Birthday Salute and Quintessential Solo #4 | Barney Kessel

Born 17th October 1923, jazz guitar icon Barney Kessel's credentials are staggering.

Having recorded with jazz luminaries such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins in the 40's and 50's, Kessel became a top-gun LA session guitarist in the 60's and appeared on many a Phil Spector-produced hit record.

Kessel was also a member of the Oscar Peterson Trio and a founding member of the Great Guitars that included Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, Tal Farlow and Charlie Byrd.

In this clip, Kessel's take on the Jimmy Van Heusen classic Here's That Rainy Day begins with his trade mark unaccompanied chord-melody style. Reharmonizing the melody with moving inner lines and chromatic devices, Kessel's chord solo is reminiscent of a lush orchestral string arrangement.

Check out also his guitar intro on his landmark recording with Julie London -- from his Columbia days as LA session man -- on Cry Me A River. Absolutely stunning.




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A Fire In A Chinese Restaurant And Meeting Living Colour's Vernon Reid

A review of Living Colour's new album The Chair In The Doorway on I Heart Guitar reminded me of my meeting guitarist Vernon Reid in 1982.

Still a couple of years away from forming the Grammy award-winning Living Colour, Reid was your typical struggling New York-based avant-garde/jazz musician and a sideman with Ronald Shannon-Jackson's Decoding Society.

Led by bandleader and drummer Shannon-Jackson, the music of The Decoding Society could best be described as avant-garde/funk/jazz/rock, played by members who were all proponents of Ornette Coleman's harmolodic concept. It is my understanding that a certain amount of training under Ornette himself, or one of Ornette's disciples was required before one could be considered 'qualified' to play in this style.

I saw the band perform as part of the 1982 Singapore Jazz Festival and they were pretty mind-blowing. Vernon's style was a combination of post-bebop, 'sheets-of-sound'-era Coltrane and Hendrix-psychedelia.

Playing an early all-graphite Steinberger prototype and a 6-string banjo tuned like a guitar, Vernon plugged into an array of what must have been 12 or more pedals (sans pedalboard) that he set up individually on the floor in front of him.

Of course when a Decoding Society jazz workshop was announced, I could not pass it up.

At the workshop the day after the gig, the band was obviously keen to educate everyone present on harmolodics -- I recall bandleader Shannon-Jackson making a reference to 'evangelizing' Ornette Coleman's concepts.

We were barely 10 minutes into the workshop when things took an interesting turn -- a fire had broken out in the Chinese restaurant in the concert hall building, which led to the band and the workshop attendees being 'evacuated' by chartered bus to the Ramada hotel where the band was staying.

In the lobby of that hotel, I had a chance to sit down next to Vernon with a couple of other guitar playing buddies of mine -- fortunately for us, most of the workshop throng were either drummers, bassists or horn players.

From what I can remember, Vernon talked at length about his musical influences and his lessons with jazz guitar great Ted Dunbar whom he obviously had a great deal of respect for. He also spoke about the necessity of being familiar with the various eras in jazz and proceeded to rip some pretty convincing bebop lines on his Steinberger.

He also described harmolodics as the current-day equivalent of bebop and how difficult it was for someone like Charlie Parker to get any kind of recognition playing in the bebop style in his earlier days. Harmolodics, he said would be embraced as the new form of jazz in time to come. (I'm still waiting on this prediction Vern..)

In an about turn, Reid then started playing a beautiful chord-melody in the style of Barney Kessel/Johnny Smith. The cat is versatile!

And when someone asked what one should do if the country they were living in did not support the arts or a career in muic, Vernon's reply was simple -- "Leave! And go somewhere that does". It impressed upon my 18-year old mind the kind of fearless journeyman attitude one must have if one chooses to make music one's life path.

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Joe Pass and the Synanon Fender Jaguar

Here's a clip, circa 1963, of the late, great Joe Pass playing a Fender Jaguar.

Born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalaqua, Joe Pass claimed a strong Charlie Parker influence and spoke often about painstakingly copying the bebop innovator's licks line by line off of 45 rpm records. By age 20 in 1949, he was jamming in clubs on New York's famed 52nd Street -- the birthplace of modern jazz.

The negative aspects of the jazz life -- including an addiction to heroin -- soon took their toll on the young Pass. After 5 years in a Texas prison he decided that enough was enough and voluntarily entered Synanon's drug rehabilitation program.

While at Synanon he practiced on a Fender Jaguar that belonged to the center. He continued to play the Jaguar on gigs after his release and that guitar is the one he is playing in the video above.

After seeing him play the Jaguar at a club, a businessman by the name of Mike Peak, who was also an avid guitarist himself, decided that it was not an instrument befitting Joe's talents. Several months later, on Pass's birthday, a Gibson ES175 --the guitar most closely associated with the guitarist for much of his career -- was delivered to him at his home as a gift.