“People love us when we’re starving,” George Benson said in 1974. “But the minute you commercialize your sound, they hate you.”

It was a hard-earned truth from a guitarist who had already lived both sides of jazz’s most enduring contradiction — artistic freedom versus survival —and who had watched that conflict take a devastating toll on his hero, Wes Montgomery.

By the mid 1970s, Benson was no longer an underdog. He had become the most acclaimed jazz guitarist of the decade so far, at least according to all-star polls and the Grammy Awards. As a member of Freddie Hubbard’s band on First Light, he shared in the album’s Grammy win for Best Jazz Performance by a Group at the 15th Annual Grammys. The following year, he was nominated again in the same category for his own album, White Rabbit.

For the 30-year-old electric guitar player, the recognition was long overdue. Benson had been recording professionally since age 10, when he made his first sides for RCA singing the R&B tunes he loved. He continued performing and recording through his teens in his hometown of Pittsburgh before joining organist Brother Jack McDuff’s band at 19 as a guitarist. Three years later, hungry for greater personal expression, he left to form his own small jazz group.

But jazz didn’t pay. To survive, Benson supplemented his income by playing rock guitar in go-go clubs—an arrangement that sharpened his versatility but underscored the gap between artistic ambition and financial reality.

Eventually, Benson found a way to bridge that divide. By merging jazz harmony and improvisation with pop structures and groove, he proved he could cook, communicate and excite without abandoning his musical identity. It was a path his idol Wes Montgomery had already traveled.

“The most modern and hippest guitarist of our time was Wes Montgomery,” Benson told Guitar Player in 1974, citing Montgomery’s “marvelous use of substitute and relative notes for the harmonic ones.”

Montgomery’s influence on Benson was unmistakable. Beyond shaping his musical outlook, it was embedded in his technique — particularly his use of octaves, a Montgomery hallmark.

But Benson also absorbed the cautionary side of Montgomery’s story. When Montgomery began recording pop and rock material in a jazz context — covering songs like “Windy,” “California Dreamin’,” “Tequila,” and “Goin’ Out of My Head” — he found commercial success and financial security, but at a cost.

Jazz purists and critics turned on him, accusing him of selling out and severing him from the community that had defined his career. The backlash weighed heavily on Montgomery, who was deeply troubled by the reaction.

“Wes told me about this a week before he died,” Benson recalled. “He was very unhappy and disturbed by that attitude. He died a very sad man. The minute you’re able to make money and live normally by commercializing your sound, the fans and critics hate you.”

Montgomery died of a heart attack in 1968 at just 45, at the height of his fame, celebrated by the public but alienated from much of the jazz world.

By the time Benson spoke with us, he had already begun to experience a similar hostility.

“The critics hate my records,” he said flatly. “They never think of me, or other musicians like me, as being told what to play and how to play it. Critics don’t know the circumstances of recording. They don’t go to the sources. And furthermore, they’re not musicians. They’ll review cats like Santana and Clapton and give them more credit and recognition than Pat Martino.”

To Benson, the issue was structural, not personal. The recording industry, he argued, had shifted away from nurturing artistry toward maximizing profit — a change that left musicians caught between labels and critics.

“Years ago, producers had a double purpose in making records: to showcase the talent of an artist and to make money,” he said. “Today, they just want to make money. The artist loses his identity by playing what and how the record company wants him to play. Then the artist isn’t considered an artist anymore, just another commercial player.”

Which is why, Benson believed, “the only place an artist can be true to his art is in clubs, not on records.”

As success grows, he noted, creative freedom often shrinks. Record labels push artists to repeat what sells, discouraging risk and growth.

“The more popular I become, the less say I have,” Benson said. “It’s the attitude that the record company makes the star, instead of the other way around.”

Yet Benson was notably pragmatic about the reality of the business.

“I’m not as depressed about this as most jazz musicians,” he admitted. “I’ll pretty much record what and how they want if it’ll make both them and me money. I was told to record ‘White Rabbit’ because Jefferson Airplane had sold thousands of copies of it. To my surprise, the album was nominated for a Grammy. That shows that even when I wasn’t playing what I wanted to, my talent still came through, just like Wes’s did.”

His talent would shine again, this time on material of his choice, when Benson scored with the 1976 cuts “Breezin’” and “This Masquerade,” the Leon Russell–penned tune that became Benson’s first major hit.

Still, the situation exposed another uncomfortable truth of the era: mainstream success often depended on Black artists recording material by white performers.

“I’ve found the most unbeatable combination is Black musicians recording white people’s music — but playing it Black,” Benson said. “Wes and the Fifth Dimension are perfect examples,” he said, noting the all-Black singing group that scored numerous hits in the late 1960s and ’70s. “A Black man playing Black music will not sell as well.”

In the end, Benson insisted, the stage, not the studio, was where an artist could truly grow.

“Environment is the whole thing,” he said. “Surround yourself with music and musicians. Listen, watch, play. Expose yourself to all music and apply it to your style — rock, blues, jazz, whatever. The greatest teacher is just going out and playing.”

“The first time I heard Wes Montgomery play, it was like being hit by a bolt of lightning. Once he hit the guitar strings with his thumb, you could feel it in your gut anywhere within the reach of sound.”

So recalled Ralph Gleason in a 1973 piece about the jazz guitarist for Guitar Player. Gleason had interviewed Montgomery many years earlier, but the interview went unpublished until it appeared in GP’s pages for a cover feature in the July/August issue.

By then Gleason was known as a co-founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and Montgomery, a giant of jazz guitar, was five years in the grave. As a longtime music critic and columnist based in San Francisco, Gleason knew Montgomery in his early years, when Wes and his brothers, Buddy and Monk, had a group in town called the Mastersounds. Wes released his first album as a leader, The Wes Montgomery Trio (a.k.a. A Dynamic New Sound), in 1959, which is around the time Gleason spoke with him.

Gleason’s interview is a candid portrait of Wes that reveals the doubts he harbored about his talent and the struggles he faced with his playing. He took up guitar relatively late, at age 19. Untrained on the instrument, he taught himself by listening to Charlie Christian records, all while raising seven kids and working as a welder. Even by the early 1960s, when his star was ascendant in the jazz world, he felt he lacked the talent of more experienced jazz guitarists who had years of playing behind them.

“Wes was actually very insecure about his own playing and very worried that when it came his tum to solo night after night, he wouldn’t be able to consistently maintain the standard he wanted,” Gleason wrote.

Invitations to perform with jazz giants did nothing to ease his mind. Montgomery once turned down an offer from John Coltrane. “It wasn’t just the money,” Gleason wrote, “it was the fact that he couldn’t think of himself as the leader in his field. He was always saying that he had played much better 15 years before.”

Montgomery was also troubled by his electric guitar sound. He favored the tone of Gibson jazz archtops, including the L-7, L-5 CES and ES-175, but had little success finding a combo that suited him. Part of the problem was his string gauges. He played a heavy, .014–.058 set, and was constantly looking for ways to brighten the sound. He tried Fender Super Reverbs and Twins before switching to a Standel Custom XV, according to Jazzguitar.be.

“He never got the sound he wanted out of any amplifier,” Gleason wrote, “and spent thousands of dollars hassling with electronics. I don’t believe that in his whole professional life he ever really got the kind of sound onstage that would have made him happy. The Fender people and everybody else must have been driven crazy.”

Montgomery gave few interviews in his life. In one quote that is frequently attributed to him, he stated, “I never practice guitar. From time to time, I just open my guitar case and throw in a piece of raw meat.”

It may be apocryphal, but it gets to the heart of his feeling about guitar: It was a beast that demanded blood. Montgomery seemed to live in constant fear of it.

“It’s a very hard instrument to accept, because it takes years to start working with it, that’s first,” he told Gleason, “and it looks like everybody else is moving on the instrument but you. Then, when you find a cat that’s really playing, you always find that he’s been playing a long time. You can’t get around it.”

If Montgomery had a signature, it was his talent for playing octaves. Starting out a solo with single notes, he’d build to octaves before moving on to block chords to create a dynamic structure that kept listeners’ ears pinned to his deft finger work.

His octave improvisations were sophisticated and lyrical. Players marveled at his mastery of such a difficult technique. But Wes, true to form, was modest about it to the point of being dismissive.

“I’m so limited. Like, playing octaves was just a coincidence,” he told Gleason. “And it’s still such a challenge, like chord inversions — block chords like cats play on piano. There are a lot of things that can be done with it, but each is a field of its own, and like I said, it takes so much time to develop all your technique.

“I used to have headaches every time I played octaves, because it was extra strain, but the minute I’d quit I’d be all right. I don’t know why, but it was my way, and my way just backfired on me.

“But now I don’t have headaches when I play octaves. I’m just showing you how a strain can capture a cat and almost choke him, but after a while it starts to ease up, because you get used to it.”

Montgomery’s decision to sound the strings with his thumb, rather than a pick, came about from his after-hours practice. Afraid to wake or disturb anyone, he brushed the side of his thumb down the strings to create a softer sound. Like his use of octaves, it would prove to be part of his distinctive style, but he saw it largely as a deficit.

“That’s one of my downfalls, too,” he said. “In order to get a certain amount of speed you should use a pick, I think. A lot of cats say you don’t have to play fast, but being able to play fast can cause you to phrase better.

“But I just didn’t like the sound. I tried it for about two months. Didn’t use the thumb at all. But after two months I still couldn’t use the pick, so I said I’d go ahead and use the thumb.

“But then I couldn’t use the thumb either, so I asked myself which are you going to use? I liked the tone better with the thumb, but the technique better with the pick, but I couldn’t have them both.”

Seemingly every direction he turned brought new threats. Classical guitarists, with their virtuosity and gravitas, were phantoms in the shadows of his thoughts. Asked if he’d ever run into any, Wes declared, “No, and I don’t want to, because these cats will scare you. It doesn’t make any difference that they’re playing classic, but there’s so much guitar.

“Like, if you hear a classical guitar player, he’ll make you feel like, ‘What’re you playing the thing you’re playing for? This is what you should be playing.’”

But it was soloing that he feared most. Gleason wondered if Montgomery would be happier playing rhythm like Freddie Green did for Count Basie.

“It would be all right,” the guitarist replied, “but

“But that’s not my aim,” he continued. “My aim is to move from one vein to the other without any trouble.

“Like, if you’re going to take a melody line or a counterpoint or unison line with another instrument, do that, then maybe drop out at a certain point, then maybe next time you’ll play phrases and chords, or maybe you’ll take an octave or something. That way you’ll have a lot of variations there.”

Perhaps it was his insecurity among jazzers that made Montgomery reach for a new market. In the years after his interview with Gleason, he scored success after success with instrumental records that crossed over to the pop format. “California Dreamin’,” “Windy” and “A Day in the Life” brought him new listeners and fame, even as purists decried his musical direction. It was short-lived, though. Montgomery died of a heart attack on June 15, 1968, at his home in Indianapolis. He was 45 years old.

Molly Miller is working overtime this summer. Yes, she’s reprising her role in pop star Jason Mraz’s Superband, on tour for his latest release, Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride, on which she also appears. But she’ll have to get there early as she’s also the opening act, performing with her Molly Miller Trio in support of their engaging new record, The Battle of Hotspur (Interrabang Records).

Recorded with her bandmates, bassist Jennifer Condos and drummer Jay Bellerose, it’s a vibrant collection of original, instrumental Americana jazz songs tinged with folk, surf rock and Ennio Morricone-inspired western soundscapes.

On its face, this may seem an unlikely musical pairing: a jazz trio opening for a major pop star. But Miller – who is also an adjunct professor of studio guitar at her alma mater, University of Southern California, where she earned a Doctorate in Musical Arts – doesn’t see herself as simply a jazz guitarist.

“Hendrix is the guy that got me into guitar,” she tells Guitar Player, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “Sure, I’m a jazz guitarist, but that feels like it’s not the whole truth. It’s just a part of what I do.”

Miller began playing guitar at age seven, joining her siblings in a family band. She counts among her inspirations such disparate artists as the Beach Boys and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the gospel legend and rock guitar pioneer on whom she would later write her dissertation.

Videos on Miller’s YouTube channel range from her beautiful solo guitar version of When You Wish Upon a Star (released on her 2020 album, Disney Guitar: The Molly Miller Sessions, as part of the Disney Peaceful Guitar series) to her trio playing a dynamite cover of J.J. Cale’s After Midnight and a host of other ingeniously arranged pop and jazz standards. (And if you’re looking for a lesson on CAGED theory, Miller’s YouTube tutorials can’t be beat.)

There’s a visceral and personal depth to Miller’s playing and songwriting on Hotspur, and her tone is big. On the cusp of embarking with her trio on a month-long series of dates preceding the Mraz tour, she took time out to chat with Guitar Player about practice, hybrid picking and trusting yourself as a guitarist.

The Battle of Hotspur almost sounds like it could be a recording of a live show.

”That was totally the goal. We wanted to make the record sound how it did live. Jason [Wormer, recording and mix engineer] actually went to one of our gigs and said, ’This is the first time I’ve ever recorded a band, mixed the record and gone to a show, and it all sounds the same,’ and I was, like, ’That’s what we wanted!’

“We recorded the whole thing in two days, and it wasn’t two crazy-long days. We’d do one or two takes, listen back to make sure everything sounded like we wanted it to, go back and do a couple more takes, and that was it. There are very minimal overdubs – maybe I had a note I didn’t like – but it’s pretty much exclusively a live record, except for some percussion and production.”

Your guitar sound is so full that it almost doesn’t sound like a trio at times. How did you get such a big tone?

“Jason is a guitar player. He brought his pedalboard and I brought mine, and he did a split at the top. I had two ’boards going to two different amps, so I could have two completely isolated sounds simultaneously. I was using my pedalboard on my Princeton ’65 reissue and Jason’s on a Vibrolux. One was set a little cleaner, closer to what I would do at a gig, and the other had more stuff on it. Then we’d blend the two sounds.

“He had different pedals than I did. I had the Strymon Flint for tremolo, EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master for reverb and delay – I used that one a ton – and Special Cranker overdrive, and the Chase Bliss Audio Dark World reverb. Jason’s board had a Diamond Compressor, a Flint on the ’70s reverb setting, slapback from the Malekko Ekko, the Keeley Monterey [Rotary Fuzz Vibe] and a modded Behringer Ultra Vibrato set to a slow rate.“

How about guitars?

“My 1978 Gibson ES-335 – that’s my baby. I used that and my Tele for most of the record. I used my goldtop P90s Les Paul on one song, Cine.”

A few of your songs give a nod to Ennio Morricone’s scores for ’60s westerns.

“Totally, though we didn’t want to be too on the nose. I thought of Mickey Baker, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Dave Brubeck, plus Afrobeat – [Nigerian drummer and composer] Tony Allen’s drums definitely inspired 66 West. We’re nodding to the past while trying to make something relevant, but in a timeless sense.

Jen said, 'I want to make a make a western concept record,' and a bunch of the songs, like Orchids and Cowboys and Cine, were very much inspired by Morricone’s music, like [his score for the 1966 western] The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and that kind of stuff.”

When you’re writing, do you start from a groove, or do you have a melodic idea first?

“I write in a couple of different ways. I play guitar every day, and I feel like I’m such a 'guitar player' where I sit down and explore the instrument, how a melody and harmony can interact. I love exploring that. So some of it is playing guitar and exploring, like Blues to Greens. Then there are songs that are coming from emotional places of me just sitting with my guitar, dealing with relationships or sadness stemming from the pandemic.

“But writing also comes from discovering. I love guitar and how chords sound and what happens if you bring the melody down to a different octave or you go to a new key. I think so much of learning on your instrument – and maybe it’s a metaphor for life – is about the exploration.

“Sometimes as a student I would be so goal oriented, like, ‘I have to learn all these scales.’ But how you really get better is by exploring. So, writing will be a combination of the discovery process and emotion for me, and trying to make sense of my feelings. I feel sometimes that playing guitar is way better than a therapy session. ‘Oh, I’m angry!’ You can exaggerate that on your instrument.

“Then some of the songs are written by Jen and I together. It’s pretty much split; half the record’s just my songs and half of it is Jen and me. But it’s funny that you say the 'groove' thing. Jen and Jay are a couple, and Jen has probably 500 Jay Bellerose grooves on her computer. She’ll put on a Jay groove and start writing and send me a section, and I’ll finish it. Then we all get into a room and make the song a real 'song' – you know, the arrangement.

“Jay references Booker T. & the M.G.’s a lot, the sort of idea where they’re not necessarily each doing a crazy amount, but every little aspect is so important – how each player is playing their part, and just slightly differently, maybe, from section to section. That’s helping to tell a story. We figure out the climaxes and how we breathe together. The little nuances.”

The intro to 66 West has some fantastic interplay between you and Jay. It’s free time but feels composed, and the entire song arrangement is very different.

“That song was the most ’Frankenstein-ed’ together. Jen said to play something at the top, and I think I started doing this slow intro. Then Jay started playing, and it really became this interactive, dynamic, cinematic thing, where you see all this tension getting bigger.

“Then he suggested he start playing drums and I, out of time, allude to the melody, because we were thinking of these westerns where they’ll have these themes that keep coming back. So throughout the song, we play the theme multiple different ways: over a four-bar phrase, over an eight-bar phrase, out of time, in 3/4 and then in 4/4. It feels like the opus of the record.”

Hotspur is all original material, but last year you released Wild World, an EP of covers, and you often post videos of your trio performing cover songs. Did you take a different approach?

“I first just learn it and make sense of the harmony. It’s kind of the same way I write a song: I think about what’s the vibe, what’s the point I’m trying to get through. After Midnight is just swanky and cool. I ask myself, 'What tools can I use in arranging to push the song forward and put my spin on it?' Maybe a different harmony idea, or in [Cat Stevens’] Wild World, for example, we have this open, psychedelic section because, well, it’s a wild world, you know? [laughs]”

You have a doctorate in music and know so much, yet still have a very natural, musical style. How do you cross the bridge from simply having knowledge to actually making music with it?

“A couple of things. I’m really focused on melodies, and when I prep for a record, when I’m learning a song or practicing, I do record myself and listen back. And I’m not listening for cool scales; I’m listening for, 'Is there a clear melody? Is there a story being told or motifs that are being pushed?'

“One of my favorite players is Grant Green; he’s the one that got me into jazz. His playing is so conversational, and that’s always something that I loved and that I strive for, when you feel like someone’s talking to you. I want it to be conversational, where you’re being told a story, essentially.

“And I practice that way, too; I’ve spent enough time on my instrument where, sure, I know all the scales all over my guitar, and I can play all the modes of harmonic minor, melodic minor, whatever. I can do that, but I never want to make it sound like I’m practicing that stuff, because I don’t like the way that sounds. I want it to be emotional.

“So I listen back and try to be honest with myself: not how fast am I playing, but am I coherently expressing myself to the best of my abilities? That is melody-driven. Melody and storytelling: Those are the things I think about.

“Even when I’m practicing scales, I’m not practicing, like, This is Dorian. Here’s Phrygian Dominant. I’m not thinking about that; I’m thinking about how do these scales – and these sounds, more than scales – interact with each other, and how can I create melodies with them?

“What notes are shared, what tensions live between them, where if I go from one scale to the next, if I move up a half step, is that a cool way to connect them in a coherent melodic way, versus, 'Let me shred this scale as fast as possible'?”

Are you listening for other specific things when you record yourself?

“I try to play full songs so I can hear how I’m playing the melody, how I’m soloing, how I’m making the song breathe. It’s more honest than anything else; it’s like looking into a mirror.

“But when I listen back, it’s not about bashing myself. I think that’s something that’s taken me time. It really is to discover the things that I find that I like, the things that I may be overdoing or that I should dig deeper into. I want to be playful and interactive in the way I play, whether I’m alone or with a band. I want to practice the way I’m going to perform.”

When you’re improvising, how do you turn off that critical part of your brain?

“It’s almost like that’s why I play music, because you have to be hyper-present. When I practice and record myself and I’m listening back, I try to listen as if it’s not myself. I think when you’re listening to someone else, they’re allowed to have mistakes. You may not even hear them as mistakes; they’re just playing music. So I try to listen to myself in those terms. It’s not like, 'I made this mistake, the whole thing’s screwed!' When I can let go of it, that allows me to be present.”

You integrate hybrid picking into your playing along with single-note lines and strumming in a very seamless way. Is that something you think about?

“It happens really naturally now. It started because I was taking lessons with Bruce Forman at USC, and I was doing this thing where I would comp with my fingers because of the warmth, and then grab my pick if I was going to solo. And he said, ’Why are you two different people? You should have one voice.’ So I started trying to just keep my pick in my hand, doing solo chord-melody arrangements.

“I wanted to be able to have my pick for soloing or some single-note stuff, and yet still have the warmth of my fingers for things like comping. I studied a lot of fingerstyle – Elizabeth Cotten, Memphis Minnie, Chet Atkins. I also spent four years playing classical, and integrating the pick into it felt like it gave me so much more freedom than I could experience with just fingerstyle or just picking.”

To touch on your playing with Jason Mraz, how does playing pop music affect your jazz playing, or vice versa?

“I feel like it all informs each other. I find the more I do not compartmentalize and just let these things inform each other, the more true I can be to myself and my sound.

“And I’ve noticed how it’s been so much more fruitful, because my goal is to be as honest as I can about who I am, and my music is a lot better that way. My guitar playing is a lot better that way, and I think I’m a happier person when I’m not trying to sound like John Mayer or Wes Montgomery or George Benson. I’m me. And I get hired to be me then, instead of those awkward moments where they say, 'Can you sound like XYZ?' Instead they say, 'Can you sound like Molly Miller?' And I’m, like, 'Yes!'”

In the beginning of rock and roll, the archtops were king,” acknowledges Texan archtop historian Dr Thomas A Van Hoose. A clinical psychologist by profession, Tom is perhaps better known in more guitar-centric circles as the author of The Gibson Super 400: Art of the Fine Guitar.

“Until the Super 400 came out in 1934, the L-5 was Gibson’s top-of-the-line guitar,” he tells us. “It’s the predecessor to not just the Super 400 but to D’Angelico, D’Aquisto and Monteleone. From a historical perspective, it’s quite something.”

Recognized as the world’s first f-hole archtop, the Gibson L-5 story begins around a century ago with Lloyd Loar – a talented musician and acoustic engineer whose revolutionary designs left an indelible mark on Gibson’s history.

“Lloyd Loar worked for Gibson from 1919 to 1924,” says Tom. “Originally, he was hired as what we might refer to these days as a design consultant. He came up with a very primitive pickup that he tried to amplify a couple of guitars with, but he didn’t do much with it at Gibson. He was a visionary, and I think he saw the future in electric guitars. He was always looking to improve and innovate throughout his career, either with Gibson or afterwards.

“He designed a number of things and experimented quite a bit until he came up with the Gibson Master series of signature instruments. The F-5 mandolin was first, followed by the L-5 guitar and H-5 mandola, then the K-5 mandocello. Those four instruments form what’s called the ‘Loar quartet’ and they were voiced to be played together.

“The f-hole design was one of Lloyd Loar’s ideas. As well as being a guitarist of some note, he was quite a gifted mandolin and viola player, and I think he took his cue from the viola. He had extensive musical and performance training before he came to Gibson and he wanted to take guitar design forward and amplify the instrument. He reasoned that the combination of f-holes, a longer body, twin parallel tone bars and tap tuning would make a really good-sounding guitar. And he was right.

“That systematic tap tuning of the top, back and braces during construction made a huge difference in the L-5, because it allowed the guitar to be played in a way that was much louder than the previous oval/round hole archtops and flat-tops. It had quite a voice. It was also very comfortable to play. Players really enjoyed the feel of the L-5. The 16-inch arched top with f-holes, the 24¾-inches scale length, the body depth – all those dimensions are just right. The original version of the L-5 designed by Lloyd Loar standardized a popular layout.”

Making its debut in 1923, the L-5’s milestone design stood headstock and shoulders above Gibson’s existing L-series archtops and quickly began to prove its mettle as an instrument of choice.

“The early L-series guitars [including the L, L-1, L-2, L3 and L-4] were an outgrowth of Orville Gibson’s original ideas and were thought of as accompaniment instruments for mandolinists,” points out Tom. “It wasn’t until Gibson came out with the L-5 that people became really interested in the guitar as an instrument that could hold its own in an orchestra, and it eventually replaced the banjo as a stringed rhythm instrument.

“The L-5 caught on early because it was a superb rhythm instrument. It could be heard in an orchestra, people could also play solo with it and it was comfortable. The guitar really began to be accepted and so Gibson’s production began to ramp up.

“As the guitar edged its way into these orchestra settings, it was seen as a rhythm instrument that provided a pulse. The guitarist would play in conjunction with the piano, bass and drums in the rhythm section. Probably the most famous proponent of that – although he wasn’t a Gibson player – was Freddie Green, the Count Basie Orchestra guitarist. He played two- and three-note chords and kept a steady four-beats-to-the-bar kind of feel that carried through their music.”

Throughout the ‘20s, guitars were also increasingly being used as solo instruments and to accompany singers.

“Eddie Lang was one of the most famous early L-5 players,” highlights Tom. “He was a master jazz player on his early L-5 [Lang is sometimes referred to as the ‘father of jazz guitar’]. He played accompaniment to singers, he played solo guitar, he played in duets, and he played in orchestras. He was very versatile and that reflected the guitar’s versatility. He showed it wasn’t just strictly a rhythm instrument and that it could be used for a lot of things. Eddie Lang was the first to really popularize the L-5 both in recordings and in personal appearances.

“Gibson had a whole stable of endorsers that played solo or just sang and played or were accompanists in small combos. Maybelle Carter was one of the first folks we saw that played an early dot-neck L-5. She played well – she did fingerstyle and all sorts of things with her L-5. Country players picked up on that and they liked the sound of it when they would sing and play. Plus, it looked different to a flat-top – and the cowboys liked their fancy guitars!”

Despite the L-5 being particularly labor intensive to build and therefore expensive, Gibson’s network of endorsers, dealers and teachers (who also sold instruments) helped keep it afloat and in production. In 1931, however, Gibson found itself facing some very stiff and totally shameless competition in the form of the f-hole-sporting Epiphone Masterbilt range of archtops. Consequently, something of a size war erupted between the two giants as each tried to top the other in a race of ‘bigger is better’.

“Gibson and Epiphone were number-one competitors, slugging it out for years until Epiphone was sold [to Gibson owners CMI in 1957],” explains Tom. “Epiphone were competing with the same customer base as Gibson, but the competition was ultimately a good thing, because both companies kept pursuing improvements in their designs and as a result, Gibsons became much more popular in terms of sales figures.

“They made L-5s in the 16-inch format with some changes in terms of the ornamentation and neck profiles and so on, until 1934 when the 17-inch Advanced L-5 models came out. They wanted to boost their sales and so they enlarged the L-5. The 18-inch Super 400 also came in that year.

“Advanced L-5s have X-bracing and a longer 25½-inch scale length, although there are different versions. It may have just been psychological, but folks thought the Advanced L-5 sounded bigger, better and louder. People also liked the Advanced models, because they have more to them in terms of ornamentation and inlays. Appearance mattered, and Epiphone and Gibson both recruited well-known guitarists of that era as ambassadors of their brand to be pictured on print material and news reels.

“But it was being heard that was the main thing – and Gibson L-5s were being heard on recordings. Carl Kress and Dick McDonough both used 17-inch Advanced L-5s. They played instrumental duets together and were very popular. A lot of these people recorded for radio as well. They would play live on radio or the recordings would be broadcast. Their playing was really magical, even for way back then – it was very interesting.”

As the guitar became ever more entrenched in popular music as a go-to instrument, players increasingly sought to bring it center stage, and with the introduction of the ES-150 electric archtop in 1936, Gibson suddenly took yet another evolutionary leap forward.

“It was a revolution when the ES-150 – the Charlie Christian guitar – arrived,” enthuses Tom. “It changed everything. Once people heard Charlie Christian with the electric sound, it really made a difference in terms of the popularity of the instrument, because then you could just step out front and play like anybody else. He was interviewed more than once about his ES-150 guitar and EH-150 amp and his famous response was, ‘I like to hear myself!’ The archtop electric allowed these guys to play the guitar where they could be heard and not just comping in the background.”

By the late ‘30s, Gibson had tentatively begun experimenting with electrifying its flagship guitars, the Super 400 and L-5, and by 1939 a Venetian cutaway version, the L-5 Premier (later renamed as the L-5C) was released. Nevertheless, World War II put the kibosh on any further developments for several years and it wasn’t until the late ‘40s that Gibson recommenced building electric guitars.

“Production stopped around ’41 or ’42,” says Tom, “and Gibson converted to producing guide rods for the M3 submachine gun. They also made wooden glider skids that were used in Normandy. We know they started making L-5s again in ’47. Those have the pre-war headstock logo and some other cool pre-war features.”

After the war, the demand for electric archtops was stronger than ever. By 1947, Gibson’s new series of laminated body ES instruments included the revamped ES-125, ES-150 and ES-300, along with its Venetian cutaway sibling, the ES-350 Premier, followed by the Florentine cutaway ES-175 and L-5-derived ES-5 in 1949.

“Going into the post-war era, it was clear to Gibson that the electric guitar was the place they wanted to go,” asserts Tom. “There was more demand for it. These were all laminate guitars – not carved tops. But there was also the ‘McCarty unit’ pickguard they used to electrify the [acoustic f-hole archtops]. When Ted [McCarty] got there in ’48, one of the first things he whipped up was this pickguard with either one or two pickups as an accessory for your acoustic L-5 or Super 400. All this then led to the electrification of the L-5 internally with the release of the L-5CES.

“The L-5CES and Super 400CES appeared in ’51 with P-90s. These were Gibson’s flagship models. They learned with the pre-war electrics that solid tops could feed back easily, so on the L-5CES and Super 400CES they went to parallel bracing and spread it out so the pickup holes in the top wouldn’t get in the way. They also put cross braces in where the pickup holes were like a little box. Over time they made the braces thicker to inhibit feedback.”

As the electric guitar began to boom in the ‘50s, leading to an explosion of popularity in the mid-‘60s, jazz music flourished and a new generation of guitar heroes emerged with colorful new sounds and styles.

“Wes Montgomery was the leading ambassador of the L-5 for many years,” recalls Tom. “I got to examine Wes’s single-pickup ‘heart’ guitar – which is probably the most famous L-5 – and discovered it is not an L-5CES, as is sometimes thought. When we lifted out that PAF, you could see the top braces had been cut through and the label said ‘L-5C’. And there were two little holes at the [end of the fretboard extension] where a DeArmond pickup had been.

“L-5 guitars were most popular with jazz guitarists like Wes. Some of the early rock and rollers like Scotty Moore used L-5 electrics, but the feedback problems, the size of instruments and the fact guitarists were jumping around on stage more meant the ES guitars were better suited. Think about Chuck Berry: he didn’t start with an L-5CES or Super 400CES; he started with a Les Paul Custom early on then went to the ES-350T. Perfect. And from there, he went to the ES-335, 345 and 355 and stayed with those.

“So the L-5CES was relegated away from rock and roll and back to jazz and solo guitar, and the sales kind of reflected that. But it all had to start from somewhere!”

Guitar Player would like to thank ATB Guitars in Cheltenham, U.K., New Kings Road Vintage Guitar Emporium of London, U.K., and Thomas Van Hoose.

Wes Montgomery could be the best-known jazz guitarist of all time, and he certainly raised the guitar to new heights in the genre.

Of his many great albums, the Wes Montgomery Trio’s aptly named A Dynamic New Sound is my favorite.

The trio included Melvin Rhyne on organ and Paul Parker on drums, and as a lover of the jazz organ-trio format, I listen to the album as much as any of Wes’s more famous works with acoustic jazz combos.

Released on the Riverside label in 1959, A Dynamic New Sound marked his debut as a leader and represented a giant step forward in the evolution of the electric guitar.

It not only introduced his genius to the world, it also put Wes on the short list of 20th century guitar innovators.

Wes was born in Indianapolis in 1923 and started playing guitar at the ripe old age of 19.

After hearing a Charlie Christian record at a party, he began obsessively copying the guitarist note for note.

Significantly, Wes was inspired to incorporate octaves in his playing after he heard Django Reinhardt.

He initially strummed the strings with his thumb to keep his practicing volume to a minimum.

From this grew his amazing technical prowess and an identifiable sound that is both distinctive and personal.

Wes’s virtuosity shines throughout A Dynamic New Sound, particularly on “Whisper Not,” “Yesterdays” and, my all-time favorite Wes track, “Round Midnight,” where he rips through the intimidating piece with apparent ease, making it sound as simple as a nursery rhyme.

On “The End of a Love Affair,” one has to marvel at how he burns through the changes as the chords quickly gallop by.

“Satin Doll” is earthy and totally swinging, with Melvin Rhyne playing a ripping solo before Wes testifies.

Some cranky critics point out that Wes became predictable for a “three-tiered” solo structure of single notes, octaves and chords, and some musicians at the time criticized him for settling into a more commercial format.

I find any negative observations about Wes head-scratchingly unfair. His contributions to the electric guitar are significant, and I think his “commercial” records are fantastically listenable.

As a teacher and a player, I encourage doing things one way. I use hybrid picking, so I always incorporate a pick and never place it in my mouth or lap.

That said, if I play octaves, I inevitably cup my pick so I can get the Wes Montgomery sound. Octaves just don’t sound right any other way. Wes once said octave soloing gave him headaches. I was relieved to discover his daunting technical ability didn’t come easily, even to him.

I guess he was a mere mortal, though he certainly sounds superhuman, particularly on A Dynamic New Sound.

Order A Dynamic New Sound here.

In 2015, I had the honor of being on a panel of judges for the First Annual Wes Montgomery International Guitar Competition, sponsored by George Klabin of Resonance Records and held in Merkin Concert Hall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

This evening showcased half a dozen rising-star guitarists from around the world, including Dan Wilson from Ohio, Michael Valeanu from France, Lucian Gray from Toronto and Roland Balogh from Budapest.

But of all the finalists that October day, one preternaturally gifted guitarist stood above the rest. In fact, after Pasquale Grasso from Italy finished his set, I elbowed fellow judge Pat Martino sitting next to me and said, “It’s all over. That’s the guy.”

And Pat agreed.

Grasso won the competition, taking home the $5,000 prize and a Pat Martino Signature Model Benedetto guitar.

It wasn’t long after that Wes competition that he was signed by Sony Music Masterworks, which led to a series of digital EPs commencing in 2019 with Solo Standards, Vol. 1, followed by Solo Ballads, Vol. 1, Solo Monk and Solo Holiday and continuing in 2020 and 2021 with tributes to jazz giants Bud Powell, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington.

The latter is a trio outing with his longtime simpatico rhythm tandem of bassist Ari Roland and drummer Keith Balla, and featuring guest appearances by vocalists Sheila Jordan (on “Mood Indigo”) and Samara Joy (“Solitude”).

The trio returns with Be-Bop!, Grasso’s tribute to bop pioneers Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

This latest outing, which also marks the guitarist’s first physical album release by Sony Masterworks, kicks off in exhilarating fashion with a faithful reading of Dizzy’s “A Night in Tunisia.”

It’s a brilliant showcase for Grasso’s balance of technical wizardry and inherent swing, and his blazing solo break at the 1:03 mark is in the breathtaking tradition of Charlie Parker’s famous alto sax break from his 1946 Dial recording of the tune.

Pasquale’s stream of single notes that follows for the next two minutes in his solo is even more astounding, brimming with rare facility and abandon to match his fertile imagination.

He punctuates his solo with brief but dazzling quotes from one of Paganini’s Caprices (the extremely difficult No. 24 in A minor) in the coda to the tune.

Elsewhere on Be-Bop!, the trio is in sync through super up-tempo, challenging bop staples like “Shaw ‘Nuff,” “Groovin’ High,” “Cheryl,” “Ornithology” and “Be-bop.”

They settle into a more serene vibe on Thelonious Monk’s gorgeous ballad “Ruby, My Dear” and take Parker’s “Quasimodo” at a relaxed mid-tempo, with Grasso’s superb octave playing leading the way.

Be-Bop! stands as the next step in the brilliant career of one of the most technically gifted and supremely musical jazz guitarists on the scene.

As his producer, Matt Pierson, put it, “When I first head Pasquale, it was clear that he was doing something on the instrument that I’d never heard before. First, he was approaching the guitar in a revolutionary way, combining jazz and classical technique to pull off a very pianistic vision.

“Second, as is the case with the greatest artists, his mastery of both his instrument and his musical vocabulary was a means to an end, a storytelling vehicle that is a direct extension of his own personality.

“As time goes on, each time I hear him play, I’m amazed how this emotional quality continues to deepen. And while he has gotten more advanced technically, the listener can feel more connected to him now.

“His phrases are more lyrical; I can feel him breathe, pausing to reflect as he’s telling his own story, leaving me hanging on that last note, dying to hear what he’ll say next.”

Born and raised in Ariano Irpino, in Southern Italy’s Campania region, Grasso relocated to New York in 2012 and has since been wowing audiences with regular appearances at Mezzrow, Smalls and the Django, where he has showcased his Joe Pass–ian command of the fretboard by freely moving between single notes, chords and independent bass lines while flashing Art Tatum-esque filigrees with uncanny speed and precision.

Grasso’s main jazz guitar is a custom Trenier archtop called the Modello Pasquale Grasso model, made by French luthier Bryant Trenier.

“I like big guitars,” Grasso says. “I like to feel the vibration go to my chest. That’s one of the most beautiful feelings when I play.”

His amp is a 1953 Gibson GA50, and he uses LaBella strings.

Where does your very pianistic approach to the guitar come from?

Since I was a little kid, I always had this sound in my head. Slowly, it’s coming out, but it’s still not what I want.

I was never too influenced by guitar players, for some reason. I grew up listening to Art Tatum, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Those were my guys.

For guitar, I always liked Charlie Christian and Oscar Moore, but I never really listened too much to guitar players. Of course, when I hear Barney Kessel and Chuck Wayne and Jimmy Raney, I love them. They’re all great artists, but they never really got me when I was a kid. I was more into Bird and Bud, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge and Louis Armstrong.

Of course, when I got Joe Pass’s Virtuoso, I was very shocked. I had never heard a guitar player play in this way. It’s the same with Wes Montgomery. I love Wes so much: his tone, his phrasing. I love everything that he plays.

So I was always more influenced by horn players and piano players than guitar players.

When I first heard you perform live, the Joe Pass comparison immediately sprung to mind because of the independence of chords, bass lines and melody. Was Joe at all an influence on you?

Of course, I love Joe Pass. I was very amazed by the touch that he had on the guitar. This is something very special. But I wouldn’t say I was influenced by that.

But I would never play in that kind of guitar style. It’s just not who I am. It’s not what I want to do. And, for some reason, I always preferred to listen to Art Tatum. It’s just a different feeling that it gives me when I hear him, or when I hear Bud Powell playing solo. It’s just their sound.

Of course, nobody can be Art Tatum. He’s a true genius – a creation of god. But I always try to catch some of his runs and some of his chords and harmonies and this swinging feeling that he gets on the piano. There’s just something about the sound of that I always liked, and I tried to transfer that onto the guitar.

In terms of guitar players, I’d rather hear a classical guitar playing a [Matteo] Carcassi song or a [Mauro] Giuliani song, and that makes me very inspired, because of the way that they play counterpoint and stuff like that.

When you cite Bud Powell as a major influence, are you referring to the very speedy single-note lines or the chord voicings and advanced harmonies in his playing?

Bud has been my inspiration ever since I was six years old. Everything that he plays – single lines, chords, his compositions – has influenced me. And the same thing with Monk and Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. There’s just something about the piano.

I studied with a great piano player, Barry Harris, when I was nine years old. That was always the sound that I liked, and I tried to transfer that onto the guitar.

But I’m curious: How does a six-year-old kid even know about Bud Powell, especially growing up in Southern Italy?

That’s funny, I know. My dad and my mom love music. When my dad was young, he went to Canada and he brought all this jazz vinyl back home, because he always liked jazz. So we grew up with all these great jazz records that he would play for us, and he saw that my brother, Luigi, and I really liked that kind of music, so he wanted to support us.

My brother, who is two years older than me, started with saxophone when he was six years old. I was four and a half when I told my dad I wanted to play music. So he brought me to this instrument store and said, “Choose whatever you like.”

He actually wanted me to play trumpet, but when I saw the guitar, I told him, “I want to play this.” There was just something about the shape of the guitar that attracted me, and that’s what I chose.

What was your early music training like?

Luigi and I grew up playing and practicing together. It was a game for us. My mom learned how to read music. There was no music school in the village where we grew up, so she got a book and she taught us how to read music.

She would sit for a couple of hours a day every day and say, “Okay, you’re going to learn the scales… You’re going to learn to read.” And my mom realized early on that both of us had perfect pitch, so it was really easy for us to learn music.

Both my parents grew up in a little town where nobody even knows jazz, but somehow they have a great love for this music. And I keep asking myself, Where does this come from? How is it possible that two people from the middle of nowhere in Italy got into jazz? And then they transmitted their love of jazz to me and my brother. That’s really amazing.

What were the circumstances that led to you studying with Barry Harris at the age of nine?

Luigi had a sax competition when he was eight, and in the competition was a great guitar player from New York named Agostino Di Giorgio, who had moved to Italy to take care of his grandparents. My dad asked him if I could take some lessons.

Agostino was a student of Chuck Wayne, the great guitarist from the ’40s. And so me and Luigi ended up taking lessons from Agostino, who lived in Rome, which was about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from where we lived in Arpino.

He would teach me guitar and teach harmony to both of us. One day, Agostina said, “Barry Harris is coming to do a workshop in Switzerland. You guys should go there.” And my dad, being a jazz fan, knew the name of Barry Harris, so he said, “I’m going to bring you guys there.”

So we drove all the way to Switzerland to do this workshop. I remember walking into the room on the first day, and Barry was playing “I Want to Be Happy.” And me and Luigi looked at each other and said, “We’re in the right place!”

What kind of records did your father have in his collection?

He had some Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong, and he’s a big fan of trumpet, so he had records by Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro. He also had some George Benson records.

Actually, my first love was George Benson, because my dad had this vinyl copy of one of his first recordings, with Jimmy Lovelace on drums and Ronnie Cuber on baritone sax and Lonnie Smith on organ.

That was The George Benson Cookbook, with that burning opening track, “The Cooker.”

Exactly! That was my first love. And then I heard Jazz at Massey Hall with Bird and Bud, Charles Mingus, Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie, and it just got me so bad, you know?

After that, all I wanted to do was play like Charlie Parker and Bud Powell.

You are mostly known for your virtuosic solo series of digital EPs that have come out on Sony Music Masterworks. But on last year’s Ellington tribute, Pasquale Plays Duke, you introduced your trio for the first time on record. What can you tell us about them?

I met Ari and Keith when I first got to NYC in 2012. My good friend Stefano Doglioni, who is a terrific bass clarinet player, introduced me to them, and we had an instant musical connection. I started hiring Ari and Keith for my local NYC gigs.

We have met nearly every day to jam together for the past 10 years. I love them as people, and they bring out the best in me when I play with them. It’s an inspiration to be around them.

I love playing solo, but it’s easier to play with the rhythm section because I have more freedom. When you play solo, you have to play chords and play the melody; you have to do everything by yourself. But when you play with a rhythm section, you can play more like a horn player.

That horn-like quality is apparent on the opening track to the Duke tribute album, “It Don’t Mean a Thing.” You’re playing more single notes and, of course, you don’t have to play so pianistically and cover baselines and chords and melody at the same time.

I play the same way that I play solo with the trio. It’s a little different because I can focus on improvisation and just be more free when I take my solo.

Thinking back to your development as a guitarist, was there a moment when you had a breakthrough in terms of the independence that you’ve attained on the instrument?

What helped me a lot was studying classical guitar. Agostino is a great jazz player and a great teacher, but what really turned me around was when my dad took me to a concert of the great classical guitarist David Russell.

I was sitting, like, five feet from him, and what I realized is that he had so much command of the instrument. He could play the melody, he could play chords, he could play counterpoint.

I was about to go and study chemistry for college, but then I thought, I’m going to go and study classical guitar instead, and that’s going to help me figure out what I want to do with with jazz.

Order Pasquale Grasso’s Bep-Bop! here.

Scott Metzger is known for kicking out Grateful Dead grooves and whooping up cosmic electric licks in Joe Russo’s Almost Dead tribute act, as well as jamming with improv maestros like Nels Cline and John Scofield.

But when the live scene went dark due to COVID, Metzger followed a vintage Martin down an acoustic rabbit hole to create a cool, understated solo album.

Too Close to Reason (Royal Potato Family) is mostly moody and spacious, rather than chock full of burning chops, although Metzger is capable of conjuring fire.

Check into the Showdown Kids to hear his proficient gypsy jazz hands, as well as those of his violinist wife, Katie Jacoby, who also happens to hold down the fiddle gig in a little British Invasion band from London led by Pete Townshend.

To hear Metzger’s electric howl, turn an ear to his power trio WOLF! On the other hand, his new solo acoustic album is a truly singular effort. He plays every note, except for Jacoby’s delicate violin on “Only Child.”

Too Close to Reason is simply a lovely listen, and a departure from run-of-the-mill guitar showcases. Metzger is not trying to juggle five parts simultaneously or worried about pulling it all off alone onstage.

To cut the album, he simply followed his acoustic muse, either melodically or rhythmically, and then typically threw in a complementary track, plus another for texture. The result is kind of like a duo with himself, with some sauce on the side.

It’s refreshing to hear an electric guitar player taking a stab at an unplugged album in his own style, completely for its own sake.

Performed with a plectrum, Metzger’s effort falls outside the realm of flashy fingerstyle fabulosos or the jam-jazz world he usually inhabits.

The first single, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” is a slice of Americana built on a lilting melody that downloads direct to memory.

“Café Hidalgo” is a haunting minor mystery, and “When Katie Smiles” is classically inspired.

Metzger excels at playing in 3/4 time, and the latest release, “Waltz for Beverly,” has a wistful bounce.

How does your acoustic guitar approach compare to electric?

The acoustic is a completely different instrument that has to be approached completely differently, but hopefully I have a similar voice on both.

I try to incorporate more open strings and let them ring out to maximize resonation on the acoustic. The idea is to highlight its beauty by featuring the overtones and other elements that you can’t get out of the electric.

Two of your primary influences, Django Reinhardt and Jerry Garcia, blurred the lines between acoustic and electric styles. How did you get into Django?

I got to Django through the jazz guitar players I admired that he inspired. I grew up reading interviews with players like Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery, who would mention Django, so I picked up one of his CDs.

I think it was the third volume of Djangology, which was a lucky choice, because some of that stuff is stronger than others, and I fell in love with it immediately.

The feeling of swing and forward momentum in the groove was unbelievable, and his control over the guitar seemed impossible, covering such wide spans with so many arpeggios and other methods on the fretboard.

And then I found out he was doing it with only two fingers on his left hand, which led to more disbelief and deepened my obsession.

I formed Showdown Kids with Simon Kafka on guitar and my wife, Katie, on violin essentially as a vehicle to get my version of gypsy jazz out of my system, because I love that music so much. It’s a great way to blow off steam.

How awesome is it to have a wife that can play Stéphane Grappelli to your Django?

Well, that was a big moment in the courting process, I’ve got to be honest. When she picked up a violin and started playing the Grappelli solo on “Minor Swing,” I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. This has potential.” [laughs]

I definitely did a double take.

What element of the Django inspiration carries over into your own album?

The biggest thing for me is the way he emotes. He could sound angry or gentle, or anything in-between. His ability to set the mood made it very obvious.

It’s in his approach to dynamics, his sense of rhythm and all of the fundamentals involved with playing the guitar. I don’t think there’s a better example of a player having mastered them all.

What do you love most about Jerry Garcia’s playing?

Actually, Jerry would always mention Django Reinhardt in interviews as well, and I think it’s the Django influence in his playing that I love most.

That’s obviously more apparent in his acoustic playing, due to the nature of the instrument, but I don’t claim to be an expert on all things Jerry. I tread lightly when I get into Garcia’s stuff. I tend not to study it too much because I do so much of it with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, and I don’t want to end up sounding like a watered-down version of Garcia.

I did get a chance to play his [Doug Irwin–built] Wolf guitar after it was auctioned off in New York City. Joe Russo put together a stacked lineup of players, including Nels Cline, John Scofield, Neal Casal, Cass McCombs and Tom Hamilton Jr. [from Almost Dead].

I remember that the guitar was very heavy, had a lot of switches and played great. It was amazing and nerve racking to hold such a piece of rock and roll history. All I could think about as it was handed off from player to player to take a solo was, I don’t want to be the guy that drops it. [laughs]

I had a chance to check out his 1943 Martin D-28 and had a similar feeling. Wasn’t it a vintage Martin that triggered your recent run of acoustic material?

Yes. Around late May of 2020, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to be touring that year, I decided it was a good time to fulfill a lifelong dream and add a nice vintage acoustic to my collection.I shopped around online and wound up buying a 1955 Martin 000-18 from Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville.

I live in Brooklyn, so the salesman played a few chords over the phone and sent me a photo. It sounded good and I thought it looked cool. I actually wanted an instrument that had been played and looked beat up, not some collector-grade guitar.

When I received the package, it was perfectly in tune right out of the case. The clear, chimey tone pops right out. It doesn’t take much effort with the plucking hand to make it project. You can really feel the guitar doing its thing.

All of these melodies almost started playing themselves on this guitar. I couldn’t put it down, and there was nowhere to go anyway. I wrote over 30 songs within a few weeks.

The most unusual song with the most unusual sound is actually the opening track, “Appropriate Wattage.” Are you playing that acoustic with an EBow?

Yes, you’re absolutely right, well, it’s actually two acoustic guitars playing counterpoint off of one another. I used an EBow on both. There’s no pickup, just a microphone in front of the guitar.

To me, the sound is like when you rub your finger around the outside of a wine glass. It’s a very pure, crystalized sound. Every now and again the string would catch the EBow a little bit and make a sharp, metallic sound. I liked the contrast of those two things.

During the mixing process, [engineer] D. James Goodwin added in a lower-octave effect and drenched it in reverb. The concept was to have an off-center introduction that didn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the record.

The title comes from a conversation I had with Nels Cline about the appropriate amps to bring to a gig we were doing together.

The rest of the record has more of a rootsy vibe, and the first single, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” sounds like perhaps there’s a bit of a Chet Atkins influence?

The melody is nice and simple, almost like a Christmas song that’s hopefully catchy and has a bit of metric modulation in it on the back half. I was trying to highlight the dynamics of the guitar on the bridge.

It’s very quiet compared to the following melody as well as the outro, where there’s certainly a Chet Atkins influence. I went through a very big Chet Atkins phase years ago, and while I would never try to make an entire record in that style, it’s definitely a nod to that phase.

You just released a video for “Waltz for Beverly.” What’s the story behind that tune?

I was kicking around that melody, which is like an Irish reel, with no harmony supporting it at all. So I put that down and then worked up some changes behind it. I’m not a huge fan of playing to a click track, but it was necessary for this situation in order to put the pieces together cohesively.

What’s great about playing over a waltz rhythm?

The great thing about a waltz is that the feel can be either very sad or very happy. It can sound lonely or like you’ve got a spring in your step walking down the street, depending on the feel.

I’d like to think “Waltz for Beverly” threads the needle between both of those. It’s got a little bit of sentimental melancholy as well as a hopeful, very major diatonic sound.

There are three tracks: one straight rhythm, one straight melody and then a third track for atmosphere, with lots of harmonics, open strings and clusters of very close-voiced chords ringing over the top.

“Only Child” is a lovely lullaby in waltz time with your wife Katie on violin, and “When Katie Smiles” has an interesting feel because it sounds like a waltz with a rest on the third beat, like two inside three, right?

Simon is going to play second guitar on the gigs I have coming up and he said the same thing, so there must be something to it, but I think of “When Katie Smiles” as being in four.

It’s also interesting that the foundation sounds rather basic, and yet you play some of the most flowery melodies and almost classical-sounding flourishes over the top, wouldn’t you say?

Sure. And a lot of the chords are slash chords [with the bass note different from the root]. I went to see the Who a bunch of times because my wife plays with them, and Pete Townshend uses so many slash chords in his writing. That influence definitely came through there.

 The single-note stuff you’re talking about is playing upper harmonics and extensions over a different bass note [than expected].

How fun is it that you get to hang out at Who gigs?

It’s unbelievable. I don’t even know what to say. Sometimes I can’t believe my life.

Order Too Close To Reason here.

Every great group needs a secret weapon – that singularly talented player whose unique contribution adds a magical, and oftentimes irreplaceable element to its sound. 

In the case of alt-rock pioneers the Pixies, whose loud-quiet-loud dynamic was famously adopted by bands such as Nirvana, that honorary title goes to guitarist Joey Santiago.

“I wanted to be in a weird band, and I got really lucky when I hooked up with Charles,” he says, referring to Pixies frontman co-guitarist Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis), whom he met in 1986 while the two attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“He’s got a wacky personality, and he understood right from the start where I was coming from. I made it very clear that I hated guitar solos. I still do. You hear these guys noodling around and playing fast. It’s like listening to somebody type. That wasn’t for me, and Charles agreed we wouldn’t have it in our band.”

Oddly enough, Santiago, who started playing at age nine, calls jazz guitar legend Wes Montgomery – no stranger to solos – one of his biggest influences. He’s also a huge fan of Brian May and Elliot Easton.

So what gives? “With those guitarists, there was always a storyline running through their playing,” Santiago says. “I always heard a lyricism in their solos. There was a narrative in the way their notes followed the chords. It wasn’t random.”

He also cites Jimi Hendrix as a prime source of inspiration. “He was the whole package. He could play incredible solos, but he worked with strange sounds and feedback. It was all very emotional and intuitive.”

In his earliest days as a player, Santiago used to rely on his own intuition when coming up with electric guitar parts, but he then adopted a more formulaic approach that, in his view, served him well. “On those first few Pixies albums, I wrote my parts out on paper,” he says.

“That had its uses. I could kind of look at it and weigh my options. Lately, though, I’ve gone back to just trusting my gut and my ears. I think I discover more things by reacting on the spot rather than plotting everything out. I rely on vibe now. I think it lends more immediacy to what I do.”

One thing that’s not apt to change, however, is his choice of guitars. He’s a Les Paul man through and through (his two main models are a ’57 reissue with a Bigsby and a 1960 goldtop).

“When the band started, I was playing an Ovation Viper,” he recalls. “Then Charles picked up a Telecaster, which is bright and great for rhythm, so I needed something to serve as a contrast. The Les Paul was the right call. It’s chunky and warm, and when you put that alongside a Tele, you’ve got a classic combination.”

1) “Gigantic” from Surfer Rosa (1988)

“We had this song kicking around for a while. Charles had the riff, and then he came with the chorus. He had [bassist] Kim [Deal] write the lyrics. The chorus goes, ‘Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic, a big, big love.’ Originally, it was going to end with ‘a big, big mall’ – you know, as in a shopping mall. That didn’t sound as good as ‘big, big love,’ so we went with the second idea.

“I’ve always loved playing around with feedback, so on this song I did all sorts of squalls. I drew from a couple of influences. I remember seeing footage of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, when he did the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’ The way he worked with feedback was awesome.

“Also, there were these moments in Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ when it almost sounds like an EBow – this one long note that just sustains like crazy. Brilliant stuff. I drew from those things and just went for a cool sound approach.

“At the end of the song, we went for the huge wall of sound. Live, it would go on forever. Sometimes I would play just one note. To me, it was like comedy: ‘How long is he going to do that? Oh, wow… He’s still playing that same note.’ It would border on the ridiculous, and I’d be like, Yep, that’s all I’m gonna do here. It didn’t take us any time at all to record the track in the studio. We’d played it live so much that we knew what we were doing.”

2) “Where Is My Mind?” from Surfer Rosa (1988)

“Charles and I ordered Vietnamese food, and he showed me the song. At this point, I was working with paper and visuals. I wrote down the chords and said, ‘Okay, I see what’s happening. This is what it is.’ I played it once, and then I stopped and said, ‘Yep, this is the one.’ And Charles said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great. Let’s go with it.’

“I did a really cool, stinging lick on my Les Paul. I always knew I was going to play that. It’s this unison string thing where I flatten the notes, kind of Chuck Berry style. That was the only element I wanted on the song. I came up with that right in Charles’ apartment, after we had lunch.

The solo is very blues – total minor pentatonic scale. The chords are major, but the solo is minor. That makes it sound kind of weird. To be honest, and because I’m not a liar, I didn’t know that I was playing a minor scale at the time. I just have what you’d call ‘Jesus ears’ – very forgiving.

“We didn’t know that it was going to be a big fan favorite. We never had that kind of vision. Over time, however, it’s the one song we have to play live a lot, every night, or people want their money back. The bus will get tipped over, we’ll get death threats and lawsuits – all that. So we play it.”

3) “Here Comes Your Man” from Doolittle (1989)

“This one was around for a while, as well. Charles had that riff since he was a kid. I think he even played it on piano. We recorded a version for our demo, the Purple Tape, that was slower and more country-ish. [The so-called Purple Tape is the band’s original 17-track demo tape recorded at Fort Apache Studios in Boston in March 1987.] Everybody loved the song and thought it would be a hit. We liked it, too, but we were alternative snobs, so we were hesitant to put it out. It stuck out like a sore thumb.

“In the end, we just said, ‘Screw it. Let’s just do it.’ We recorded it with [producer] Gil Norton, who knew it was a very palatable song. We did the backing track without Charles. For some reason, he wasn’t around.

“At the start, I played the ‘Hendrix chord’ – it’s like what he used on ‘Purple Haze.’ I thought it made the opening sound like that first chord in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – very jarring. For the riff, I remember trying out a bunch of different guitars – a Jaguar, a Tele, a Les Paul. Then we paired the Tele with a 12-string Rick, and that sounded good. We put a lot of thought into it. There was real production on the song.

“We got an invitation to do The Arsenio Hall Show, which was a big deal. I wanted to play our song ‘Tame,’ because that’s how we wanted to be introduced to such a large audience. Our tour manager came to us and said they wanted us to play ‘Here Comes Your Man,’ and I said, ‘That doesn’t sound like a very friendly host, making us do stuff.’ I insisted on ‘Tame,’ and the show people said, ‘No, thank you.’ So that’s how it went.”

4) “Monkey Gone To Heaven” from Doolittle (1989)

“Back in the day, I didn’t have a phone. Charles would try to reach me but couldn’t. He’d come over and I’d buzz him in, and he’d say, ‘Joe, you’ve got to get a phone.’ One day, he had a guitar with him. He played the opening chord sequence and sang, ‘If man is five and the devil is six,’ and he was kind of laughing. I listened and said, ‘All right, that’s funny.’ I think I had a hangover at the time.

“We didn’t play it live before we recorded it; it was all done in the studio with Gil Norton. It’s such a simple but clever song, although it keeps going with the same progression, so you have to be hyper-aware to make things interesting.

"At one point, Gil said we had to come up with some guitar melodies, so we decided to do a dumbed-down version of the Allman Brothers, with dual-harmony solos.

“That’s our classic combination of the Les Paul and the Tele. I liked the idea of a harmony lead and thought it was funny, but there’s that part where Charles says, ‘Rock me, Joe!’ I was like, I don’t know about that.

“I have to be honest: I hate playing the song live. The fans demand it. I still don’t get why people love it. The song makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s supposed to make people feel that way, but I don’t like feeling uncomfortable. I probably don’t like the ‘Rock me, Joe’ part, hearing my name.”

5) “Hey” from Doolittle (1989)

“This is actually one of our first songs. We had just started the band, and I visited Charles at the Cape, where he lived. We had our guitars and started working on it. It was very exciting. I even came up with the solo right there. It was trying to write itself. I found this one note, a siren-like sound. It was the kind of thing where other people would say, ‘That’s a good place to start,’ but my attitude was, ‘That’s a good place to stop. I think I’ve found it.’

“My guitar approach always stayed the same on the song. I would be kind of quiet. I’d flip the switch to the bridge setting with the volume low and a little bit of the tone rolled off. Then I’d switch it up and play the solo by going back to the lead pickup and wailing on that thing.

“It’s a little dynamic. You know when someone’s whispering and your ear just keeps getting drawn in? That was the whole idea. In the studio, I nailed it right off. Then whole thing was live, and we did it in one take.

“The song is very soulful – the rhythm patterns and Charles’ vocal delivery. He always had that kind of thing. I think he said that he once did ‘In the Midnight Hour’ by Wilson Pickett in high school. I don’t know if it was, like, a talent show, but I remember he said he did it, and people were very impressed.”

Browse the Pixies catalog here.

We recently asked some of the world's top guitar players to choose their favorite solos. There was, however, one catch: They had to refrain from the obvious choices. In other words, no Hendrix, Clapton, Gilmour, et cetera.

Here’s what Eric Johnson had to say…

1) Wes Montgomery | “Caravan” from ‘Movin’ Wes’

GUITARIST: Wes Montgomery

“It’s classic Wes Montgomery – totally swinging and improvising over the changes. It’s part chords and a lot of single-note sections, and it’s all great. It’s hard to pick just one Wes solo, but this one is particularly smokin’.”

2) Albert King | “Crosscut Saw” from ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’

GUITARIST: Albert King

“Albert King always knocks me out. He gets such a great tone in this solo, and his phrasing is extraordinary. I know Eric Clapton is a fan. He’s covered this song and plays the solo almost note for note.”

3) John Lee Hooker | “Boogie Chillen’” (single)

GUITARIST: John Lee Hooker

“Check out the original 1948 version of this song. It’s incredible that this was recorded before rock and roll, because John pretty much set the foundation for everything that was to follow. The playing is flat-out extraordinary.”

4) The Electric Flag | “Texas” from ‘A Long Time Comin’’

GUITARIST: Mike Bloomfield

“Mike Bloomfield is so fiery on this cut. He’s hitting on all cylinders. I was very influenced by Mike Bloomfield. I used to listen to him a lot.”

5) The Monkees | “Valleri” from ‘The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees’

GUITARIST: Louis Shelton

“He worked a lot during the Wrecking Crew days, and this is one of his best solos. Here in the middle of a pop song that got on the radio, he slipped in this blazing, fleet-fingered solo that just shines.”

Every great group needs a secret weapon – that singularly talented player whose unique contribution adds a magical, and oftentimes irreplaceable element to its sound. In the case of alt-rock pioneers the Pixies, whose loud-quiet-loud dynamic was famously adopted by bands such as Nirvana, that honorary title goes to guitarist Joey Santiago.

He’s the first to admit that his playing style – big on jarring shrieks, abrasive chords and short “anti-solo” outbursts – probably wouldn’t fit most other outfits. And that’s just the way he likes it.

“I wanted to be in a weird band, and I got really lucky when I hooked up with Charles,” he says, referring to Pixies frontman and co-guitarist Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis), whom he met in 1986 while the two attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“He’s got a wacky personality, and he understood right from the start where I was coming from. I made it very clear that I hated guitar solos. I still do. You hear these guys noodling around and playing fast. It’s like listening to somebody type. That wasn’t for me, and Charles agreed we wouldn’t have it in our band.”

Oddly enough, Santiago, who started playing the guitar at age nine, calls jazz legend Wes Montgomery – no stranger to solos – one of his biggest influences. He’s also a huge fan of Brian May and Elliot Easton.

So what gives?

“With those guitarists, there was always a storyline running through their playing,” Santiago says. “I always heard a lyricism in their solos. There was a narrative in the way their notes followed the chords. It wasn’t random.”

He also cites Jimi Hendrix as a prime source of inspiration. “He was the whole package. He could play incredible solos, but he worked with strange sounds and feedback. It was all very emotional and intuitive.”

In his earliest days as a player, Santiago used to rely on his own intuition when coming up with electric guitar parts, but he then adopted a more formulaic approach that, in his view, served him well. “On those first few Pixies albums, I wrote my parts out on paper,” he says. “That had its uses. I could kind of look at it and weigh my options.

“Lately, though, I’ve gone back to just trusting my gut and my ears. I think I discover more things by reacting on the spot rather than plotting everything out. I rely on vibe now. I think it lends more immediacy to what I do.”

Browse the Pixies catalog here.

After starting out in 1965 at age 16 with the British pop rock group the Herd, Peter Frampton joined Humble Pie, where he established himself as one of rock’s premier guitarists.

He launched his solo career in 1972 with the band Frampton’s Camel before achieving superstar status in 1976 with his multi-Platinum breakthrough album, Frampton Comes Alive!

Blues guitar was huge in England when he was coming up. But how did Frampton manage to evolve his playing into something noticeably different from what other electric guitar greats of the day were doing, such as Peter Green, Mick Taylor and Eric Clapton?

“When I started to go see John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton up in London and other places, I suddenly realized that everybody was trying to be Eric,” Frampton told GP. “They were trying to look like him, play like him and use the same stuff he used.

“I loved Eric’s playing, always have. He’s been a major influence on everyone, including me, because his licks are masterful and it’s such a beautiful clean blues style.

“But I felt that everyone was going to end up sounding like Eric Clapton. It’s just too seductive, and I’ll go there too. However, because of my parents having brought me up on Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, I had this sort of inbred jazzy side to me from a very early age.

“When I was about 13 or 14, I started listening to Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Joe Pass, and then, later on, a very young George Benson with the Jack McDuff trio. So before and during the Herd was when I was really burying myself in those guys.”

Would you say your jazz-informed blues-rock style fully came to fruition in Humble Pie?

“Yes. When Steve Marriott and I formed Humble Pie and we were jamming together, he was hard blues and I was more lyrical jazz rock. I’m putting myself in my own box there, but that’s the only way I can describe it.

“The combination of the two styles pushed me into the first couple of albums of Humble Pie where I found that I had a style of my own. It wasn’t blues and it wasn’t jazz, but it was everything I’d got in my library of licks in my head, and now it’s just coming out sounding like me.”

Purchase the Frampton Comes Alive! (Deluxe Edition) here.

The conventional roles of the lead and rhythm guitarist are quite clear: The rhythm guitarist plays chords that accompany the lead guitarist, who plays the usually higher, faster and “more important” single-note material. This dichotomy, however, is not always true or musically desirable, and the guitar’s long history includes many players who have chosen to explore the middle ground – “soloing” using a variety of chords for both harmonic support and textural variation. 

It may at first seem overwhelming to consider soloing with chords when it’s hard enough to learn chords and scales separately, especially considering the guitar’s asymmetrical tuning (with the G and B strings being tuned a major 3rd apart while all the other pairs of adjacent strings are tuned in perfect 4ths). And it must be noted that a guitarist who can solo effectively with chords in a variety of contexts knows both music theory and the guitar fretboard very well indeed, as one needs to be agile both creatively and technically to utilize this approach.

Fortunately, one can develop knowledge and skill in this area through a series of conceptual and practical exercises. Although there are many highly accomplished blues, rock, soul and pop chord soloists, we’ve opted to focus on the genre of jazz here, because it allows us to experiment with a wide range of melodic, harmonic and modal concepts, from the minor pentatonic and blues scales to standard jazz-style chord progressions to modes. 

These concepts can, of course, be applied to other styles you like, but the rich, eclectic and beautiful world of jazz guitar is a great place to start with this study. Working on these ideas will improve your soloing, allowing greater harmonic support and independence, particularly when playing in smaller ensembles, such as a guitar-bass-drums trio. They’ll also help you incorporate a greater variation of textures into your lead playing, other than just single notes, which can help you build a solo effectively and keep it interesting, especially when playing with a clean, undistorted tone.

This lesson includes 11 exercises/examples, presented in two parts that focus on and demonstrate various useful chord soloing concepts and approaches. In this first part, we will look at five examples that demonstrate the following: 

• How the all-important minor pentatonic and blues scales can serve as a basis for octave, double-stop and chordal soloing.
• Bluesy double-stop ideas for dominant 7 chords all over the fretboard.
• How to build agility and fluency with minor 7, dominant 7 and major 7 chord shapes on the guitar’s top four strings.

For purposes of illustration and comparison, we’ve chosen to use just one key center for each concept, but transposing these ideas to and practicing them in different keys and contexts is essential to properly absorb them, so be sure to do that on your own. 

So dial in an appropriately clean and warm-sounding neck-pickup electric guitar tone, and let’s get started!

We’ll begin by looking at an example of how to construct a chord solo from the minor pentatonic scale, specifically D minor pentatonic (D, F, G, A, C). Ex. 1a presents a simple “seed phrase” that we will use to build a number of chord solo ideas. Ex. 1b shows the same melody played in strummed octaves using an approach popularized back in the 1960s by the legendary Wes Montgomery, with each melody note doubled an octave higher. 

When playing octaves like this and moving up and down the fretboard, it helps to visually focus on the lower note, fretted with the 1st, or index, finger while maintaining a constant three-fret distance between it and the 4th finger, or pinkie, which is two strings higher. Be sure to mute the unused string between each octave pair with the “paw” of your 1st finger, to prevent it from ringing as you strum across all three strings. To emulate Wes’ warm, jazzy touch, strum the strings with downstrokes of your pick-hand’s bare thumb. Note that, when playing strummed octaves on the A and G strings or the low E and D strings, the octave-higher note would only be two frets higher, not three, due to the way the guitar is tuned.

Building upon this strummed octaves idea, Ex. 1c adds a note that’s either a perfect 5th or 4th above each low melody note, producing a subtle and harmonically rich variation that has a “throaty” and sort of “power-chord-like” quality that brings to mind the sound of an electric organ and its prominent overtones. George Benson and Grant Green have made great use of this root-5th or root-5th-octave harmonization technique in many of their guitar solos. Be sure to barre the notes played at the same frets on the top two strings with your pinkie.

Inspired by Kenny Burrell, Ex. 1d takes our foundational minor pentatonic melody and instead harmonizes it in major and minor 3rds. This adds an additional “color tone” to the minor pentatonic scale – the major 6th, B, which is played above the G note – implying the interesting sound of the D Dorian mode (D, E, F, G, A, B, C). This approach can be highly useful in many minor-key contexts.

Finally, like the three-note, root-5th-octave “stacks” we looked at in Ex. 1c, Ex. 1e takes a similar approach with three-note chords, one that’s more edgy and modern sounding, inspired by the styles of players like Robben Ford and Joe Dioro. 

Here, each note of our foundational melody, which has been slightly altered, has two 4ths stacked above it (a 4th and a 4th above that note), producing what’s known as quartal harmony. For added dissonance, the lower two notes can be altered chromatically, as demonstrated in bar 2. Actually, in this case, the focus shifts to the top note, which can serve as your guiding melody note. 

When utilizing this approach, you can think of the highest note as being harmonized below with a pair of 4ths that form a “sub-stack.”

Ex. 2 presents a variety of jazz-blues-style double-stop ideas, which are great for playing over many dominant 7 chords. These are all in the style of George Benson, and I’ve given an idea for each of the five CAGED shapes, so that you will always have one to work from. 

Experiment with transposing these licks and phrases to other keys and using them over a blues progression, as well as over static dominant-7 chord vamps. We also recommend writing your own double-stop riffs for each position. 

In order to solo with chords effectively, one needs to know several chord types everywhere on the fretboard, so let’s be thorough and dig deep into some fundamental chord qualities: minor 7, dominant 7 and major 7. The better we know these chord types and their various shapes, the more fluently we can navigate a range of progressions, and even harmonize any melody with any chord, which is a great goal. 

For further study, be sure to check out the ballad-playing styles of Joe Pass, Charlie Byrd and Wes Montgomery for inspiring examples of this sort of approach.

In our last examples this lesson, we’ll look at minor 7, dominant 7 and major 7 harmonization. Ex. 3 shows every available inversion of a Dm7 chord played on the top four strings, followed by how they can be used and altered slightly to harmonize an ascending and descending D Dorian melody on the 1st string. (The D Dorian mode “agrees with” a Dm7 chord beautifully.)

Ex. 4 similarly shows the inversions for a G7 chord on the top four strings, followed again by the harmonization of an ascending and descending scale, this time the G Mixolydian mode (G, A, B, C, D, E, F) with a simple rhythm. Note that G Mixolydian and D Dorian are built from the very same seven notes, as they are both relative modes of what would be considered the “parent” C major scale, or C Ionian mode (C, D, E, F, G, A, B). Again, practice transposing this information to other keys, as well.

Finally, Ex. 5 presents the available inversions for a Cmaj7 chord on this same string group. For the harmonizations, we’ve used some alternative voicings employing maj6, 6/9 and maj13 chords, partly because the first chord, the utterly beautiful Cmaj7/E, is quite tricky to grab on the fly. You’ll find these solutions to be more agile.

In addition, Cmaj7/B (with the C in the melody and B in the bass) is quite a spiky chord, so we’ve offered the softer C6/9 with the A in the bass as an alternative. Note that all of these chords “live within” the C major scale and provide a general “happy” major diatonicism. You might find that using small two- and three-string partial barres with your fretting hand is easier than trying to finger every string with a different fingertip.

Experiment with what works for you, especially given the speed of some chord changes.

We’ll be back next time to explore working in fundamental modes and their harmonic contexts, and we’ll look at some useful and harmonically appropriate solutions for navigating the jazz style’s essential major and minor ii – V progressions all over the fretboard.

See you then!

When the electric guitar began to catch on in the ‘50s and ‘60s, jazz music flourished and a new generation of guitar heroes emerged. Since the release of the L-5 jazzbox in 1923, Gibson had been leading the charge in the f-hole archtop market, and in 1951, the single-cutaway electric version – the L-5CES – made its debut.

Considered to be one of Gibson’s finest designs, the L-5 has proven to be an instrument of choice for many a jazz legend over the decades, and in this film from the mid-‘60s, Wes Montgomery can be seen playing his famous ‘heart' guitar. 

With its rounded/Venetian cutaway and humbucker, this iconic instrument appears to be an L-5CES at first sight. It is, however, a modified single-cutaway L-5C.

“Wes Montgomery was the leading ambassador of the L-5 for many years,” recalls Gibson archtop historian Thomas Van Hoose. “I got to examine Wes’ single pickup ‘heart’ guitar – which is probably the most famous L-5 – and discovered it is not an L-5CES, as is sometimes thought. 

"When we lifted out that PAF [humbucker], you could see the top braces had been cut through and the label said “L-5C”. And there were two little holes at the top of the neck where a DeArmond pickup had been.

“L-5 guitars were most popular with jazz guitarists like Wes. Some of the early rock ‘n’ rollers like Scotty Moore used L-5 electrics, but the feedback problems, the size of instruments, and the fact that guitarists were jumping around on stage more and more meant the ES guitars were much better suited.

"Think about Chuck Berry – he didn’t start with an L-5CES or Super 400CES. He started with a Les Paul Custom very early on then went to the ES-350T. Perfect. And from there, he went to the ES-335, 345 and 355 and stayed with those. So, the L-5CES was relegated away from rock ‘n’ roll and back to jazz and solo guitar, and the sales kind of reflected that. But it all had to start from somewhere!”

Discover more of Wes Montgomery's music here.