Legends Of Jazz Guitar - Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop

Legends of
Jazz
Guitar
Volume Three
featuring
Jim Hall
Tal Farlow
Pat Martino
Herb Ellis
Charlie Byrd
Barney Kessel

LEGENDS OF JAZZ GUITAR
VOLUME THREE
by Mark Humphrey
Funny how unlikely couples get together. Take, for
instance, the guitar and jazz. The guitar, rooted somewhere
in Moorish Spain and Americanized as a ladies’
parlor instrument or a cowboy’s companion, is not by
its acoustic nature a convincing surrogate horn. Jazz,
rooted in African polyrhythms and nurtured in Southern
brass bands, is seemingly too raucously aggressive
to keep company with a delicately-strung wooden box.
But leave it to imaginative musicians and instrument
makers to find ways around such contradictions. If the
guitar was ever an anomaly in jazz it ceased to be long
ago. Can you even imagine the idiom without the guitar’s
voluble presence? A key player in the band would be
missing.
The six men seen and heard in this video are among
the most exemplary band members to choose the guitar
as their means of expression. The initial inspiration
for most of them was Charlie Christian, who blazed trails
jazz guitarists still tred a half century later. Christian
swung in the direction of bop, and his disciples (foremost
among whom are seen here) boldly carried the
guitar into that next phase of jazz. Aside from their fervor
for the potential of the guitar in the evolution of jazz,
many of these artists have similar backgrounds: Southern
or Southwestern, and of roughly the same generation.
But their individuality is abundantly clear in performances
ranging from meditative ballads to speedof-sound
boppers. Underlying it all is an exhilarating
sense of triumph over that apparent oxymoron, jazz
guitar. Having proven that the guitar is indeed a first
rate medium for jazz expression, these artists confidently
address other contradictions, ones involving evolution
within a well-grounded tradition. They’re serious about
their business, but you can see them having fun with it,
too.
2

3
Photo by Tom Copi

JIM HALL
This collection of performances opens with a George
Bassman – Ned Washington ballad which was the theme
of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Jim Hall, who played
“I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” for the BBC in 1964,
told Guitar Player five years later: “I enjoy ballads, standards.
By standards, I mean I enjoy things with chord
progressions more than ‘open free’ music. I also like
medium swing tempos.”
A year older than 1932’s “I’m Getting Sentimental
Over You,” Hall says he was “brought up in the Baptist
Midwestern environment of Cleveland, Ohio.” He started
playing guitar at age ten; like most jazz guitarists of his
generation, Hall had a ‘Damascus road’ experience with
Charlie Christian. “The first time I heard him I was 13
years old,” he told down beat’s Mitchell Seidel, “and it
changed my life.” The performance that bowled Hall over
was “Grand Slam.” Half a century later, Hall says
Christian’s style “sounds old and brand-new at the same
time.”
Though determined to play jazz guitar, Hall says
“Baptist guilt” drove him to earn a Bachelor of Music
degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music. “I was actually
being primed to become a music teacher or composer,”
Hall told down beat’s Bill Milkowski, but the prospect
of an exclusively academic life prompted him to
drop out before attaining his master’s degree and head
for Los Angeles. Still, Hall deems his formal training a
plus: “I could read music fairly well for a guitar player,”
he says (he wrote a string quartet as his thesis). “When
I was in music school,” Hall told Guitar Player’s Jim
Ferguson, “I heard everything from Gregorian chant to
12-tone and electronic music, which was pretty new
back then. It opened my view of what music could be.”
Hall arrived in Los Angeles in 1955 and simultaneously
studied classical guitar with Vicente Lopez while
hanging out on the jazz scene. If Hall was initially unsure
of his direction, a work call from drummer Chico
Hamilton changed that. Still, he insists his classical training
left its mark. “I keep my strings lighter than most,”
4

Photo by Tom Copi
Hall told Seidel.
“Part of that was trying
to get a classical
guitar sound out of
this instrument... My
sound is a combination
of Charlie Christian
and classical
guitar.”
Hall’s jazz baptism
with Hamilton
was followed by a
challenging stint
with saxophonist/
clarinetist Jimmy
Guiffre (“It cost me
a few hairs, but it
was worth it,” he
says) and work accompanying
the supreme
chanteuse of jazz, Ella Fitzgerald. “Playing with
singers,” Hall told Norman Mongan, “gave me a sense
of space, a way of placing notes in relation to the lyrics,
which is quite different from accompanying another
instrument.”The way Hall ‘breathes’ is heard to good
effect in both “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” and
“My Funny Valentine.”
By the late 1950s, Hall’s services were in demand
by such legends as tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and
pianist Bill Evans. Hall considers his 1961 stint with tenor
saxophonist Sonny Rollins an exhilarating career highlight:
“He inspired me more than any other musician I
had played with up to then,” says Hall. Rollins is the
composer of “Valse Hot,” which Hall performed for the
BBC in 1964 as a member of the Art Farmer Quartet.
With Farmer’s distinctive fluegelhorn to the fore, Hall,
bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Pete La Roca made
a striking ensemble. (Swallow and La Roca accompanied
Hall on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.”) His
instrument in this group was a single pickup Gibson ES-
175 which had previously belonged to Howard Roberts.
5

“What I do best,” Hall has said, “is react to other
musicians.” In 1965; he realized that drink was slowing
his reactions, so he retired, got sober, and spent the
next three and-a-half years in the house band of the
Merv Griffin Show. “That always sounds like a confession
when I mention it now,” Hall quips of his television
job. When the Griffin show moved from New York to
California, Hall didn’t. He began performing with bassist
Ron Carter and gradually worked his way back into
doing what he loves most, playing jazz. Twenty two years
after the BBC performances, we find Hall in Denmark
for a rendition of the Rodgers and Hart classic, “My
Funny Valentine” from the 1937 musical Babes in Arms.
Joining him is the extraordinary French pianist Michel
Petrucciani, whose height (less than three feet) is no
measure of his talent. Hall toured Europe with
Petrucciani in 1986, and told down beat’s Bill Milkowski:
“Michel’s such a wonderful player and makes it easy
because he listens so hard and reacts so fast. To me,
that’s really the gist of playing together. It all boils down
to whether or not the guys listen to one another, and
Michel does that very well.”
Hall has been called “the most romantic and subtle
of the modern guitarists,” but he has also challenged
himself in recent years by collaborating with such
progressives as Bill Frisell and John Abercrombie.
“These younger guys always inspire me, says Hall,
whose first solo guitar album (Dedications & Inspirations,
Telarc) appeared in 1994. “I’m sure that it’s never over,”
Hall told Mitchell Seidel, “at least it certainly isn’t for
me. I practiced today already, and if I don’t, it’s like
somebody stepped on my hand. That’s another one of
the beauties of it-that it goes on forever.”
6

BARNEY KESSEL, HERB ELLIS,
AND CHARLIE BYRD
“THE GREAT GUITARS”
Photo by Tom Copi
In 1973, Australian jazz promoter Kim Bonythan
brought Barney Kessel, Herb Ellis, and Charlie Byrd to
Australia and New Zealand for a nine-concert tour. “The
promoter wanted Herb and me to play the first part of
the concert, Charlie and his group the second, and all
of us together for the finale,” Kessel told Guitar Player’s
Robert Yelin. “It was a lot of fun playing with them,”
Byrd told Frets editor Jim Hatlo, “and the audiences
really responded to the way we were enjoying ourselves.
So we decided to keep it going.” The tour launched The
Great Guitars, a group which gave new meaning to the
term ‘power trio.’ Drawing on a combined 90 years of
professional experience, The Great Guitars featured inspired
dialogues among three of jazz guitar’s most fluent
voices.
The most outspoken of these voices is Barney
Kessel. The son of an immigrant Russian Jewish
bootmaker, Kessel was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma
in 1923. He grew up hearing cowboy songs like “Rye
Whiskey” and old hymns strummed on guitar. When he
was 12, he bought a guitar complete with strings, a pick,
and an instruction book for one dollar. Tutored by Charlie
7

Keoube in a Federal Music Project of the WPA, Kessel
received a three-month ‘crash course’ in guitar and
music theory in 1935. Two years later, Kessel was playing
well enough to join an otherwise black jazz band. It
was there he first heard the name Charlie Christian.
By the time he actually met Christian in 1940, Kessel
had listened intently to that pioneer’s work with Benny
Goodman and thoroughly absorbed Christian’s style. But
the experience of jamming with his idol jarred him:
“When I began improvising with Charlie Christian,”
Kessel recalled, he had to ask himself, “What am I going
to play?” Kessel realized he would have to find his
own musical voice rather than merely mirror Christian’s.
Experiences in a varied settings on the road (with
the bands of Chico Marx, Artie Shaw and Charlie Barnet)
and in the studio (with the legendary likes of Lester
Young and Charlie Parker) went a long way toward earning
Kessel his own unique identity, one which bridged
the sounds of swing and bebop. In 1952, he joined bassist
Ray Brown and pianist Oscar Peterson in an influential
trio which spotlighted Kessel’s talents. But family
concerns prompted Kessel to leave Peterson’s trio in
1953. Before departing, he recommended Herb Ellis for
the job.
“We met 30 years ago at the Taft Hotel in New York
City,” Ellis told Robert Yelin in 1974. “Barney had some
trouble with his guitar, so he came to borrow mine. He
was working with Artie Shaw then, and I was off from
the Jimmy Dorsey band that night. From that first meeting
we jammed, and we’ve been jamming ever since.”
Beyond common musical passions, Ellis and Kessel
shared similar beginnings in Southwestern small towns.
For Ellis, it was Farmville, Texas, where he was born in
1921. “My mother tells me I always played the blues,”
Ellis recalls. His interest in jazz blossomed at North Texas
State College, where Ellis majored in music and eagerly
explored Charlie Christian’s recordings with Benny
Goodman’s Sextet. Both Ellis and Kessel cite the same
formative influences: Christian, tenor saxophonist Lester
Young and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker.
8

Kansas City was still a jazz Mecca when Ellis joined
the Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra in the early 1940s.
Praised in down beat and Metronome, Ellis then moved
up to Jimmy Dorsey’s Orchestra. After World War II,
piano, guitar and bass trios were all the rage and for
awhile Ellis became a third of the Soft Winds. It was a
calm before the storm of Oscar Peterson’s frenetic tempos
in the trio which Ellis joined at Kessel's departure
in 1953. “Herb Ellis,” Peterson wrote in Lp sleeve notes,
“demonstrates...that he is not only a talented soloist,
but that he has complete control of his instrument, along
with a capacity for invention at all tempos...” Considering
its source, that’s high praise indeed.
Following five exhilarating years with Peterson and
bassist Ray Brown, Ellis left to work as accompanist to
Ella Fitzgerald for a year. There were occasional ventures
as leader, such as the highly-regarded Verve album
Nothing But the Blues, but Ellis spent much of the
1960s and part of the 1970s in studio orchestras for a
succession of television variety-talk shows, including
the Merv Griffin Show. Ellis has characterized the studio
musician’s life as “99% boredom, 1% absolute terror,”
but admits he occasionally found inspiring material
in that role.
The outstanding feature of Ellis’ solos, writes jazz
guitar historian Norman Mongan, is “an extraordinarily
earthy quality...Ellis is unbeatable where swing and drive
are concerned; his is a style of classic modern simplicity.”
Ellis seemed to emphasize much the same point in
discussing the empathy among Kessel, Byrd and himself
with Robert Yelin: “We all have a mutual respect
and great feeling for swing,” he said. “Without even talking
about it among ourselves, swing is the basis for our
wanting to play the guitar.”
Charlie Byrd points to a slightly different impetus
for taking up the instrument: “It was such a happy social
occasion to play music at my house,” he recalled
in a 1967 Guitar Player, “I guess I just wanted to be in
on it.” The house was in Chuckatuck, Virginia, where
Byrd was born in 1925. His father and uncle played fingerstyle
guitar and his father ran a country store where
9

“the black blues pickers came in on Saturday nights to
play and drink a few beers,” Byrd recalled to Frets editor
Jim Hatlo. He “learned by listening and absorbing.”
But the radio brought him another musical world: “Fred
Waring had a radio program that Les Paul was on during
the late 1930s,” Byrd told Hatlo, and, of course, there
were Benny Goodman’s groups. Theirs was the music
Byrd aspired to play, even though he was happy in his
teens to pick country and folk tunes on radio stations in
Newport News and Suffolk. (At 14, Byrd acquired a
Sears Silvertone electric guitar and amplifier, the first
such contraption heard in Chuckatuck!)
Like Kessel, Byrd got an early taste of the jazz life
when, in his 14th summer, he played with a dance orchestra
from William and Mary College at the resort town
of Virginia Beach. The precocious Byrd enrolled in the
Virginia Polytechnic Institute at age 16 and played in
the school dance band. During World War II, Byrd played
in the Special Forces band in Europe. He also got a
chance to sit in with Django Reinhardt before shipping
home. That meeting, Byrd asserts, “decided me on a
career in jazz.”
But he was sidetracked for a time by the lure of the
classical guitar. Thanks in part to the G.I. Bill, Byrd studied
with Sophocles Papas and, in 1954, made a pilgrimage
to Siena, Italy to study with Segovia. The experience
offered Byrd the humbling insight that “I wasn’t
really going to be a significant classical guitar player,”
he told Hatlo. “I realized that it might be a better idea
for me to use all my life’s experience, in jazz and popular
music as well, combining them with classical. So I
started working out some jazz arrangements on classical
guitar, and I thought, ‘Someone might be interested
in recording these.”’ Savoy Records was interested, and
in 1956 Byrd’s Jazz Recital album appeared.
A 1961 State Department-sponsored ‘goodwill’ tour
of Latin America brought Byrd into contact with the
sounds of bossa nova. The following year his collaboration
with tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, Jazz Samba, carried
Brazil’s ‘new beat’ to the U.S. and became a surprise
hit. (“Desifinado” made it to # 15 on the pop
10

11
Photo by Tom Copi

charts!) “I guess that got me typecast a little more than
I would have liked,” Byrd admitted 20 years later, but it
was a strong validation of his move to explore jazz on
the classical guitar.
Ironically, the ‘Great Guitar’ heard playing bossa
nova on this collection isn’t Byrd but Kessel who shows
his confidence in an idiom generally associated with fingerstyle
guitarists and nylon-strung guitars. His medley
of Luiz Bonfa’s “Manha de Carnaval” and “Samba de
Orfeu” is taken from the evocative score for the 1960
film, Black Orpheus. Accompanying Kessel on this 1969
date in Denmark are Larry Ridley, bass, and Don
Lamond, drums .
A decade later, Kessel and Ellis teamed up on Iowa
public television’s Jazz At The Maintenance Shop for a
sassy sprint through George Gershwin’s “Oh! Lady Be
Good,” a standard from the 1924 musical of the same
name. The performance clearly reveals this duo’s roots
in the Southwest, which gave the guitar world not only
Charlie Christian but electric blues pioneer T–Bone
Walker and Western Swing guitarist-arranger Eldon
Shamblin of Bob Wills Texas Playboys. Kessel and Ellis
seemingly return home here. Such performances inspired
Norman Mongan to observe that Ellis’ “Southwestern
twang...powerful attack and ‘stringy’ tonality
make constant reference to his Texas origins.”
Proving that great tunes often come from unlikely
sources is the Bryson & Goldberg “Flintstones Theme”
from the 1960s television cartoon series. Kessel and
Ellis take a fiercely swinging romp through Bedrock accompanied
by Joe Byrd, bass, and Wayne Phillips,
drums. This performance is from a ‘duo’ spotlight of
The Great Guitars captured in Cork, Ireland in 1980.
“What’s great about these concerts,” Ellis, the longtime
television studio ace once said, “is that we’re playing
duets for the public and getting paid for it.”
Trios, too. Our collection’s finale features the full
fleet of Great Guitars in a medley tribute to three earlier
extraordinary guitarists. It opens with “Nuages,” the
most popular composition of Django Reinhardt (1910-
1953), who recorded it at least 8 times. (“Nuages” made
12

oth the French and British ‘hit parades.’) In a 1976
Guitar Player tribute to Reinhardt, Kessel wrote: “He
symbolizes the Gypsy spirit, the thing in everyone that
wants to be free—to be an adult but not lose the childlike
quality.”
“Goin’ Out of My Head” was a 1964 hit for Little
Anthony & the Imperials which became a 1966 Grammywinning
vehicle for Wes Montgomery (1925-1968). It
represents a phase of Montgomery’s career which
brought him popular acclaim along with the disdain of
some jazz fans who felt he had sold out. In a 1972 Guitar
Player discussion (‘Where Are the Jazz Guitar Lps?’),
Kessel remarked: “I remember talking with Wes Montgomery
when he was playing in a packed club. He wasn’t
bitter, just realistic. He said, ‘See those people out there?
They didn’t come to hear me, they came to see me play
one, two or three of my hit records, because when I decide
to do a tune of mine or Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’
instead of ‘Goin’ Out My Head’ they get bored and start
talking.’” Success for a jazz musician can be a mixed
blessing.
The medley closes with the Benny Goodman-Lionel
Hampton composition “Flying Home,” long the theme
of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and, in its early days,
a showcase for Charlie Christian (1916-1942), without
whom most of the music on this video is unthinkable.
The trio of Byrd (on an Ovation acoustic–electric),
Kessel and Ellis (both playing Gibsons) gave this exhilarating
1980 performance in Cork, Ireland in the company
of bassist Joe Byrd and drummer Wayne Phillips.
In a 1974 Guitar Player interview, Ellis gave away
part of The Great Guitars’ game. “What’s particularly
good about a trio,” Ellis explained to Robert Yelin, “is
that the soloist can concentrate completely on his
chorus...the other two guys will come in to take over
the ensemble part while the soloist is thinking only about
his solo.” Byrd summed up The Great Guitars experience
this way: “We have a great time,” he said, “and we
enjoy each other’s company...We just love to go out there
and swing for them. We couldn’t swing the way we do if
these concerts didn’t make us happy.”
13

Photo by Tom Copi
TAL FARLOW
The stunning
velocity and facility
with which Tal Farlow,
pianist Tommy Flanagan
and bassist Red
Mitchell blaze through
“Fascinating Rhythm”
(a Gershwin tune from
the 1924 musical, Oh!
Lady Be Good) in
Lorenzo DeStefano’s
1981 documentary,
Talmadge Farlow, is a
jaw-dropping study in
abandon earned by
years of woodshedding.
Farlow has only
reluctantly left his
woodshed in recent
decades, and the rarity
of his public appearances
has only enhanced his deserved reputation
as a jazz genius.
Jim Hall has called Farlow “the most complete musician
I know on guitar,” and he’s not alone in that opinion.
Farlow turned up the heat several notches on bopera
guitarists by his innovative work in the Red Norvo
Trio in the 1950s. “Farlow took the message of hard
bop and translated it for the guitar,” writes Norman
Mongan in The History of the Guitar in Jazz. “Always
inspired, he let ideas flow from under his fingers and
creates a sound more akin to that of a wind instrument
than a guitar.” Blowing at tempos few guitarists dare
match, it wasn’t only for his large hands that Farlow
earned the nickname the Octopus: he was seemingly
everywhere on the fingerboard at once.
Talmadge Holt Farlow was born in Greensboro,
North Carolina in 1921. It’s often been said that he didn’t
start playing till his early twenties, but that isn’t exactly
14

true. “I could already play the guitar a little bit,” Farlow
told down beat reporter Lee Jeske, “but the guitar was,
in most cases, part of a hillbilly band—you know, with
three chords.” The guitarist who made him think, “Now
I’ve got an instrument here that can conceivably move
out front” was, naturally, Charlie Christian. “Christian
was the one who got me moving,” Farlow told Burt Korall
(down beat February 22, 1979). “I bought all the
Goodman–Christian recordings and memorized Charlie’s
choruses, note-for-note, playing them on a secondhand
fourteen dollar guitar and twenty dollar amplifier.” Working
as a sign painter in Greensboro, Farlow had few opportunities
to play with other jazz musicians. However,
radio brought him the sounds not only of Charlie Christian
but of such innovators as Lester Young and pianist
Art Tatum. Self-taught, Farlow had an innate sense of
the guitar’s potential by the time he found himself working
piano-bass guitar trios in Philadelphia during World
War II.
Pianist/singer Dardanelle Breckenridge gave Farlow
his first noteworthy job in 1947. It took him to New York
City, where he heard Charlie Parker “giving off sparks,
influencing every young player in sight,” Farlow told
Korall. “At the beginning, I had some difficulty getting
into what Bird and Diz and Miles and those fellows were
doing...I found the bop phrases didn’t fall easily on the
guitar. But I kept listening and working out my problems
until I felt comfortable with the modern idiom.” He
worked so effectively in that idiom that vibes wizard Red
Norvo hired Farlow in 1949. His work in Norvo’s Trio
with bassist Charles Mingus is the stuff of legend. “I was
no faster than the next guy until I went with Red,” Farlow
told Korall. “I had to work like crazy just to keep up
with Red and Mingus—they forced me into the woodshed.”
After nearly five years with Norvo’s Trio, Farlow departed
in 1953 for a stint with Artie Shaw’s last Gramercy
Five. Farlow rejoined Norvo for awhile in a quintet, then
fronted his own trio with pianist Eddie Costa. In 1958
Farlow left New York City and its jazz scene for a life of
anonymity in Sea Bright on the Jersey Shore. “I got fed
15

up with the back stage parts of the jazz life,” Farlow explained
to Korall. “It seemed that I became increasingly
involved with stuff that had nothing to do with music.”
A country boy at heart, sign painting and occasional
local gigs in Sea Bright suited Farlow. “I don’t have to
be out there,” Farlow said, “dealing with situations I find
difficult to handle. I don’t need expensive things or a
hectic life. So I stay in Sea Bright.”
Starting in 1967, Farlow began making occasional
forays “out there” – a reunion with Norvo on a 1969
Newport All-Stars tour and a Prestige album the same
year, The Return of Tal Farlow, reminded the jazz world
he was still a player of ferocious energy. Recordings for
the Concord label in the 1970s brought Farlow further
acclaim, and in 1981 he ventured out with Norvo and in
the company of Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel. The performance
from that same year in this video affirms that
Farlow at 60 was still in peak form.
For all his harmonic invention, Farlow never learned
to read music, and felt self-conscious about that. His
unease may have contributed to his retirement, particularly
from recording. Asked in a 1969 Guitar Player for
advice to aspiring jazz guitarists, Farlow said: “You have
to really play all the time so that you are able to execute
any ideas that come into your head. To be a jazz
player, that’s important. After you learn the scales, to
be a better jazz player, you should play more jazz and
lots of it.”
PAT MARTINO
His father, once a pupil of Eddie Lang, told him at
birth: “With these hands you are really going to learn to
play guitar.” Instead of bullying his son into practice, he
lured him to the guitar by forbidding him to touch the
one hidden under his bed. “I was... a prodigy,” Martino
told Guitar Player’s Vic Trigger. “When I was 11 years
old I had about the same chops I have today...” By the
time he was 16, he was accompanying such R&B stars
as Lloyd Price and Chubby Checker. Six years later
Martino’s debut album as a leader, El Hombre, made
him a presence to reckon with in the jazz guitar world.
16

His punchy 1987 performance here of his composition
“Do You Have A Name?” in the company of bassist
Harvie Swartz and drummer Joey Baron plainly shows
why. “Mr. Martino,” wrote New York Times reviewer Peter
Watrous, “was among the few important jazz guitarists
to arrive in the 1960s, somebody who understood
the place of a blues sensibility in jazz and who could
improvise with the fluency and drive of a horn player...”
Born in Philadelphia in 1944, Pat Azzara took the name
his father used as a singer, Martino, and paid his dues
not only accompanying pop singers such as Frankie
Avalon but jazzmen such as tenor saxophonist Willis
Jackson. For a child prodigy, it was a humbling dose of
reality: “I was, for the first time in my life, reduced to
being a subordinate,” Martino told Trigger. “I thought
that once you had reached these incredible chops you
were revered, literally revered...It required so much redefinition
from me to survive that it brought me
strength.”
Martino’s 1967 stint with the John Handy Quintet
thrust him into the spotlight; by the end of the 1960s he
was fronting his own groups. Initially indebted to the
influence of Johnny Smith and Wes Montgomery, in the
1970s Martino’s music explored not only such familiar
jazz touchstones as the blues and bossa nova but also
Indian music and modern compositional ideas inspired
by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Elliott Carter. “I like to
walk up to the guitar and throw myself into the middle
of a creative experience,” said Martino, who did exactly
that in the performance we see from Baltimore’s ‘Ethel’s
Place.’
In 1976, Martino began suffering memory loss and
headaches. A nightmarish four years of locked wards
and shock treatments followed. Finally, it was discovered
that Martino had a brain aneurysm; an operation
to restore blood flow to his brain left him without his
memory. Martino regained his brilliant skills by studying
his old recordings.
In a January 25, 1995 New York Times review of a
Bottom Line appearance, Martino’s first New York City
outing in at least a decade, Peter Watrous wrote: “Mr.
17

Martino proved himself to be as charismatic an improviser
as ever.” In the Times only a couple of weeks later,
Matt Resnicoff praised Martino’s “torrential, groovedriven
melodies that seemed to stab at the listener from
several directions at once.” Happily, Pat Martino’s back
doing what he does best. “Jazz,” Martino once reflected,
“is a way of life, not an idiom of music. Jazz is spontaneous
improvisation. If you ever walk out of your house
with nowhere to go, just walking for the pleasure of it,
you’ll find that you improvise. Everyone in life improvises;
jazz is just a relative degree of improvisation.”
Photo by Tom Copi
18

PERFORMANCES & PERSONNEL
1. JIM HALL(G),
STEVE SWALLOW(B) and PETE La ROCA(D)
“Jazz 625” September 26, 1964 London, England
Song: I’m Getting Sentimental Over You
2. BARNEY KESSEL(G),
LARRY RIDLEY(B) and DON LAMOND (D)
Newport All-Stars, Denmark 1969
Song: Medley Manha, De Carnaval
and Samba De Orfeu
3. TAL FARLOW (G),
TOMMY FLANAGAN (P) and RED MITCHELL (B)
New York City 1981
Song: Fascinating t Rhythm
4. BARNEY KESSEL (G) and HERB ELLIS (G)
“Jazz At The Maintenance Shop”, Ames, Iowa 1979
Song: Oh Lady Be Good
5. JIM HALL (G) and MICHEL PETRUCCIANI (P)
Denmark 1986
Song: My Funny Valentine
6. PAT MARTINO (G),
HARVIE SWARTZ (B) and JOEY BARON (D)
“Ethel's Place” Baltimore, Maryland 1987
Song: Do You Have A Name
7. BARNEY KESSEL (G), HERB ELLIS (G),
JOE BYRD (B) and WAYNE PHILLIPS (D)
The Great Guitars In Cork, Ireland 1980
Song: Flintstone Theme
8. JIM HALL WITH THE ART FARMER QUARTET ON
“Jazz 625” September 26, 1964 London, England
JIM HALL (G), ART FARMER (Fluegelhorn),
STEVE SWALLOW(B) and PETE La ROCA(D)
Song: Valse Hot
9. BARNEY KESSEL (G), HERB ELLIS (G), CHARLIE
BYRD (G), JOE BYRD (B) and WAYNE PHILLIPS (D).
The Great Guitars In Cork, Ireland 1980.
Songs: Nuages, Goin' Out Of My Head and Flying Home
19

Vestapol 13043
Barney Kessel & Herb Ellis
The guitar's odyssey in jazz is presented afresh in Vestapol's third
compilation of prime performances from six of the idiom's movers
and shakers. These men are among the most exemplary band members
to choose the guitar as their means of expression. The initial
inspiration for most of them was Charlie Christian, who blazed trails
jazz guitarists still tred a half century later. Christian swung in the
direction of bop, and his disciples (foremost among whom are seen
here) boldly carried the guitar into that next phase of jazz. Aside from
their fervor for the potential of the guitar in the evolution of jazz,
many of these artists have similar backgrounds: Southern or Southwestern,
and of roughly the same generation. But their individuality
is abundantly clear in performances ranging from meditative ballads
to speed-of-sound boppers. Underlying it all is an exhilarating sense
of triumph over that apparent oxymoron, jazz guitar. Having proven
that the guitar is indeed a first rate medium for jazz expression, these
artists confidently address other contradictions, ones involving evolution
within a well-grounded tradition. They’re serious about their
business, but you can see them having fun with it, too.
1. JIM HALL I’m Getting Sentimental Over You 2. BARNEY
KESSEL Medley: Manha De Carnaval & Samba De Orfeu
3. TAL FARLOW Fascinating Rhythm 4. BARNEY KESSEL & HERB
ELLIS Oh! Lady Be Good 5. JIM HALL My Funny Valentine
6. PAT MARTINO Do You Have A Name 7. BARNEY KESSEL &
HERB ELLIS Flintstones Theme 8. JIM HALL Valse Hot
9. BARNEY KESSEL, HERB ELLIS & CHARLIE BYRD Medley:
Nuages, Goin’ Out Of My Head & Flying Home
Running Time: 63 minutes • B/W and Color
Front & Back Photos by Tom Copi
Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,
One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140
Representation to Music Stores by
Mel Bay Publications
® 2001 Vestapol Productions
A division of
Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop Inc.
ISBN: 1-57940-916-4
0 11671 30439 7