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worked together at a Jersey club called Molly’s, where Paul launched his
“comeback.”) Pallo revealed that Paul was afraid of something: “He
always wanted to be remembered as a guitar player, not just a guitar,” he
said.
In perpetuity, Paul has nothing to fear. There’s no shortage of admiring
guitarists keen on talking up his guitar artistry. Larry Coryell, using a slow
cadence and placing careful thought behind each word, offered: “Les had
it. He had it. The man knew how to make the guitar talk.” Adrian Belew
remarked that “Les could play so well, play so very fast, do all sorts of
amazing runs and tricks that other people are still doing today.” Pat
Bergeson, part of Madeleine Peyroux’s touring band, judged Paul to be
“one of the most creative guitar players ever.” Greg Nagy, of the Michigan
roots band Root Doctor, might have spoken for three generations of
famous and unheralded guitarists when he commented that “anybody who
has ever played a trill, pull-off, hammer-on, slur, or any other plethora of
techniques owes a debt of gratitude to Les Paul.”
Bucky Pizzarelli first heard Paul play on a Chicago radio station
decades ago. “It was spectacular,” he said. “Les knew how to play the
melody. His jazz playing has always had the melody in it. That’s a trick
that all the greats had, starting with Louis Armstrong. He syncopated the
melody and then whenever he wanted to throw one of those beautiful runs
in, he threw it in.” Pizzarelli said he treasured the many times he worked
with Paul, whether it was at Carnegie Hall or in a small backwoods lounge
in New Jersey. “Les had a fine mind for anything that had to do with
music. He’d present it better than anybody else. That’s the only way I can
explain it.”
New Yorker Frank Vignola had many occasions, onstage and off, to
check out Paul’s fine mind. “Les was a master at playing a melody and
getting an unbelievably great sound,” he said. “I remember my first night
playing with him. We were doing ‘I’m Confessin’.’ He played the first 16
bars and when it came to the bridge he looked over to me to play the
melody. It was then I realized how thin my sound was. His tone was thick
and big.”
Paul’s lyricism was very familiar to Pallo. “He would play ‘Over The
Rainbow,’ and it was so pretty,” he said. “He got the exact notes and timbre.
It was so perfect.”
Another New Yorker, Joel Harrison, heard Paul far less often than
Pallo but was just as mesmerized. “The sound of his playing has a warmth
and a very direct kind of ... how am I going to say this ... the notes just
ping out at you,” he said. “They’re very clear. They’re very true.”
Charlie Baty, now involved with Gypsy jazz after years swinging the
blues with the Nightcats, said what he liked most about Paul on records
was “the fact that his playing is exciting and that his sense of structure is
different than a lot of people.” He continued: “When I hear Les, I’m thinking
that he’s realizing the potential of the guitar. He’s using open strings.
He’s using pull-offs and doing the things you can only do on the guitar so
he’s not playing the same kind of line that a horn player would play.”
Bucky Pizzarelli’s son, John, who grew up in New Jersey with Paul a
neighbor, reported he was amazed by all facets of his playing, but was puzzled
by something he hoped his chatty friend would clarify for him. “I’ve
always thought that Les’ guitar had a whole different sound than what the
sound has become on the Les Paul guitars,” he said. “But for Les, that was
the sound the way it was supposed to be, like a hollow-body archtop guitar
without the feedback so he could turn it up loud. So I asked him, ‘How
come those pickups on your guitar are a lot different from the ones on the
Les Paul guitars they sell’ He only said, ‘Oh, I got them at Radio Shack.’”
Duke Robillard said that he loved Paul and Ford’s “New Sound” of the
’50s—the direct result of Paul the perfectionist fiddling around countless
hours with the electronic gear in the garage workshop of his home, then in
Los Angeles: “Man, the way he used augmented chords and whole-tone
scales and diminished scales and then multi-tracked them.”
Vignola was similarly taken. “The amazing thing about those records
was that it was all one-takes because it was sound on sound, so if he made
a mistake in one of his overdubs he had to start all over from the beginning,”
he said. “There was such a high level of musicianship.”
Coryell, who is older than baby-boomers Robillard and Vignola, heard
“Mockin’ Bird Hill” and other Paul-Ford tunes when they were hot property.
“Like everybody else in my age group, there was no way to avoid
Les Paul unless you were nowhere near a radio or record player in the
’50s,” he said. “He was part of our normal life, and when I got old enough
to get interested in the guitar, my jazz guitar teacher said he had a record
of Les playing before he started doing his multi-tracking stuff. So it was
very instructive to hear this record and hear him play more or less normally.
He could really play the instrument, and for a musician playing popular
music, it was not unattractive.”
Coryell recalled a mid-’60s session at Paul’s home with trumpeter Doc
Severinsen. “I was a little guitar speed-freak at the age of 23,” he said,
“and Les checked me out. I realized I had been ‘regarded’ by Les Paul, so
that was a big thing for me.” Over the decades, Paul was never in short
supply of encouragement for established and aspiring musicians. Al
DiMeola, one recipient, said, “Les was so supportive of me through the
years. He became like a second dad to me. He was my dearest friend.”
At the Iridium, one of the musicians Paul took under his wing was violinist
Christian Howes. Paul called him up onstage many a night. “There
was something about the presence Les had, the reassuring confidence that
he projected,” Howes said. “It helped the music come through. Everyone
felt that from him, and that’s why they played so well.” Howes appreciated
how Paul let a guest, famous or unknown, take charge of the song all
the way through rather than have him do a short solo and then defer to
someone else. Howes commented on Paul’s playing: “If you sat and listened
to him for a full night, you would hear a lot of amazing stuff. He
wasn’t just regurgitating the same ideas, he was being spontaneous, he
was trying things and taking chances. It was really deep what he did.”
Paul interacted well with the Iridium crowd—a mix of guitarists, curious
tourists and staunch fans from all over the world who made yearly
trips to New York because of him. “Les had audiences in the palm of his
hand,” said Howes. “He would always tell jokes. He was very witty. If
somebody in the audience would call out to him, he always had a comeback
very quick.”
Monday nights at the club were also special for Vignola. “The thing
that I will remember most about Les was his enthusiasm for music and
performing and for meeting with people after the shows,” he said. “He
would stay sometimes until 2 o’clock in the morning to make sure that he
was able to meet with every person who stood in line to meet him and take
a picture. What a wonderful man.”
Howes felt the same vibe. “He made every person feel like they were
the most important in the world,” he said. “You always felt like he really
cared deeply about you.”
DOWNBEAT ARCHIVES
42 DOWNBEAT November 2009