Legends of Jazz Guitar - Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop

BARNEY KESSEL
“Above all, the humanness of a performer should
be apparent...the essence of a living being is greater
than the music. The music is only an expression
of that essence.” — Barney Kessel
Photo by Tom Copi
Articulate and passionate, Barney Kessel has been
a crusader for jazz since discovering it in his teens in
Muskogee, Oklahoma. That was Kessel’s birthplace in
1923, and it was there he first explored jazz in an otherwise-black
band at age 14. “I knew what I wanted to find,”
Kessel once remarked of his first forays into jazz, “and I
used the guitar to find it.”
Finding Charlie Christian grooving to his playing at
an Oklahoma City club was the shock of Kessel’s life.
Christian’s encouraging words (“I’m gonna tell Benny
about you”) inspired the sixteen-year-old Kessel to strike
out on his own, first to the upper Midwest and ultimately
to California. There his presence at jam sessions brought
him to the attention of producer-promoter Norman Granz,
who enlisted Kessel (along with Lester Young and other
greats) for the 1944 film short, Jammin’ the Blues. Kessel
soon took the guitar chair in a succession of notable big
bands, including those of Artie Shaw, Charlie Barnet, and
Benny Goodman. He began exploring bebop when Dizzy
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