives me the shivers. The production is so full of life and feeling. I think his opening guitar line has probably been copied a million times. 

Of his live performances my favourite is Isle Of Wight festival. You can sense it’s getting closer to the end but little did Jimi know. He is delivering a show out of hell. 

Later I learned to love Frank Marino and the Mahogany Rush. I think he is the guitar player that developed and carried Jimi’s legacy the best. Check out "King Bee" from his Live album. I think Jimi would have been proud.

STEVE LUKATHER

STEVE LUKATHER 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It was the aftershock of the Beatles changing the world, then an alien came and landed on our planet to give those that understood, the truth. All that before he was 27 years old. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

A total reinvention of the possibilities. He could make a statement with his use of feedback and amazing use of chords and R&B stylings which he made his own. Very loudly! It’s like nothing else. I’m not sure anyone could make an impact like that afterwards. 

EVH did but he was not on a cultural level because Jimi was part of the 60s anti- establishment scene. Black man with a white band accepted by everyone but I never saw colour, just the sound. It was a colossal sound; the anger and intensity of "Machine Gun" through to the softness of "The Wind Cries Mary."

Goodness knows what he could have gone on to have done!

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Impossible. They are all a huge part of my growing up. Kids today might not ‘get it’ but remember this was 1966! NOTHING like it had happened before or indeed after it. 

HANK MARVIN

HANK MARVIN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It was probably early 1967 when I first heard the Jimi Hendrix Experience. They were performing their first single, "Hey Joe," on Top Of The Pops and, as we say in the weather bureau, I was blown away. 

I loved Jimi’s guitar solo, blues but not as we know it and with so much feeling. Jimi opened the door to a whole new world of guitar playing. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I’m not aware of anyone before Jimi using feedback in the way he did, or using the whammy bar to create effects so extreme that it probably contributed to global warming. 

He also showed the music world that the electric guitar could be played with the teeth, used as a fireplace and in the right hands be a wonderfully expressive instrument. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

The opening riff on "Purple Haze" is hard to beat, but then there’s the live version of "Red House" on Hendrix in the West. I love those deceptive bends. 

JOHN McLAUGHLIN

JOHN McLAUGHLIN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi changed the electric guitar forever. I was exposed to the acoustic guitar playing of Muddy Waters at the age of 11, and it was revolutionary. Jimi started a revolution 25 years later. Now while I was exposed to Muddy, Bill Broonzy and other great blues players at an early age, I got captured by jazz from 15 years old. But on hearing Jimi for the first time, I heard a guitar being played in a way I’d never heard before. 

At the same time I could hear the profound influence of Muddy Waters not only in the playing but in Jimi’s singing. It was completely new and yet I could hear the history behind his playing. 

I mention my love of jazz but there’s a connection to Jimi here. Jimi revolutionised the sound of the guitar using distortion to bring in harmonics; by the mid 1960s, John Coltrane began to bring in harmonics into his sound and, while the two styles of Coltrane and Jimi are really diverse, there is something very deep that connects them. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

By renewing the influences of the great Mississippi blues players, Jimi brought history up to date with a concept that was not only contemporary, but remains contemporary today. 

There are great musicians who have a powerful impact on other musicians, but to create a new concept of playing is even more significant. I think it’s safe to say that the concept Jimi introduced, changed the way of playing the guitar for all time. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite piece from Jimi is his interpretation of "The Star Spangled Banner." With a guitar, an amp and a wah-wah pedal, he created not only the most amazing interpretation of the American National Anthem, full of irony, but the most powerful anti-war piece of music I’ve heard to this day. 

STEVE MORSE

STEVE MORSE 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

I loved the way that he created mind-bending, unreal atmospheres with his studio recordings; the backwards solos, the echo effects, Rotovibe, wah-wah, octave box, slide effects, whammy bar, etc. 

I was just a young teenager and I just wanted to play "Purple Haze" and "You Experience" solos upstairs in my room with my amp cranked up to get feedback. That is partly how I developed an approach where I mute all the strings but the one I am playing, in order to limit the feedback only to the string I wanted. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

All the previously mentioned sounds (backwards solos, echo effects, Rotovibe, wah-wah, octave box, slide effects, whammy bar, etc), but also strong phrasing, soulful, powerful bends, and melodic rhythm playing. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

That would be "Are You Experienced." In fact, I wrote a ‘in the style of Hendrix’ piece called "Well, I Have” as a tribute. The ending part has the backwards solo too! 

OZ NOY

OZ NOY

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Hendrix is the most influential and important electric guitarist that ever lived. His tone, touch, energy, musicality and fire to me are what rock-blues electric guitar is. I loved Hendrix’s songwriting, and his sense of rhythm influenced so many guitar players in all different styles of music from rock to funk to R&B to gospel. 

Also, to me he is one of the greatest blues players to ever lived, as every time he played a slow blues it was special. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He opened the doors to electric guitar in such a huge way, that I don’t think anybody has more influence on the instrument than he did. The tone of both his rhythm and lead guitar is still untouchable. His soloing was obviously amazing, the depth of his blues roots mixed with this new-age rock feel using very loud amps that created a lot of sustain. 

I don’t think any of that existed before him, and if it did it wasn’t on such an extreme level. He was also a very special rhythm guitar player. The use of wah-wah, fuzz and Univibe set the bar for those sounds to this day, really. 

Hendrix didn’t only change music, he changed our culture! 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"Castles Made Of Sand." I also love the intro and the actual song and the guitar tone of "Spanish Castle Magic." I love the rhythm guitar playing; it’s hard to choose one! 

ORIANTHI

ORIANTHI 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix was when my dad put on the Woodstock video. I was 11 years old. I was blown away. The freedom in his playing and the sounds he created inspired me so much. He was such a force. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He opened people’s minds. He was an innovator and was constantly searching. He made the guitar sound like no other. He changed the way people heard it. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"The Star Spangled Banner" from Woodstock. It’s just an amazing moment. I also love the acoustic performance of "My Train A Coming."

My favourite tune is "Voodoo Chile" though. I cover it a lot. 

ULI JON ROTH

ULI JON ROTH 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi was my most important influence, artistically speaking, when I was younger. I can’t even begin to put into words how much I have learned and soaked up from that man. 

To this day, his music doesn’t get old, but always sounds fresh and incredibly alive. His contribution to the world of guitar playing and rock music is unbelievably important. Of all the people in rock music, Jimi was simply the most unique and most visionary. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He brought a completely new approach, both in terms of playing as well as forging a sound which had never been heard before. His playing was always so much more than ‘just’ guitar playing, though. 

There was always something deeper, something more meaningful, something mysterious behind the notes. He was one of the great inspired artists of all time, and because of that he will be remembered forever. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

There are so many moments that are totally inspired and unique, but if I have to pick one, it would be Axis: Bold As Love. It doesn’t get better than that. 

JOE SATRIANI

JOE SATRIANI 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi’s heart and soul were evident on everything he played. This had the most profound effect on me as a young player. I still get the feeling that he surrendered himself to the music every time he performed. 

For Jimi, every song was a unique opportunity for expression, exploration and exposition. Even though he was a true showman, he still strove for something new, honest and ‘of the moment’. 

His skills as an improvisor were spellbinding, and convinced me as a young musician that that very skill had to be part of my life’s pursuit. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He showed us that the electric guitar could be played with far more expressiveness than previously attempted. 

He innovated with his fingers, hands, and his whole mind and body on every song he played. 

He proved that the sound of the guitar was a vastly larger tool for musical story telling. 

He showed us that you could play like a virtuoso without reminding the audience of anything that sounded like scales and exercises. 

I could go on... 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Every time someone asks me this question I find a new answer. The problem is, I love all of Jimi’s songs! For sheer groundbreaking electric guitar brilliance it has to be "Machine Gun" from the Band Of Gypsys: Live At the Fillmore. For sheer beauty maybe it’s May This Be Love or 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be). 

But, I can’t ignore the magic captured on film at the Monterey Pop Festival when Jimi talks to the audience and introduces the Bob Dylan song "Like A Rolling Stone," and then proceeds to reinvent it, elevate it, and destroy it, along with his guitar! 

His innocence, boldness, naivety, audacity, musicianship, showmanship, are all gloriously on display in this once-in-a-lifetime and beautifully captured moment. 

KIM SIMMONS

KIM SIMMONS (Savoy Brown) 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi made me focus on who I wanted to be as a guitarist. He was so flamboyant and multi-faceted that I knew I couldn’t compete on that level, so I had to look within and find my own personality and style. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

Jimi’s guitar playing was Arabesque. It was a mixture of rock, blues, gospel and jazz. He brought a sensuality to the instrument that we hadn’t seen before. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

"Foxy Lady" comes immediately to mind. It was on his 1967 debut album and the song brings back happy memories of London in that time period. 

ANDY TIMMONS

ANDY TIMMONS 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi’s life and music are a continuous source of inspiration and encouragement to explore growth and creativity in a most loving and spiritual way. His true beauty of character emanated through his guitar and his songwriting. Jimi also spoke with the same beauty and eloquence with which he played his guitar and wrote his poetic music. 

I encourage you to seek out interviews and documentaries to learn more about the incredible human Jimi was. And is!

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

I think we largely take for granted much of Hendrix’s innovation in technique and tone today. You have to consider what he did, when he did it. Think about the other music that was happening in late 1966 and early 1967! 

His masterful command of chordal embellishment, his incredibly soulful bending, his array of tones, his control of feedback, his use of the vibrato bar, his ferocious and charismatic live performances. 

All of these elements were certainly beginning to be implemented by other performers and players, but nobody had put it all together in such a highly developed fashion like Jimi. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

Though I have many favourites ("Freedom," "Angel," "May This Be Love"), "All Along The Watchtower" has always stood out as a really special Hendrix recording. It’s at once dark yet beautiful, haunting yet uplifting. An incredible reading of his hero Bob Dylan’s beautiful lyric, Bob’s precedent gives Jimi even more confidence vocally. The guitar tones and incredibly melodic soloing take you into the stratosphere! 

All that being said, my favourite moment was easy to pick. His performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock is legendary on so many levels: the tone, approach and arrangement, the protest of the war, the sombreness and finally the beautiful love of his country despite its deep flaws. 

The moment? Check out the melody that magically appears at 2:10 in the midst of chaos, anguish, air raids, bombs, missiles and terror. Almost like permutated taps. Sombre yet hopeful. 

WALTER TROUT

WALTER TROUT 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

It’s monumental. He took electric guitar playing to an entirely new place. I was 15 and this friend of mine said, I have this album by this new guy, Jimi Hendrix, come on over. I was into Michael Bloomfield and Scotty Moore and James Burton, and I went over and he put on the first Hendrix album. I said, “It doesn’t even sound like a guitar, this is the worst shit I ever heard!” 

Then I realised he’d taken what the rest of the world knows about the electric guitar further than anyone had ever taken it. And to this day he’s my favourite guitarist. But it was so new that it was shocking to hear it. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar?

He was huge once I came around to what he was doing. I had to listen to "Red House" before I realised he’s playing the blues. Even though he was pushing the limits, everything he was doing was based in blues, and R&B and soul music. 

He’s putting it all together and playing it through an electric guitar like no one had ever done before. I think Jeff Beck is the world’s greatest living guitar player, but Jimi was the ultimate. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why?

My favourite track is "Voodoo Child." But I mean the long slow jam version, not the "Slight Return" that everyone plays ad nauseam, every club band. But with that slow blues version, everyone is in the studio and they’re just having this great blues jam.

 Steve Winwood is on Hammond B3 I think, and they just do this long, slow, 14-minute blues jam. For me, his guitar playing on there is the ultimate of everything that he ever did. 

CARL VERHEYEN

CARL VERHEYEN 

What did Jimi Hendrix mean to you as a player?

Jimi Hendrix is a huge influence on my rhythm guitar playing. His concepts and chord voicings have saved me countless times in the studio when searching for a part. All you have to do is learn these five songs: "The Wind Cries Mary," "Castles Made Of Sand," "Electric Ladyland," "Bold As Love," and of course "Little Wing." 

You’ll see that his rhythm licks in D Major are the same as the ones he uses for the relative Minor which is Bm. Learn the rhythm licks and study this Major-Minor concept and you’ll be a much better rhythm guitar player. 

What do you think Hendrix brought to the guitar? 

Jimi was a pivotal musician in the 20th century. Besides his R&B training with Little Richard’s Upsetters, he draws on the Delta blues players’ deeply moving tradition of acoustic blues. That tradition migrates up the river to Chicago where players like Muddy Waters electrify it, and one-chord Delta blues songs become Catfish Blues and Two Trains Running in Muddy’s band. 

When Hendrix arrives on the scene mid-century, he turns them into psychedelic rave-ups like "Voodoo Chile" and "Machine Gun," thus carrying the tradition into mainstream rock. Obviously his use of distortion, effects and recording techniques were huge breakthroughs for the electric guitar, but I believe his contribution to popular music will be remembered equally for its deep roots in American blues. 

What’s your favorite Hendrix moment, and why? 

It’s really hard to pick one because I love "May This Be Love" as much as "Who Knows" from Band Of Gypsies. But the long version of Voodoo Chile stands out for me because Jimi is baring his soul on this record. Tuned down a whole step, his huge Strat sound completely fills the room. 

When I recorded with Jimi’s engineer Eddie Kramer a few years ago, I asked him how he got that sound on this ‘live in the studio’ recording. Eddie said, “That was Jimi’s amp bleeding into all the mics: Steve Winwood’s Leslie cabinet mic, Mitch Mitchell’s drum overheads, Jack Casady’s bass amp mic, and the vocal mic.” I said, “Weren’t you worried about phasing issues?” He replied, “We got lucky!” 

I hold this up as one of the greatest Stratocaster sounds of all time. Very lucky indeed! 

Originally published in Guitar Techniques issue 314. Subscribe to Guitar Techniques in print or digital.

Innovator, technical avatar, eternal seeker – all of these terms apply to the extraordinary John McLaughlin, who helped pioneer jazz-rock in the early '70s with the high-energy Mahavishnu Orchestra.

While many guitarists were trapped in a harmonically bleak, pentatonic prison, McLaughlin's depth enabled him to freely explore the musical landscape.

McLaughlin defies categorization. Rooted in jazz, he was influenced by Django Reinhardt, Tal Farlow, and Jim Hall, trumpeter Miles Davis, and saxophonist John Coltrane.

At the same time, he was fascinated with classical composers from Beethoven to Bartok. 

Later, he became interested in Eastern philosophies and music, studying rhythmic theory and instrumental technique with several Indian masters.

These factors, intermingled with elements of rock and blues guitar, helped shape his resilient approach to improvisation and composition, leading him to record with musicians as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, bassist Jack Bruce, and Indian violin virtuoso L. Shankar.

In this fascinating interview extract from the September 1985 issue of Guitar Player, McLaughlin talks creativity, artistic evolution and the unifying power of music.

Do contemporary pop and jazz reflect the degree of creativity that they have in the past?

On the whole, no. There seems to be a kind of hiatus going on. Today, rock and jazz are rhythmically, harmonically, and experimentally inferior to what was happening even as far back as the '60s.

But this kind of backlash against intellectuality of any kind is more of a sociological problem than it is a musical one.It's  cyclical, and a more receptive mood will return. 

However, you can't deny that a lot of pop music – including the type of easy-listening funk by so-called jazz musicians – is terribly banal. It's superficial, and it is not even covertly commercial; it's unashamedly blatant.

Jazz is vital, living music that should be about life. Don't misunderstand me, because at the same time I don't knock any kind of music. I like Billy Idol, you know what I mean? 

There's room for everybody, and I like to think that if it's music, then it's good. It's the most profound spiritual power on earth. It sure beats the hell out of killing people.

You have a reputation as a great technician. Can the intellectual and technical aspects of music get in the way of speaking from the heart?

Not when the artist is wholly integrated in himself, which is something we're all working for. 

I'm alive. I have an intellect, a heart, and a physical side, and I want to integrate all three to be whole.

In the process of evolution, you may emphasize one more than the other, but that is perfectly normal because you have to live life in order to integrate yourself.

It's a lifelong work because it presupposes evolution as a human being.

You are also known for exploring different musical areas. Does that result from curiosity and the urge to experiment, or is it due to frustration and restlessness?

It's not due to frustration and restlessness. It's from my love of music. If I hear something great, I want to know more about it.

When I hear a great musician, I can feel his life and his elegance and his eloquence inside the music, and that makes me want to know more about him. Whether it comes from east, west, north, or south, music is my language.

When I first heard some of the great Indian musicians, I had an enormous desire to know them better.

To be able to play with them is satisfaction you cannot imagine, although I don't really play their way. I'm able to communicate with them because I know the rules governing their approach.

Order John McLaughlin’s Liberation Time here.

John McLaughlin’s new album, Liberation Time, is his response to the tribulations of the past two years, in a world turned upside down by Covid. With the cancellation of two tours, and finding himself with time on his hands in Monaco, where he has lived for many years, McLaughlin was, by his own admission, starting to go crazy.

Out of his frustration came inspiration, and he started to create a collection of positive, upbeat and joyful tracks that were a celebration of life. Indeed, joy is something central to McLaughlin’s existence. Inspired by nature and life, he finds positivity in the wonders of the universe.

That optimistic and grateful attitude is expressed perfectly on an album that contains some of the guitar master’s most direct and affecting music.

No stranger to readers of Guitar Player, McLaughlin has been a mainstay of the jazz and fusion scene for more than 50 years. Prior to his profile-raising tenure with Miles Davis, McLaughlin had been a member of Brit jazz pioneer Graham Bond’s band, and had worked as a session guitarist on numerous hit singles in 1960s Britain.

Leaving Davis to start his own band, McLaughlin ultimately took fusion to the next level with the global success of Mahavishnu Orchestra. Always a musical purist, he followed that by forming Shakti, exploring the boundaries of Indian music and jazz. Although the band was not as commercially viable as Mahavishnu, McLaughlin was undeterred; his only focus then, as now, has been musical integrity.

He has continued to be prolific. Always active on the live and recording fronts, he shows no signs of slowing down and continues to follow his muse regardless of commercial considerations or musical fashions.

Given that Liberation Time was recorded during lockdown, did everybody do their parts remotely?

Yeah, mostly because we had to. Wherever it was possible, I’d have the bass player and drummer work together, though. It was a very difficult time. The record came out of pure frustration. By October of 2020, I was losing it, you know?

But out of everything, instead of going slightly mad with the restrictions, all this music started to come out of my head. I knew I had to do something with it. I was mainly on my own, but there are a number of musicians that I can record with here in the south of France.

My first instrument was the piano, and I still think of myself as a piano refugee. [laughs] I know how to make a piano track sound good. When I was first in America, I loved to play the drums, so I can set up a whole rhythm section on my own to lay down the tracks if I need to.

I had been going so crazy, but playing music is one of the greatest experiences possible if you have intense emotional issues to process. I’d set up the tracks with everything on them, then send copies to musicians around the world – wonderful players – and they’d have a score and a demo to listen to, but they all had solos to play.

My instructions were “Be yourself.” I didn’t care how crazy they went. I didn’t care if they didn’t want to follow what I’d laid down when I sent them the track to work on.

Did you miss the interactive process of working with the musicians face-to-face?

Here’s an interesting thing: Sometimes the playing would be so great when they sent the track back to me that I’d be moved to redo my original part differently, simply because it was so inspirational.

When I put the headphones on, it feels like I’m in the room with the players. What was interesting then was that I’d send the track back to the musicians and they’d become re-inspired to change their part again as well, so it was a very collaborative process that wasn’t at all hindered by working remotely.

The mood and character of the pieces often changed and developed and required an evolving approach. This meant that things took a long time, of course, with all the sending of files and booking studio time, et cetera, for musicians around the world.

Liberation Time is a very strong album that covers a lot of ground, from straight jazz guitar to fusion. Are you happy with the end result?

The way the music came out was, to me, a kind of recapitulation of the wonderful ’60s period of jazz with upright bass, in a way more straight-ahead but with electric guitar. It was kind of the classic jazz approach, but with my guitar today.

It isn’t that I set out to write an album like that; this is just how it came out. I wanted to keep the integrity of the music, but I recalled through the music the pieces that I recorded about 40 years ago, when my piano technique was reasonable. It’s gone a lot since then. There are two piano pieces, and they are perhaps more in the late-’70s era of jazz. I thought that they were very personal, but why not?

It makes me laugh when I think about making money from records. I guess maybe I should try another approach. [laughs] But I’m old-school. I don’t even know how many albums I’ve made. For me, it is all about the music and the expression.

I presume, like most artists, you’re primarily concerned with how happy you are with the music rather than commercial considerations.

Exactly. I can’t stop making music and recording albums, whether they sell fantastically well or relatively poorly. Once the record is finished, it is unchangeable; it’s over. People will either like it or they won’t, but that’s not my problem. [laughs]

 “As the Spirit Sings” is a very upbeat opener. It’s indicative of the album as a whole, which has a totally positive vibe. Was that something you were trying to convey?

In spite of the fact I was losing my mind, I’m a very positive person. I think to myself that I’m fortunate to be alive when I think of how many friends I’ve lost over the years. I’m very healthy and I can still play. I don’t know how long it is going to last, but I don’t care. I thought I’d lost it five years ago when I got terrible arthritis, but somehow I found a way to cure myself.

I’m grateful for every day and every minute. Maybe that is the benefit of 50 years of meditation – you become aware of the nature of existence and your place in it. I am in such awe of the immensity of this universe that we live in. I am in wonder and awe at the beauty of nature, and I feel connected to it. I think the reason that I am upbeat is that I feel connected to everything. The joy of playing music and the joy of existence is crucial to who I am.

How did you resolve the problem with your hands?

It was very bad in 2014, ’15. I thought I’d come to the end of my playing life. I was quite philosophical about it. I thought, Okay, I’ve had a fantastic career, and thank you very much!

I met several doctors, and one injected me with a solution of hyaluronic acid [a cushioning and lubricating fluid found in the eyes and joints], which was a fairly new concept, and it was quite effective, but the pain would keep coming back, and it bothered me to keep needing the treatment.

I then discovered a doctor in America called Joe Dispenza, who had a bad accident himself, and his back was broken in three places. He’d been told he’d need to live his life in a wheelchair. He started working on his own body with his mind, and I read about this and decided, three years ago, to try this approach.

After six months, I realized that I didn’t need the injections again. The technique is very simple: Every day before my morning meditation, I talk to my hands. I tell them how beautiful they are and how grateful I am for what they’ve given to me in my life and how much I love and cherish them. I do that every day, and I have no pain or swelling.

Isn’t that amazing? If you persevere, your mind will win.

Another interesting track is “Right Here, Right Now, Right On,” which is a prime example of what you were saying about some of the tracks being a real throwback to an earlier age of jazz – the Blue Note small-combo approach. I guess that must be a very comfortable area for you to play in, having been playing that style of music since the early ’60s.

All the tracks are in a comfortable zone for me because they all came out of my head. [laughs] I know them intimately, and they’re like my babies. There is a strong post-bop feel on this one, as you suggest.

To have these players on them is just wonderful. People like sax player Julian Siegel, [drummer] Vinnie Colaiuta and less well-known musicians like [drummer] Nicolas Viccaro. It is so satisfying to hear what they bring to the music.

The musicians know that there will be ensemble playing and space for them to express themselves, and that is where the magic happens.

Among a wealth of great soloing from all concerned on the album, the bass solo on “Lockdown Blues” is a real highlight.

Absolutely. That is Etienne MBappé who plays in 4th Dimension, which is my current band. The other two members of the band, Gary Husband on piano and Ranjit Barot on drums, are the remaining musicians on that track.

On “Singing Our Secrets,” it is almost four minutes before your guitar enters. It’s clear that you see the music as an ensemble piece rather than a guitar-centric record, as so many guitarist’s albums turn out to be.

I learned that lesson from Miles and Coltrane, you know. They are my heroes, and I still listen to them today. Take a track from Miles or Coltrane: They’ll all take the melody, then perhaps McCoy will take a solo, or Herbie or Cannonball will take a solo, and Miles will come in later.

The whole philosophy was marked on me and ingrained in my brain: Okay, I’m writing the music and I’m the so-called leader, giving the direction, but the whole point of collective playing is the fact that it is improvisation and interpretation, and this is individual and collective.

I told everyone, “Be who you are. Be crazy if you want to be, but be crazy in the context of the music.”

A track like “Liberation Time” is almost classic fusion and is very guitar heavy, whereas there are tracks like “Mila Repa” and “Shade of Blue” that are almost the polar opposite, featuring only your solo piano. Was the diversity of the album something that was planned or just part of the spontaneous creative process?

The only philosophy that I can hold to is to be who I am, and the devil take the rest. I’ve always felt that if I try to play something thinking people will like this, I’m not only betraying them but I’m betraying myself.

Shakespeare said it 500 years ago: Be true to yourself and you’ll be true to everybody else. [laughs] In music, it is so important. I’m not against people who make records that are trying to please the crowd. It’s just not for me.

Over my career, I’ve had records that were very successful and some that were not so successful. It’s important to distinguish between different kinds of success, There’s commercial success and there is musical success, and it’s not very often that the two come together.

I think hell would be to make an album to please others and then think, Shit! Why did I do that? What an idiot I am! [laughs]

Gear-wise what did you use for the album?

Basically, I used a Paul Reed Smith that I’ve had for about 10 years now. I have a number of his guitars; he’s a phenomenal guitar builder.

I use a Line 6 HX preamp that I got that last year, and I really like it. At the same time, I sometimes use an old Mesa/Boogie preamp in the studio for a number of tunes. I only use preamps though. I haven’t used a regular main amp for years, live or in the studio.

When I play live, I’m fed into the desk and hear myself back through the monitors. I like to hear it in stereo, so I have my speakers in front and facing toward me. The house gets basically the same sound that I get.

Strings are, as always, D’Addario. I guess I’ve used them for 50 years now, and for a pick I use a Dunlop Jazz III. I think I was the inspiration behind this pick because I used to make something similar for myself and then slash and score them with a knife to help me keep a grip on them. The picks now have the grip built in.

In terms of your own playing, what do you work on?

I’m fascinated by harmony, melody and rhythm. They are all different departments of work, and there are periods of life where I will pay more attention to each area. Articulation of melody is my focus at the moment.

You can hear it in my playing on something like “Liberation Time.” The titles of my tunes are very meaningful to me. The idea of liberation was so important last year. To be free in music implies a lot of very important things: Firstly, that you don’t have any technical problems with your ability to play your instrument. There is the harmonic aspect of improvisation – what are you going to say with your improvisation?

All we can talk about when we improvise is our own life story: How deeply we feel and we what we feel about ourselves; how I feel about life, existence, the people I’m playing with, the music I’m playing. This is like the gas in the engine, the emotion behind the intent.

Then you start playing. “Liberation Time” is just two chords. It’s a total steal from “So What,” by Miles Davis. Coltrane stole it for “Impressions,” and Mike Brecker stole it for something else.

We’re all thieves! [laughs] You take the two chords, then decide what to do with them. To be free in music you have to have no problems technically, then you need to be inspired, and you can overcome the limitations of the music.

You then get into harmonic exploration. You need the knowledge to understand what you’re trying to achieve and express. Any note is a good note if the intent is behind it. I like to be inspired by the musicians I’m playing with, to be provoked into trying something new and to take a chance, to walk the high wire and not be afraid to fall off.

You only really get this freedom in jazz, in my opinion. Improvised music brings joy, and joy is not an emotion that you see in the world in general. I’m not talking about happiness, like, “Yeah you have a good job,” et cetera. Joy is the immediate experience.

I see it in my dog when I come home. You see it with kids who can’t even talk yet. Adults don’t have pure joy so easily, and we need joy in this world. There’s far too much heaviness.

Are you still as excited by music as when you started, and what is it that keeps everything so fresh for you after all these years?

I’m alive. Every day is different, every minute, every hour. I’ve never lived this second before. Every second is new. It’s amazing. In meditation, you practice living in the present moment, but the present moment is the most fantastic moment I’ll ever have. I’ve never had it before.

Every moment is a brand-new experience. Most of the time in life people look backward, but I look forward as every moment comes toward me. It’s fantastic. I’m living in perfect stillness.

Time is coming, and I feel it flowing over me, and I give thanks for being alive.

Get Liberation Time here.

A live album collecting John McLaughlin's finest performances at the Montreux Jazz Festival over the decades has been announced.

Curated and compiled by McLaughlin himself, John McLaughlin: The Montreux Years is set for a March 4 release via BMG. Collected from six performances between 1978 to 2016, the album features McLaughlin with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Free Spirits, The 4th Dimension, and Paco de Lucía.

Though no singles from the album have been released as of yet, you can check out a brief trailer for the album below.

“To speak about The Montreux Jazz Festival brings back so many wonderful memories. But since my association goes back to 1971, we are looking at 50 years of history!" McLaughlin said in a statement.

"Whether it’s the different incarnations of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Shakti, The One Truth Band, The Free Spirits, The Heart of Things, Carlos Santana, or with the late great Paco de Lucía, the list goes on and on.

"Not only all my musical performances at Montreux, but all my other visits to see my dear friend Claude Nobs – the founder – my friends of the festival, join[ing] jam sessions, [and] hiking in the fabulous countryside around that lovely town," he continued. "Montreux is a big part of my life’s musical and personal history and to share this selection of my performances on this recording makes me truly happy.” 

You can check out the cover art and tracklist of John McLaughlin: The Montreux Years – which features liner notes by McLaughlin and previously unseen photography – below.

To preorder the album, point your browser this way.

John McLaughlin – The Montreux Years

1. "Radio Activity" (Live – Montreux Jazz Festival 1984)
2. "Nostalgia" (Live – Montreux Jazz Festival 1984)
3. "Acid Jazz" (Live - Montreux Jazz Festival 1998)
4. "David" (Live – Montreux Jazz Festival 1987)
5. "Sing Me Softly of the Blues" (Live – Montreux Jazz Festival 1995)
6. "Florianapolis" (Live - Montreux Jazz Festival 1987)
7. "El Hombre Que Sabià" (Live – Montreux Jazz Festival 2016)

From his first session for the Mamas & the Papas when he was just 16, Lee Ritenour forged a career working in L.A.’s pressure-cooker session scene and became a first-call guy for every major act from Michael Jackson to Pink Floyd. “I’ve done every style of music except country,” he tells Guitar Player.

After becoming one of the most recorded guitarists in history, Ritenour decided in 1976 to make the switch from session superstar to solo artist with his debut album, First Course. “For modern-day readers, that session era probably seems like a thousand years ago,” Ritenour says. “The mid-to-late ’70s was an interesting period because, having already been established as a studio musician playing just about everything, I needed to create my own sound. My first album was a little lighter in feel to Captain Fingers [1977], which did well for me. Fusion guitar was really starting to come through with Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, Allan Holdsworth and the rest.”

Although Ritenour’s career has proceeded without a hitch, he has suffered terrible personal misfortune. In the space of a few months in 2018, his house burned to the ground, taking with it priceless personal possessions, guitars and music. Soon afterward, he had major heart surgery.

Ritenour rebounded from those setbacks to record Dreamcatcher, which was released in 2020. “It was interesting that I got the chance to do that album, after the fire and the surgery,” he says. “It was a good way of getting myself back on track. It definitely functioned as part of the healing process.”

As a guitarist who worked hard to find his own voice on the instrument, Ritenour has strong thoughts about what musicians must do today to forge a unique identity in a world where countless teenage prodigies steal views on social media and the like.

“You have to be very wary about the fact that everybody has amazing technique,” he says. “A lot of kids can copy incredible things, but the depth that goes into creating your own style and your own voice is much harder to achieve. I always stress the need to compose. You have to be a B.B. King, a Wes or a Jeff Beck, with such a strong individual identity to be able to do someone else’s song and make it your own. 

Look at Sinatra: Every song he sang became a Sinatra song. I think it’s particularly important for anyone interested in making a career in music to always be learning about the music business itself. Understand promotion and social media, and find ways to get yourself heard.”

He likewise has strong feelings about rhythm guitar. “You need to listen to the history of accompaniment guitar, not only in this country with things like rhythm and blues but also in areas like folk music in England, or old blues,” he offers.

“Even in medieval times, the lute was used to accompany singers. The role of accompaniment is such an important thing to understand. Segovia used to say that the guitar was a mini orchestra. A lot of times when I was on sessions, I was listening to what the drummer and bass player were playing and trying to fit into the cracks. Most importantly, uppermost in my mind, was what the song called for, which most often was what the singer needed.

Like many artists, Ritenour has lost an enormous amount of live work due to the pandemic and is eager to get back on the road. “Besides thinking about getting back out there, I’ve got a couple more studio projects brewing for me,” he reveals.

True to form, his love of fusion and sense of the guitar as the perfect means of expression remain central to his art. “While I know the energy level in straight jazz can be very intense, there is so much intensity in fusion,” he offers. “The guitar is the perfect vehicle if you love exploratory music. We’re dealing with 12 notes in the Western musical tradition, and maybe a few bent ones as well, but the guitar has the ability to exceed those inherent limitations.

“I think in some ways modern instrumental metal is the new version of fusion. Once upon a time there was the ‘jazz committee’ who would decide what jazz should be or what would be rock, but that all got blurred by fusion. Today’s world is a perfect example of the genre. The whole world is interconnected. The pandemic proved that.”

1. “Captain Fingers” from “Captain Fingers’ (1977)

“This track had a combo of chops and technique, which were a big part of fusion, but it also had a great groove, and not too many people had that. When this album came out, I think it captured a lot of my personality and showed that I did have a distinctive voice as a guitarist.

It’s still not an easy tune to play, even to this day; it wasn’t just fast for the sake of it. It would have been recorded with my ES-335 into a Fender amp, a Deluxe Reverb maybe, but Paul Rivera was doing a lot of mods to amps back then, so he probably worked on that one. Actually, I had a very early version of the Mesa/Boogie at that time, so that may have been part of the sound.

That era was the first time that rock guitar and jazz guitar started to be lumped into fusion. It was a boom time for the fusion guitar movement. The first time I heard Mahavishnu with John McLaughlin, I was like ‘Damn!’ [laughs] I was also impressed by guys like Bill Connors, and of course no one could figure out what Allan Holdsworth was doing. I guess if Hendrix had a career that had endured, he could well have been doing great stuff in fusion.”

2. “Morning Glory” from ‘The Captain’s Journey’ (1978)

“This was the first tune I wrote that really got a lot of attention, not only from other guitar players but also from fans and other artists, some of whom wanted to write lyrics to it. I recorded this version in 1978, and I actually revisited it on Dreamcatcher.

Harmonically, rhythmically and melodically, it really defined who I was as an artist because I’d been so versatile as a studio player that I had to find my own identity, as every guitarist does. I always say the key to finding who you are is to compose, and ‘Morning Glory’ is a good example of that. I think it really helped me home in on what my ‘thing’ was.

“I wrote this tune, and Eric Gale, an artist I really admired at the time, covered it [on his 1977 album Multiplication]. Then Bill Champlin put the vocal on. I remember playing at the Roxy in L.A. with my band, and as soon as I started to play ‘Morning Glory,’ it got a strong reaction from the crowd. You don’t have to be some kind of scientist to work out that if something is really connecting with a crowd, as ‘Morning Glory’ did, you’re onto something valuable.”

3. “Night Rhythms” from ‘Festival’ (1988) and “Harlequin” from ‘Harlequin’ (1985) by Dave Grusin and Lee Ritenour

“I wanted to pick two tracks to kind of stand as one, because they reflect my deep love of Brazilian music, There is a lot of Brazilian influence on Festival. At the time that I recorded it, I’d started hanging out with my soon-to-be wife, who is Brazilian, and she was doing a big project in New York at the same time. She had a lot of amazing Brazilian artists coming to it. That lit a fire under me, and it started me working on music that reflected that Brazilian influence. This song became a signature sound for me, and I still hear it all the time on digital radio.

“The Harlequin album was also very Brazilian influenced. Dave Grusin has been a longtime collaborator for me. I met him when I was 18, and he was such a prolific composer for TV and film. I heard about him from his scores; he’d have Howard Roberts blowing over these really long chase scenes. I met him through Sérgio Mendes, and soon after that he started hiring me for some of the shows. The rest is history. We’ve been friends for about 50 years now.”

4. “Stolen Moments” from ‘Stolen Moments’ (1990)

“This was a very traditional jazz album for me. I pulled out my ’49 Gibson L-5 that I’d had since I was a teenager. A lot of people didn’t know I had that traditional jazz background – the whole Blue Note thing – as the sessions and solo albums that I’d done previously weren’t in that style, of course. People knew I had the fusion and Brazilian things going on, but at the heart of everything I do is my love for jazz.

“We did this album direct to two-track. It only took two days to record it at Sunset Sound studios in L.A., which is my favorite studio. It was recorded for JVC in Japan originally. There were so many excellent musicians that played on that record with me. I always loved this Oliver Nelson tune, and I feel that the album holds up really well when I listen back to it. The studio has such a beautiful vibe. I plugged the L-5 into a Fender Deluxe, but again one that had been modified by Paul Rivera.”

5. “Lay It Down” from ‘6 String Theory’ (2010)

“There is a lot more blues guitar in a lot of my playing on this album, and this track was a wonderful duet with John Scofield. The two guitars really complement each other. I think something about his playing influenced me into a more bluesy direction. The whole album was a dream project, working with so many great guitar players. I’d never done anything like it before.

“When I first put the project together, I knew it was going to be an expensive album, so I thought I’d go to a few guys that I trusted the most, and if they said that they wanted to do it, then I knew it would be viable. Those guys were Steve Lukather, who I’ve known since he was a teenager, and he immediately said yeah.

B.B. King was the other one that I called. I had a long relationship with B.B. I used to play rhythm on his records, and there was a double album that was sponsored by Guitar Player way back that I appeared on with him. I met him when I was 19, and we were friends ever since.

The third guy I went to was George Benson. After he agreed, I started to branch out into a whole bunch of newer guys, like Andy McKee and Joe Bonamassa. We all wanted to make a great record. Nobody wanted to show off.”

Buy Lee Ritenour’s latest album Dreamcatcher here.

Pat Martino’s Joyous Lake was released on Warner Bros. Records in 1977. Along with Pat, its alumni includes Delmar Brown on electric piano, Mark Leonard on bass and Kenwood Dennard on drums and percussion, and it’s a terrific lineup. 

I first heard the album on KRE, the Bay Area AM radio jazz station that exposed me to hundreds of artists and their works, including Julian Priester’s Love, Love, Bobby Hutcherson’s “Houston St. Thursday Afternoon” and Pat Martino’s Joyous Lake.

The opening track, “Line Games,” basically says it all: athletic impassioned playing, almost impossible unison lines, and yes, one could use the F word – fusion – to describe it accurately. 

Pat always had a unique sound that wasn’t really jazz guitar or rock guitar; it was simply Pat Martino. He always fused together something that was exciting and original. He tears it up on “Line Games,” my favorite track on the LP.

The Delmar Brown composition “Pyramidal Vision” follows with a sound like a stormy wind, before a lovely melody played by Pat brings us indoors. While Kenwood Dennard borders on unhinged, he never comes close to derailing but instead righteously energizes the music.

Side one closes with “Mardi Gras,” a track that reminds me of a pre-Jaco Weather Report tune. It begins with fusion funk but enters a thoroughfare of melody that is timeless. Pat’s electric guitar solo sound on this track is the most “plugged into an amp” of all the album’s songs, and of course he plays masterfully. I love when he does his 16th-note triplets thing. I can’t get enough.

Side two opens with the Dennard composition “M’Wandishi,” and while it might be pushing my fusion calorie limit, it’s sincere and trippy. His composition “Song Bird” follows, delivering more impossible ensemble parts before settling into a vamp where Pat’s guitar testifies successfully. 

The “Song Bird” MVP award goes to keyboardist Brown, whose comping is sublime. The LP’s closer, “Joyous Lake,” slams into us gently and revisits some of the territory discovered on “Line Games.”

There was a fusion “golden age” (at least for my generation) that included Allan Holdsworth with the New Tony Williams Lifetime, Return to Forever, Bill Connors’ solo LPs, John Abercrombie, Jon-Luc Ponty, John McLaughlin, Weather Report, Miles Davis, Stanley Clarke with Jeff Beck, and Billy Cobham with Tommy Bolin, to name a few. 

I always revisit this era of fusion. I don’t think I took it for granted back then, but the music is almost more impressive to me today. All these artists were knocking down walls. Their music strikes me as more ambitious than what anyone expected, displaying an almost impossible athleticism that required a loving, focused dedication. They were stretching boundaries without the distractions of commerciality. 

Pat Martino delivered all that, and his artistry is captured in spades on Joyous Lake.

Browse Pat Martino's catalog here.

Jim Campilongo has 14 critically acclaimed instrumental records available on vinyl, CD and digital download here.

We recently we asked some of the world's top guitar players to choose their favorite solos. With one catch: They had to refrain from the obvious. No Hendrix. No Clapton. No Gilmour, et cetera.

Here’s what Reeves Gabrels – guitarist for David Bowie and the Cure – had to say…

1) Derringer | “Drivin’ Sideways”

From Sweet Evil (1977)

GUITARIST: Danny Johnson

“When I first heard Danny Johnson, in 1975, I felt like I had found a kindred spirit, someone like myself who, at 19, was standing on the corner at the intersection of Mahavishnu and Mountain. On this track, Rick Derringer generously pushes Danny out front in the dual role of lead guitarist and vocalist. Danny fearlessly tears at the seams of conventional rock harmony during his solos.”

2) Boxer | “More Than Meets the Eye” live radio broadcast

GUITARIST: Ollie Halsall

“Many of us first heard the late Ollie Halsall in the band Patto. With singer Mike Patto, he formed Boxer in 1975. As is the case with most of the guitar players I like, Ollie is at his best live, where he plays with the songs like a cat with a ball of string. It’s all here: Curtis Mayfield double-string slides, Tal Farlow-like arpeggios, blues guitar bends and chromatic runs.”

3) James Taylor | “Someone”

From One Man Dog (1972)

GUITARIST: John McLaughlin

 “I heard this song for the first time in 1972, when the only guitar I owned was a Harmony H-162 acoustic. This largely acoustic guitar recording blew my mind and exposed me to a level of communication and technique to which I still aspire. For years, I wondered what effect was on the guitar, until one day I was struck by the stupiphany that there was none – just John McLaughlin’s massive technique and deep soul that, for me, conjured up the sound of the flutter of dragonfly wings and the rolling of waves.”

4) Billy Joe Shaver | “Georgia On a Fast Train”

From Unshaven: Shaver Live at Smith’s Olde Bar

GUITARIST: Eddy Shaver

“The late Eddy Shaver kicked out the roadhouse jams Texas-style in 1995 with a Boogie combo, a ’50s Strat and some serious seat-of-the-pants high-level playing. Live at Smith’s Olde Bar is a good record to shake of the dust with, and this track can never be too loud.”

5) Todd Rundgren | “No. 1 Lowest Common Denominator”

From Todd (1974)

GUITARIST: Todd Rundgren

“Todd is strangely underappreciated as a guitarist. This is one of my favorite Rundgren guitar songs. He conjures up a surreal sonic landscape whose visual corollary, for me, would be Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Are psychedelics bad? Let Todd offer his opinion.

TV cops are usually dudes who listen to jazz – y’know… the kind of jazz Ken Burns enjoys. Typically, after a long day of combatting their superiors and being removed from their latest case (while failing to quit smoking), they go home and listen to cool jazz, a preference meant to indicate an intellectual sensitivity to the arts and hidden creative depths.

But in actuality, the sultry elegance of jazz doesn’t seem compatible with the usual TV cop clichés, like misogyny, stereotyping, failing to connect with their daughters in the stranglehold of unjust custody restrictions, and serving vigilante lone justice.

Wouldn’t something a little more rocking, chaotic and energizing be more appropriate for the typical TV cop during a 70-hour work week? To them – and to you, dear reader – we might suggest investigating the third phase of Miles Davis’s brilliant career via his 1972 Columbia Records release, On the Corner.

Miles’ band of geniuses includes John McLaughlin, Michael Henderson, Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and many others, all of whom contribute significantly.

After defining bop alongside Charlie Parker, and creating cool jazz with Bill Evans and John Coltrane, Davis created another equally important genre that we are at a loss to name other than “’70s Miles.” It’s raw, organic, powerful, challenging and grooving, and although it doesn’t get the Wynton Marsalis/Ken Burns seal of approval, it’s our favorite era of Miles’ music.

On the Corner sits firmly at its apex. Side one begins with the title track, which slams the listener with an amalgamation of Sly Stone, James Brown and free jazz. The first four tunes are listed as track one and seamlessly segue from “On the Corner” into “New York Girl,” “Thinkin’ One Thing and Doin’ Another” and “Vote for Miles.”

Davis’s horn is the centerpiece, playing interstellar melodies that orchestrate and guide the way. “Black Satin” begins with a heavy percussion that separates itself from the prior sounds, but in the City of Miles, this is only a few blocks away.

Throughout this great album, McLaughlin rips and testifies, making electric guitar an instrument more about emotion than mere scales. He is a must-hear.

Side two opens with “One and One,” its wah bass and percussion evoking the feel of a galactic jungle, while Miles’ trumpet sounds like a melodic struggle. “Helen Butte” starts with a great trumpet hook as drummer Jack DeJohnette and company lay it down. “Mr. Freedom X” continues the endless groove that never feels tedious, making On the Corner an almost perfect masterpiece to our ears.

It should be noted that jazz critics, fans and even Miles’ contemporaries reviled On the Corner, and it became one of his worst-selling albums. Its status has improved considerably over the decades, and many listeners now hear in its rhythms and sounds the precursors of post-punk, electronica and hip-hop.

If you’re unfamiliar with this phase of Miles Davis, we might suggest watching his 1970 Isle of Wight concert on YouTube (above). It’s an incredible performance. That said, we think acceptance is mandatory when putting on a ’70s Miles record. It’s not an easy read for those who have narrow definitions of music. We, however, love On the Corner, and, again, it replicates the sound of the city.

In that sense, ’70s Miles might be a consoling style of music at the end of the day for TV cops who feel underappreciated and somehow always get the wrong end of the stick. It imitates the sound of their workplace, an urban center bustling with energy, awareness, struggle and community. The music of On the Corner beckons revelation, while it churns and speaks an unspeakable universal language.

Meanwhile, Tony Soprano listens to classic rock…

Purchase On the Corner by Miles Davis here.

In 1971, rock and roll guitar was barely in its teens. But, remarkably, what started as R&B- and western-swing-infused three-chord rave-ups had grown to incorporate elements of folk, Chicago blues, modal jazz, Indian classical music and flamenco. The music of the 1960s – especially that of the Beatles – proved that the pop charts could deliver expressive, high-quality artistry that rivaled that produced in jazz clubs and symphonic halls. The music of the time also became the de facto voice of one of the most significant cultural upheavals in American history.

As the new decade dawned, musicians were presented with a blank canvas on which they created what can rightfully be seen as the rock era’s belle époch. Indeed, many famous artists released their defining masterpieces during this fertile 12-month period.

Guitar Player has celebrated the 50th anniversary of this magic year with features on some of the greatest albums from 1971. Now, with it just about over, let’s have one final celebration of the albums, artists and guitarists that made the year so significant.

Power (Chords) to the People

The Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy was an ambitious project that established them as major players, but it was 1971’s Who’s Next that is often considered their crowning achievement.

Ex. 1 is loosely based on the pugilistic power chords Pete Townshend delivers during epic anthems like “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The consummate rock rhythm player, Townshend didn’t merely “strum.” Rather, he attacked his strings with powerful percussive jabs, pioneering a style that would evolve into punk and metal in the hands of the next generation. When playing this example, try using a short, controlled wrist motion, striking the lowest strings with extra oompf! 

Going for Soul

A 2020 Rolling Stone poll cited Marvin Gaye’s 1971 release What’s Going On as the greatest album of all time, and though polls are subjective and art isn’t easily quantifiable, the album’s merit is unquestionable. Gaye’s emotive vocals and heartfelt lyrics are front and center on this song cycle about a Vietnam vet returning home to find his country in turmoil. However, the unsung heroes of this and many other great Motown releases are the Funk Brothers, a loose collection of studio musicians who played uncredited on dozens of hits.

Ex. 2 recalls guitarist Robert White’s pulsating chord work on the title track, a clever combination of jazz harmony and funk rhythm. To play the percussive “scratch” strums (indicated by Xs), simply loosen your fret-hand’s grip on the neck without taking your fingers off the strings. This will effectively mute the strings, so that, when strummed, they produce the hollow, pitchless “chick” sound that is a signature of funk guitar.

Sticking It to the '70s

The Rolling Stones were indisputably one of the most popular and influential musical acts of the ’60s. As the decade drew to a close, however, dark clouds seemed to be forming on the horizon. The band experienced the death of founding member Brian Jones and watched in horror as the Hells Angels security detail they hired for a 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway murdered one attendee and brutalized several others. 

They also sought to extricate themselves from management and recording contracts. Come 1971, the band returned with their own label, a new iconic tongue-and-lips logo, and arguably their finest record to date, Sticky Fingers.

Around this time, Keith Richards had fully embraced open-G tuning (low to high: D, G, D, G, B, D), and Ex. 3 takes inspiration from his clever riffage and chord voicings on such Stones classics as “Brown Sugar” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” 

Meeting of the Masters

Miles Davis was a pioneer of multiple styles of jazz, including bebop, cool, hard-bop, and modal jazz, and when he incorporated electronic instruments and rock beats on 1969’s Bitches Brew, jazz-rock fusion was born. 

Two years later, former Davis guitarist John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a quintet that blended jazz harmony and improvisation, Indian classical scales and rock instrumentation into an incendiary mix. Their 1971 debut, The Inner Mounting Flame, was a hit with rock audiences and established them as the premier fusion band of their time.

Ex. 4 is modeled after “Meeting of the Spirits,” a track that begins with McLaughlin’s hauntingly exotic arpeggiated chords before exploding into an impassioned exploration around the Phrygian-dominant mode (1, b2, 3, 4, 5, 6, b7). 

Tapping Into English Moods

Without a doubt, 1971 was a landmark year for progressive rock, a style of music that drew heavily on European classical influences.

Ex. 5 is an homage to guitarist Steve Howe’s use of classical guitar techniques to enliven songs such as “Roundabout” and the solo piece “Mood for a Day” that were featured on Yes’s brilliant album Fragile.

Another significant prog release from 1971 was Genesis’s Nursery Cryme. Although not as well-known as Fragile, the record did herald the debut of Steve Hackett, a guitarist who employed fretboard tapping several years before Eddie Van Halen.

Ex. 6 recalls his approach on “Return of the Giant Hogweed,” but unlike Van Halen, Hackett would tap the strings with the edge of his pick instead of using a fingertip. 

A Case of the Blues

Although often labeled as a folk artist, Joni Mitchell drew inspiration from many sources. Throughout her storied career, the eclectic composer has melded elements of jazz, pop, blues, and electronica in with her songwriting and has collaborated with artists as varied as David Crosby, Charles Mingus and Pat Metheny. 

Mitchell often wrote and performed in a wide variety of open tunings, many of her own design, but for 1971’s Blue, her instrument of choice was often a four-string Appalachian dulcimer.

Because of variances in string thickness, it’s impossible to match the dulcimer’s tuning and timbre on a standard guitar, but for Ex. 7’s approximation of “A Case of You,” we tuned the top two strings down a whole step, to A and D, respectively, and the G string up a whole step to A, resulting in two unison A strings. This makes our tuning, low to high, E, A, D, A, A D.

If you stick to the top four strings, it evokes the droning unisons, octaves and 5ths associated with dulcimer tunings. Perhaps the larger lesson here is inspirational and not technical. Mitchell’s fearless artistic exploration and constant experimentation is a beautiful reminder to step outside of our comfort zones. 

My Back Pages

As 1971 dawned, Led Zeppelin – the supergroup that Jimmy Page had formed in the wake of the Yardbirds’ dissolution – was already in full flight, but it was their fourth album (generally referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, but officially named by the four cryptic symbols that adorned a sticker on the album’s wrapper) that would cement their legacy as the greatest hard rock band of all time.

Ex. 8 is inspired by the outro to “Black Dog” and demonstrates Page’s clever appropriation of country and blues licks to extend rock’s lead vocabulary beyond simple pentatonic scales. Centered on an A dominant-7 tonality, it makes effective use of b3, b5, and b7 color tones (the C, Eb, and G notes, respectively).

For our final example, we’ve chosen to template what is perhaps the most culturally iconic and controversial guitar lick from 1971; Page’s intro to “Stairway to Heaven.” Recent lawsuits have pointed out a similarity to Spirit’s 1969 track “Taurus,” but to our ears, both songs are based on a common musical trope – an A minor chord arpeggio with a bass note that descends down in half steps. Its use in rock music predates Spirit (Google: Ace of Cups “Simplicity” 1968). And, like a 12-bar blues shuffle, it’s arguably fair game when songwriting.

What makes Page’s take on this cliché stand out is his incorporation of contrary motion between the outer voices, with ascending notes on top pitted against descending bass notes. This is a cleverly appealing compositional move, which we’ve also used for Ex. 9.

Although we’ve covered several albums with an enduring legacy, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the major releases that turned 50 this past year. David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, the Doors’ L.A. Woman, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, John Lennon’s Imagine, Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh, Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story, and Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On are among the many great albums making a compelling case that 1971 was in fact the guitar’s – and modern music’s – greatest year.

With guest spots from Vernon Reid, John McLaughlin, Kirk Hammett and Carlos Santana, drummer Cindy Blackman Santana’s latest album – Give the Drummer Some – has its focus firmly on guitarists.

It might surprise people that your wife, a drummer, created such a weighty electric guitar record.

Perhaps, but I can see it quite clearly because of the core principles of who she is. She’s Tony Williams Lifetime, so that’s John McLaughlin. But there’s also Cream and Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix. She’s all of that.

Is there any difference in how you two work when she’s playing in Santana or when you’re playing on her music?

You know, it’s different for me, because for the last 25 years I’ve been the director or the producer. Playing on Cindy’s album was very relaxing for me, because all I had to do was listen to the music and do my best to complement each song. I wanted to please my wife and the music, so that came easily. [laughs] It was a privilege. And I mean that with honor and with zest and joy. Cindy’s record was presented before me as a gift, and I liked being in a position to be directed or pointed toward something.

Your playing throughout is spectacular, particularly what you did on “Imagine.”

That track blew me away. I had no idea what was going to be coming out of the speakers when they played it for me. I had no preconceived thoughts about what I was going to do. So when they turned it up, I immediately felt like a kid who could jump up and down on a bed. I looked at it like, Okay, I’m in AC/DC or Led Zeppelin. I’m in Queen! I was given the chance to tear it up, and that’s what I did. I brought the energy. I mean, we have reverence for the Beatles and John Lennon, but I wasn’t thinking of those confinements

Can you talk a little bit about playing with Vernon Reid on “Black Pearl”?

Oh, that was great. I loved Vernon from the beginning. I think one of the main things that Vernon and I have in common, besides playing the guitar, is that we both love Dionne Warwick and Sonny Sharrock – Dionne for the way she carries a melody, and Sonny Sharrock for how he was this tornado, a force of nature.

One thing I’m looking to do is make an album that honors his music. I would have Sonny’s band but also invite different musicians – Vernon, Jeff Beck, Eric Johnson, Kirk Hammett – just playing nothing but Sonny Sharrock music. It’s a dream I have.

It’s interesting that John McLaughlin is on Cindy’s album. You guys go back a long way, to at least 1973, when you recorded Love Devotion Surrender together.

That’s true. I’d love to do something else with him in the future. Maybe I’ll invite him to participate in this Sonny Sharrock adventure. But I love what he did on Cindy’s record. Everybody played so beautifully.

And you know, something else I want to say: Thank you for having the passion to keep the six strings alive. Your spiritual frequency, the frequency of this magazine, is very much needed. We need to create a whole new army of guitar players – not guitar heroes, not that. We need real guitar players. I’m watching a new wave of youngsters, under 12 years old, coming out with some divine, mean intentions. So that’s encouraging.

Visit Cindy Blackman Santana's website to order Give the Drummer Some.

During a recent internet radio broadcast from dublab in Los Angeles, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and John Frusciante talked about some of the music that helped shape them as musicians, spinning some of their favorite tunes in the process.

In the bumper slot known as Timely Inspirations, Frusciante pulls out a number of influential tracks, highlighting their importance in terms of his development as a guitarist.

From the seminal electric blues of Johnny “Guitar” Watson to the superlative jazz-fusion genius of Allan Holdsworth, here are a dozen of the finest from Frusciante’s eclectic collection…

1. The Tony Williams Lifetime – "To Whom It May Concern – Them" from 'Turn It Over' (1970)

Frusciante discovered the hard rock chops of jazz fusion pioneer John McLaughlin on the 1970 track "To Whom It May Concern - Them" at age 13. Described by Jeff Beck as “the best guitarist alive" McLaughlin moved to the US from the UK in 1969 to join jazz drummer Tony Williams’ Lifetime power trio. 

As well as recording two early jazz fusion classics with the group – 1969’s Emergency! and Turn It Over the following year – Mclaughlin appears on several Miles Davis long-players from the same period.   

2. Ramones – "I Don't Care" from 'Rocket to Russia' (1977)

When it comes to punk rock, Frusciante was an aficionado at the tender age of 9. He was also surprisingly resourceful in his musical pursuits for someone so young, at first retuning his guitar in order to play Sex Pistols songs with one finger and using a “jar of pennies” to finance the purchase of a Ramones record. 

But after hearing the New York punk pioneers on the radio, nothing was going to stop him. “I’d heard [the Ramones’] “Beat on the Brat” on the radio,” he remembers, “and I was just like: I’ve got to have a record by that band.”

3. Public Image Ltd – “Go Back” from 'The Flowers of Romance' (1981)

Referred to as the ‘Jimi Hendrix of post-punk’ and described by Frusciante as “spectacular” guitarist Keith Levene’s prolific career in music includes being a founding member of both The Clash and Public Image Limited, not to mention working as a roadie for his guitar hero, Steve Howe of Yes, at age 15! 

Interestingly, Keith Levene and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ founding guitarist Hillel Slovak (one of Frusciante's more obvious influences) recorded a track together in 1985 called “Clothesline”. Black Flag's original bassist Chuck Dukowski had a rare vinyl copy for sale here.

4. Marvin Gaye – "I Want You (Vocal)" from 'I Want You' (1976)

Although Frusciante is well-known for his jaw-dropping technique and can certainly turn on the showmanship when he wants to, his musical sensibilities dictate that the balance of the song as a whole is equally important. 

Speaking of the stellar lead guitar work on Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You (Vocal)” Frusciante highlights that it requires a certain skill to play “in a way that doesn’t draw attention to itself but fits in with the surrounding context.”

5. Butthole Surfers – “Jimi" from 'Hairway to Steven' (1988)

When Frusciante was finding his voice as a guitar player in the late ‘80s, he happened to catch one of the Butthole Surfers’ infamously intense live shows and was struck with genuine awe. “I saw them live and had a similar experience to when I first saw Jane’s Addiction where I was scared,” recalls Frusciante. 

Though he was immediately taken aback by what he saw in Butthole Surfers’ guitarist Paul Leary, Frusciante ultimately found the identification he needed to define himself more clearly. “Before that, I was just lost,” he adds.

6. Johnny "Guitar" Watson – “Too Tired” (1955)

Johnny "Guitar" Watson was a true pioneer of the electric guitar and one of the wildest guitarists on record by anyone’s standards. Just listen to 1954’s “Space Guitar” to hear his radical use of reverb and feedback, or 1955’s “Too Tired” for a great example of early guitar distortion. 

According to Frusciante, Watson had a “very mean approach to electric guitar that I don’t think anybody before him had come anywhere close to.”

7. Iggy Pop – “China Girl” from 'The Idiot' (1970)

Iggy Pop was a huge influence on Frusciante from an early age. In addition to the Chili Peppers’ 1991 “Search and Destroy” Stooges cover the guitarist has performed solo renditions on acoustic guitar of Iggy Pop's “China Girl” and “Neighborhood Threat”. “David Bowie and Iggy pop co-wrote this song on the wonderful album The Idiot,” points out Frusciante. “And it’s got some of my favorite guitar playing ever on it.”

8. Big Brother and the Holding Company – “Down on Me” from 'Big Brother & the Holding Company' (1967)

Frusciante is a self-confessed Nirvana devotee. But when Le Butcherettes’ Teri Gender Bender asked him which singer he thought was better, Kurt Cobain or Janis Joplin, he found it difficult to answer. “I’m not one to say one person’s ‘better’ than another,” says Frusciante, “but [Joplin] is about as effective a singer emotionally as there could ever be. And the guitar players in her band at this time were really exceptional.” 

Bringing to mind the days in the lead up to recording Blood Sugar Sex Magik Frusciante recalls, “Around 1990, I was starting to realise: fuck playing fast and clean! It’s about the feeling that’s in it and sometimes playing sloppy can be a way more exciting feeling than playing clean.”

9. Allan Holdsworth – “Three Sheets to the Wind” from 'Road Games' (1983)

Allan Holdsworth was arguably the ultimate guitarist’s guitarist with a singular technique developed from his intense studies of freeform jazz and alternative scales. And while nobody has been able to beat Holdsworth at his own game, many guitarists continue to look to him as a source of inspiration, including Frusciante. 

“I don’t think somebody has to be technically advanced to be soulful at all, but,” he concedes, “I really don’t think there’s anyone better than Allan Holdsworth… I’m sure I’ll always learn from him and never in a million years will I be able to do what he did.”

10. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band – “Peon” from 'Lick My Decals Off, Baby' (1970)

The music of Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band has long been a source of inspiration for Frusciante, notably Bill Harkleroad aka Zoot Horn Rollo’s guitar contributions for the band’s 1969 avant-garde masterpiece Trout Mask Replica. Its follow-up, 1970’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby is also cited by many as a Captain Beefheart classic, along with its standout guitar/bass instrumental track “Peon”. 

Donning metal fingerpicks, Frusciante and Flea literally pulled off this challenging number live in front of thousands of Chili Peppers fans. “There’s no way to count it,” Frusciante remarks. “You really have to read each other’s minds to play it properly.”

11. T.S.O.L. –  “Thoughts of Yesterday” from 'Weathered Statues' (1982)

Growing up with punk rock, Frusciante was naturally drawn to guitarists such as Black Flag’s Greg Ginn and Pat Smear of Germs, while hearing Joy Division’s Bernard Sumner and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ John McGeoch broadened his musical horizons even further. 

Here he cites T.S.O.L.’s Ron Emory as another of his favorite punk guitarists. “This song has sort of a Siouxsie and the Banshees influence to my ear,” says Frusciante. “But they did all kinds of sounds throughout those early days of the band. One song would be real different from the next.”

12. T. Rex –  “Cosmic Dancer” from 'Electric Warrior' (1971)

Marc Bolan was a big influence on Frusciante as a songwriter, as was the backwards guitar on this track from 1971’s Electric Warrior. Backwards guitar has long been a Frusciante hallmark, as those familiar with his landmark debut solo release Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt and the “Give It Away” solos will know. 

“The lead guitar playing in this song is beautiful; it’s got backwards lead guitar that was very influential on me,” reminisces Frusciante. “I have really nice memories of listening to this when we were making Blood Sugar Sex Magik and staring out the window late at night, or being 17 years old when I’d just moved to Hollywood.”

Listen to the full show at dublab here.

For more than five decades, prog rock has been the cradle from which guitar virtuosity has crawled forth.

Here, in their own words, more than 20 pioneering prog-rock guitarists share insights into their craft.

Frank Zappa

“The history of pop music has a habit of telling us who we really are – ’cause if we weren’t that way, we wouldn’t have spent billions of dollars on those records, would we? 

“After careful training by media and merchandising people, the entire population (even guitar players) has been transmuted into a reasonably well-groomed, odor-free, consumer-amoeba which is kept alive only to service manufacturers and lives its life by the motto: ‘Biggest, fastest, loudest is most and best.’”

Listen To: “Watermelon in Easter Hay“

Robert Fripp (King Crimson)

“Originally, the [Frippertronics] system was introduced to me by Brian Eno. I worked with him on it for the piece of music that became No Pussyfooting. I began working on it on my own in June and July 1977, when I was living in New York. Frippertronics as such went public for the first time in February 1978 at the Kitchen [a New York City arts and performance gallery], where I was giving a solo concert. 

“I needed a name for it, so I came up with ‘Frippertronics’ because it was silly. Then it went very, very public in 1979 with a four-month solo tour – two months in Europe and two in America. And it was there, actually in front of people – in record shops, pizza parlors, record offices, small cinemas, museums, all matter of places – that I began to learn to work with it pretty well. 

“I would run the tape back and improvise on top of it. The original form was with two Revox tape recorders, but now I’m working with the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay. It was advertised as a Fripp in the Box. It’s far smaller, quicker, and easier to set up than two Revoxes, although the sounds one gets are quite different.”

Listen To: Let the Power Fall (Robert Fripp)  

Martin Barre (Jethro Tull)

“I learnt my lesson in 1967. I was in a studio doing a session for Eric Burdon and we were doing the backing track. Jeff Beck wandered in. We were in awe. When we finished the track, he picked up an old amp and guitar in the corner of the studio, plugged in and sounded amazing. 

“And it was Jeff Beck that produced that sound, not a particular amp or pedals. It was purely him. He was totally in control. He could’ve reproduced that anywhere in the world in any circumstances. That’s what I’m always aiming for.”  

Listen To: “Aqualung”

John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra)

“Sometimes I can’t actually sit down and write music. I have to wait until I hear something. That’s why I like my iPhone: I get an idea and I can sing it directly into my phone, and it’s archived. 

“It might be just a melody, or it might be an idea I have for a particular chord progression, or it might just be a rhythmical idea. So I actually do so much with my iPhone and my voice. Who knows where I might be? I’m not necessarily going to be home when I get an idea, and if I don’t record it, it’s gone.”  

Listen To: “Birds of Fire”

Jan Akkerman (Focus)

“Focus is for me one of the few groups who know how to catalyze love for music and voice. We get into the theatrics strictly through the music, like with ‘Hocus Pocus.’ I want to reach the people with pure beauty. I want to make pure music.”

Listen To: “Sylvia”

Todd Rundgren (Utopia)

“Mahavishnu Orchestra was a revelation to us, so we started composing long, polymodal polyrhythmic marathons with bits of vocal and occasionally something that sounded like a song…. 

“We were comparing ourselves individually to our various heroes as well as to each other, and I developed a whole new relationship with the guitar. The material was structured in a way that left long passages without vocals and an uninterrupted focus on the instrument. For fleeting moments, I could channel the inner mounting flame.”

Listen To: “The Ikon“

Steve Hackett (Genesis, GTR)

“In Genesis, I was always writing solos. There were a few improvised ones, but there were not that many because there was always such an emphasis on writing with the Genesis team. I think I probably erred more on the side of blues than any of the other guys in the band. 

“I did always have the ability to be able to go into a blues. And I still do. It’s something you can share onstage with somebody else’s band, and I often have, where I don’t know the tune but I just wing it as a blues player. It’s stood me in very good stead.”  

Listen To: “Fifty Miles from the North Pole” 

Mike Oldfield

“When I listen back to Tubular Bells and Hergest Ridge, it sounds like yesterday. For a start, I use all five fingernails on my right hand, not a plectrum, so I get a very pure sound. That’s why people don’t seem to see me as a guitar player. 

“When there’s a video of me, I don’t look like I’m doing very much. I use violin vibrato. I can only think of Robert Fripp, who also uses that. And I often play just one note with a lot of power to start a melody.”

Listen To: “Ommadawn”

Steve Howe (Yes, GTR, Asia)

“I’ve always put [prog-rock] down to a post-psychedelia reinvention of rock music, because it had already got churned up quite a lot in psychedelic times, but I think it got broader then, and orchestral spirits came into it. I think what was great about [Yes, Pink Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson, and Led Zeppelin] was that each one of its members had a different story that they wanted to bring into the group. 

“I wanted to bring my writing into the band – my guitar ideas, my chordal ideas and songs. Bill [Bruford] wasn’t going to play 4/4, you know? He always knew what was appropriate, but he also knew what Bill Bruford would do with it.”  

Listen To: “Siberian Khatru” (Yes)

Steve Hillage (Khang, Gong, System 7)

“I was nine when I got my first guitar – a little acoustic with steel strings. I learned to play with a pick, and by the time I was 12 I’d got quite good. My first electric guitar was a Watkins Rapier, then finally I managed to get a Fender Stratocaster – my first pro guitar – in ’67. I think it was either a ’62 or a ’63. 

“I gradually found my own thing through a long series of experimentations with tape recorders, and later on I started getting into tape echo and various echo boxes. That’s how I really developed my personal sound and style.”  

Listen To: “The Glorious Om Riff” (Steve Hillage)

Alex Lifeson (Rush)

“I feel [my vibrato] is one of the more outstanding characteristics of my playing. I’m heavily influenced by Jimmy Page, and he has a fantastic vibrato. It’s so loose and so emotional. So as vibrato bars got better, I really wanted to create a subtlety in the right hand with the bar that matched my left hand. 

“I would push the left hand a little more, and I would ease off on the right hand. Of course, I did a lot of dive-bomb stuff in the ’80s, but I always wanted to have a very subtle vibrato on the whammy bar. It takes time, but it’s a very emotional thing. And very effective.”

Listen To: “La Villa Strangiato”

Allan Holdsworth

“I’ll just experiment with different voicings. What I usually do is just try to find the kind of voicings of particular chords that I like, and turn them around. I don’t like the sound of conventional guitar voicings. I love listening to jazz guitar – I listened to it a lot when I was younger, because my father introduced me to it. 

“But I very quickly tired of the sound of the chord voicings. I just decided that if I was going to get some chord things together that I might as well play some other voicings, instead of the kind of Jazz Book One or Jazz Book Two or Jazz Book Ten types of chords.” 

Listen To: “Metal Fatigue”

Tosin Abasi (Animals As Leaders)

“I would say the pure definition of progressive is to create new things. So advancing the scope of a genre – or the expression within a genre – is to be progressive. The minute you try to define what you’re doing is when you put limitations on yourself. I’m looking outside metal for my inspiration right now. That’s not to say that I don’t love my influences, because I do. But I want to keep moving.” 

Listen To: “Tempting Time”

Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree)

“This idea of being ‘progressive’ is misleading. I don’t like the word, anyway. I certainly don’t like the word prog. There’s nothing on anyone’s record that you cannot relate back to something from the past. I am aware of that, and I kinda embrace it. 

“What we’re doing is trying to invest that musical vocabulary with enough musical personality that it still sounds fresh. For [Wilson's 2015 solo album Hand.Cannot.Erase.], I would say it’s conceptual rock music, with all the implications that may or may not have.”  

Listen To: “The Raven That Refused to Sing” 

Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, Kansas, Deep Purple)

“To become a good guitarist, you have to be open to things. When I first played with Al Di Meola, I asked how he sounded so percussive. We switched picks and there was a difference, so I changed from nylon to celluloid for the rest of the tour. 

“I’d love to get to know Jeff Beck and see if he really is pulling it out of nowhere, which is how it seems. It feels like he’s really improvising and making art through his guitar.”  

Listen To: “Tumeni Notes”

Steve Rothery (Marillion)

“I fell in love with Genesis after I heard ‘The Knife’ on Alan Freeman’s Saturday Rock Show. After that, I discovered Camel, Yes, King Crimson.... For me, there’s only good and bad in music. Labels are meaningless. 

"The true meaning of progressive is music without any self-imposed boundaries. It’s having the freedom to work outside the constraints of conventional song structure, almost like a soundtrack-type approach to creating songs.”

Listen To: “Grendel”

Dweezil Zappa

“I love the sound of microtonal instruments. On Via Zammata, I played the oud and a Godin Glissentar. I’m inspired by a variety of Eastern styles, including Indian, Turkish, Arabic, and Bulgarian. 

“I even recorded some music by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. The tunes I chose have resonated with me since my dad took me to one of their concerts. I orchestrated them for guitar in a way that pays homage to Brian May.”   

Listen To: “Funky 15”

Alan Morse (Spock's Beard)

“When I saw Yes, I felt like they incorporated everything I loved about music into one thing. I saw them play live when I was 12, opening up for Black Sabbath in Los Angeles, and they really changed my mind. I was raised with all this classical music and some jazz, and I loved the power of rock and felt like Yes particularly embodied everything that I loved about music.”  

Listen To: “The Man Behind the Curtain”

Omar Rodríguez-López (The Mars Volta)

“From a fretboard perspective, I work with shapes rather than patterns. I’m useless at running through scales, but I’m good at arranging my thoughts into geometric shapes and creating chords and melodies out of them. Thoughts have shapes, just like tones – they have waveforms. 

“You can translate the shapes of thoughts and emotions through your hands onto the fretboard. With experience, you start relating the shape of your hand on the fretboard to certain geometric shapes that enter your mind when you’re hearing those sounds or having those feelings. You hear people use shapes to describe things all the time, such as, ‘That guy is a square,’ or ‘This sound is really round.’”  

Listen To: “Eriatarka”

Mike Keneally

“I decided a good discipline exercise would be to learn all the guitar parts on all the Gentle Giant albums. It turned out to be very valuable. But even more valuable was the time spent learning from Zappa’s discs. 

“I managed to develop a pretty good memory by playing stuff off of them. One of Frank’s names for me was Evelyn Wood [of speed-reading course fame], because of my unusual amount of comprehension and fast recognition of patterns. I can read music, but I don’t sightread it.”  

Listen To: “Lightnin’ Roy”

Guthrie Govan

“I think the best way to become comfortable with odd time signatures is to not think of them as odd. You just have to develop a natural feel for the contour of the bar in any given time signature, so you can sense when the ‘one’ will return without having to do any literal counting. 

“However daunting the top number in the time signature may appear, there’s generally an underlying framework, so it’s helpful to focus on finding the most prominent pulses within each bar, which are generally separated by smaller, more manageable numbers, like 3 and 4.” 

Listen To: “Sevens”

John McLaughlin has announced a new album, Liberation Time.

Set for a July 16 release via Abstract Logix, the remotely-recorded Liberation Time features a number of musicians, including: Nicolas Viccaro on drums, Jerome Regard on bass, Julian Siegel on tenor saxophone, and Oz Ezzeldin on piano (on "Right Here, Right Now, Right On"); Vinnie Colaiuta (drums), Sam Burgess (bass), and Gary Husband (piano) (on "As the Spirit Sings"); plus McLaughlin's normal 4th Dimension rhythm section – bassist Etienne Mbappe and drummer Ranjit Barot.

You can check out a preview of the album below.

Liberation Time features "Lockdown Blues" – the single McLaughlin released with the 4th Dimension last spring – and solo piano pieces, the first solo piano work McLaughlin has released since his 1973 Carlos Santana collaboration, Love Devotion Surrender.

Of the long-distance nature of Liberation Time's recording, McLaughlin said “The wonderful thing about music is that you put the headphones on and you are all in the same room.” You can check out its cover art and track list below.

To preorder the album, step right this way.

John McLaughlin – Liberation Time:

1. The Spirit Sings
2. Singing Our Secrets
3. Lockdown Blues
4. Mila Repa
5. Right Here, Right Now, Right On
6. Shade of Blue
7. Liberation Times

Jazz-fusion guitar giant John McLaughlin may have retired from touring a couple years ago, but he's not finished creating - far from it.

Watching the devastation the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked across the world, McLaughlin reconvened his old band, the 4th Dimension, to record a new song, the appropriately-titled "Lockdown Blues."

Featuring McLaughlin, Gary Husband on keyboards, Etienne M'Bappe on bass and Ranjit Barot on drums and konnakol, "Lockdown Blues" was recorded remotely from a number of far-flung locales - McLaughlin in Monaco, Husband in London, M'Bappe in Paris and Barot in Mumbai.

You can hear the track, the ensemble's first new studio recording in five years, below.

The track aims to raise money for the Jazz Foundation of America, which recently established a COVID-19 Musicians' Emergency Fund to give musicians and their families money to help cover basic living expenses. 

"The pandemic has thrown hundreds of thousands of musicians out of work, and nobody knows how long," McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin is asking listeners to consider donating to the fund to assist musicians and their families during this difficult time.

"As a band, we've been together so long we're family," McLaughlin added. "But in fact we go further back. Humanity is the only family, and we believe the only way humanity will survive is if we care enough for each other.

"We hope that whoever sees or hears this will care also. So, if you donate something - even something really small - thank you." 

To donate to the COVID-19 Musicians' Emergency Fund, stop by jazzfoundation.org.