Herb Ellis

Herb Ellis was born in 1921 and grew up in on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. He is rumored to have heard his first electric guitar played on a radio program by George Barnes. Unlike all of the other significant guitarists of this period, Ellis had the benefit of a formal training. He majored in music at North Texas State University. Although he had already become proficient on the guitar before matriculating, he focused on string bass since the music department did not have a guitar program.

Ellis shortly ran out of funds, dropping out of school in 1941 to tour with the University of Kansas jazz band. By 1943 he had joined Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra, and in this role received some small recognition in jazz magazines.

Soon thereafter, Ellis got his first big break, joining the Tommy Dorsey band, where he remained until 1947. It was this with this band that Ellis made his first recordings. Another break followed in 1953, when he replaced Barney Kessel in the Oscar Peterson Trio. The remained until 1958, longer than any other guitarist. It is in the trio that Ellis would meet bassist Ray Brown, someone who would turn out to be a long term friend and musical collaborator. As in Kessel’s career, Ellis’ position in the trio was somewhat controversial since he was white.

Oscar Peterson’s trio had, by this time, become a significant part of the house band for Norman Granz’s Verve Records, and the work afforded Ellis the chance to play and record with some of the most important musicians of the time including Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge, Sweets Edison, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong. From 1958 to 1960, Ellis toured with Fitzgerald.

His earliest musical influence was Jimmy Giuffre. His musical direction was cemented forever by hearing Charlie Christian. Ellis recounted in an interview with Leonard Feather Christian’s impact: "... the first time I heard Charlie Christian I thought he really wasn't so much, because I felt I could play faster than that. Then after a few more times it really hit me, and I realized that speed wasn't everything. I got quite emotional -- put my guitar away and said I'd never play again. But the next day I got it out and started to try to play like Charlie." Christian’s influence is everywhere evident in Ellis’ playing to this day, but also so are the blues and Texas Swing he heard growing up.

Ellis is still very much alive.

Herb Ellis Medley

Joe Pass

Joe Pass was born Joseph Passalacqua in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1929. He was raised in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, however, where his Sicilian-born father was able to find work in the Steel Mills. Pass was inspired to play the guitar not by any member of his non-musical family, but by Gene Autry’s performances as the singing cowboy. By age nine his father recognized the boy’s abilities and encouraged him to play a wide range of music, including music by ear.

By age fourteen, Pass began playing with dance bands including one led by Charlie Barnet. From dance bands he jumped to traveling with small combos, and the business ultimately led him to move from Pennsylvania to New York City. Here he quickly developed a heroin addiction, losing most of the 1950s to drugs.

After two and a half years in Synanon, the drug rehabilitation center in California, he began to rebuild his career, recording in 1962 his first album, The Sounds of Synanon. In 1963, he received an important career boost in the form of Downbeat Magazine’s presentation to him of its “New Star Award.”

Throughout the 1960s Pass toured with blind jazz pianist and composer George Shearing, but the majority of his jobs came in the television and studio recording industry. He appeared as part of the band for The Steve Allen Show, Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and The Merv Griffin Show. In the recording studio, he served as sideman to Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughn, Della Reese, and Johnny Mathis, among others.

During the 1960s, Pass performed frequently at Donte’s nightclub in L.A. with his friend Herb Ellis, and the collaboration led to two legendary recordings in 1970. These recordings also featured Ray Brown on bass and Jake Hanna on drums.

In the early 1970s, Pass signed with Norman Granz’s new label, Pablo Records, and under this umbrella Pass would continue with several other legendary collaborations. Pass recorded four albums with Ella Fitzgerald. As a part of the Pablo “stable,” he also performed with Benny Carter, Milt Jackson, Zoot Sims, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and, of course, Herb Ellis. Pass continued to record with some of the top jazz artists through the 1980s.

In 1974, Pablo released an album called The Trio featuring the Oscar Peterson Trio but with Pass now in the guitar chair. It won the Grammy that year for “Best Performance by a Group.” Finally, Pass worked with Bill Thrasher on a series of music instruction books called the Joe Pass Guitar Style, and these books have since become the mainstay for student guitarists.

Because Pass’s father encouraged him “not to leave spaces” between the notes of the melody, he developed playing skill unlike any of his contemporaries. Pass was exceptional as both a lead guitarist in ensembles and as a stand-alone soloist. Hence his style not only included straight melody, but also sophisticated harmonic interpolations, polyphonic linear fills, two-voice textures, and rapid changes in the speed of the figuration within leads. He often superimposed his solo style of playing onto ensemble textures. Pass plucked with both his right-hand fingers and a flat pick. Pass cited as his primary influences the music of gypsy guitarist Django Reinhart and saxophonist Charlie Parker.

Pass died in 1994 from liver cancer in Los Angeles but is buried in the family plot in New Brunswick, NJ.

Joe Pass plays "All the Things You Are"

Tal Farlow

Talmadge Farlow was born in Greensboro, N.C. in 1921. His household was a musical one. His father played the guitar, banjo, ukulele, violin, and clarinet. His mother played the piano. When Farlow was eight, his father showed him a few chords on a mandolin tuned like the top four strings of the guitar (but an octave higher). Farlow’s father liked to tinker with electronics, and the boy also became interested.

Apart from these few chords, Farlow received no formal musical training. He did not begin to play the guitar seriously until he was twenty-one, when he first heard Art Tatum on the radio. Tatum’s jazz music fascinated Farlow, who grew up hearing and playing the country or hillbilly music favored locally. His exposure to the music of Benny Goodman and especially Charlie Christian and the electric guitar he played galvanized Farlow’s childhood hobbies into focus. Farlow was fascinated with the possibility of playing sophisticated harmonies and melodic horn lines and with the sound of the new electric guitar. He collected every Christian record and learned every solo from them, note for note. The radio also gave him access to the music of saxophonist Lester Young. Young was influential in the evolution of Kansas City, Mo., jazz, with its relentless, high-energy attack and its new, extended lines, both elements that would be mainstays of bebop. At this time Farlow’s other childhood interest, electronics, came into play, and he built his own guitar pick-up from a pair of old radio headphones and ran it through a $20 Sears and Roebuck amplifier.

Farlow had been trained to paint signs, and so he became the early part of his professional life, painting signs during the day and playing with various dance bands in the Greensboro area at night. As often as not, he was recruited to play not only for his ability to play advanced chords and lead solos, but also for his ability to play bass lines. This skill developed in response to professional necessity, but it would help to shape the solos of the mature musician.

Many of the musicians who passed through the Air Corps basic training facility in Greensboro heard Farlow at the USO dances and many, including guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli and pianist Jimmy Lyons encouraged him to move north and pursue a jazz career. A 1944 tour with singer/vibrophonist/pianist Dardanelle Breckenridge’s group brought Farlow to Baltimore, Philadelphia and, finally, New York. A six month gig at the Copa Lounge gave Farlow the opportunity to hear great jazz first hand including that of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Oscar Pettiford, and Bud Powell, among others.

Farlow returned to Greensboro and his sign-painting business in 1945 but, by 1947, was back in New York again, painting signs to feed himself while he waited the activation of his union card. During this time he got his first big break, replacing Mundell Lowe in vibist Red Norvo’s trio, which included Charles Mingus on the bass. His relationship with Norvo lasted from 1949 until 1953, and made Farlow famous in the jazz world. Farlow’s large hands and his ability to play lightning fast lines earned him the nickname “Octopus.” After Norvo, Farlow spent six months with Artie Shaw’s Gramercy Five band before forming his own band.

Norvo had been absolutely critical in Farlow’s musical development. Every mindful to draw the best results from the trio by creating the greatest variety of context and interest from the songs, he pushed Farlow to greater exploration but also to greater speeds in his linear playing. Like so many of the musicians who grew up under the influence of Charlie Christian, Farlow had favored a more relaxed approach to attack and speed. He struggled first with the new demands but rose to the challenge, in the process developing new plucking techniques that included using the upstroke as well as the down stroke. When Barney Kessel heard Farlow’s speed, he recalls that it forced him, and nearly every other guitarist, to rethink his right-hand technique. Farlow recorded 21 tracks with Norvo and several more with Shaw, but it was the recordings with his own band that established Farlow on the national scene. These recordings, for Blue Note and Verve, made between 1954 and 1959, which also represent the treasure trove of his legacy.

In 1958, Farlow retired to Sea Bright, New Jersey, and from performing. Tired of the music business and the jazz world, he simply returned to the peaceful life as sign painter. Although not performing, his star would hit its zenith in recordings in 1962, when the Gibson Guitar Corporation enlisted his expertise in designing the guitar named for him. He would make only one appearance to record in the years between 1960 and 1975. From 1976 to 1984 he recorded somewhat regularly for the Concord label, and then largely disappeared back to New Jersey.

Farlow was known as much for his reluctance to perform as for his superlative abilities on the guitar. He is closest stylistically to the quintessential bop guitarist, a tall order on an instrument not well-suited to play horn-like lines at horn tempi. His technique was unorthodox as were the unusual voicing and inventive structures of his solos, which invariably utilized the full range of the instrument, and his chromatic chords. The sum of his music style bespeaks the sum of his experiences and the size of his hands, beginning with the “thumb-over” left hand technique that stayed as a vestige of his early days playing the mandolin, to the full use of range that reflected the necessity to learn to play bass lines in the early dance band days.

Farlow died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York in 1998 at age 77.

Tal Farlow plays "Autumn Leaves"

Wes Montgomery

John Leslie "Wes" Montgomery was born in 1923 in Indianapolis, Indiana. His family was a musical one. His two brothers were both jazz performers, Monk on string and electric bass, and Buddy on vibraphone and piano. Montgomery started to learn the guitar at age nineteen and, like so many of his contemporaries, taught himself by learning by ear every note of every solo of Charlie Christian from records. The undertaking led him to his first musical job with no less than Lionel Hampton, who hired Montgomery because he knew and could play all the Christian solos and because he had the remarkable capacity to learn almost instantly complex solos and chord structures by ear. Montgomery never learned to read music well. Hampton, of course, was a Goodman alumnus and recorded with Christian. Like Christian, Goodman had helped Hampton to introduce and establish the vibraphone which, like the electric guitar, was new and not accepted in the jazz world.

Montgomery toured with Hampton’s orchestra from 1948 to 1950. He is heard on many of the orchestra’s recordings made in this two-year span. After leaving Hampton’s organization, he returned home and did not record any significant music until 1957, when he participated in a jam session that included his brothers and which introduced a new figure to the trumpet world, Freddie Hubbard. He continued to record with Hubbard and his brothers through 1959.

Back in Indianapolis, Montgomery struggled to support his family of eight. He worked in a factory during the day and played in local clubs until late, effectively living for years on two or three hours of sleep a night. Cannonball Adderly heard Montgomery in one of these clubs. He was so impressed that he arranged the meeting between Riverside Records executives and Montgomery.

Montgomery signed with Riverside Records in 1959, and remained until the company went bankrupt in 1963. The recordings made during this four-year span are regarded as Montgomery’s best and most influential. Nearly all the settings are for small ensemble, usually a trio, quartet, or quintet and most often with piano, bass, and drums as the other instruments. The playlist invariably alternated between driving upbeat numbers and soft ballads, and the playlist included many of his compositions. The personnel often included his brothers, Melvin Rhyne, an Indianapolis organist, and various other musicians such as Adderly and the Wynton Kelly Trio, Miles Davis’ previous back-up band. John Coltrane asked Montgomery to join his group after a jam session but Montgomery chose to remain the leader of his own groups.

Montgomery signed with Verve Records in 1964. The contract resulted in a stylistic shift that many regard as a decline in Montgomery’s creative talents and importance. Many of the records used an orchestra and ratcheted down the edge that made Montgomery important in the first place.

Montgomery’s work from Bumpin’ (1965) paved the wave for the formulation of a new style of music, “smooth jazz.” Although Montgomery continued to play hard driving jazz in public appearances, including his European dates, and his entries in Verve’s catalog included a few pure jazz albums, Bumpin’ represented a huge step away from jazz and toward commercial music.

“Smooth jazz” was a sub-genre, then, of jazz which drew upon other contemporary styles to make the music more accessible. The majority of tracks featured a much stronger melody than jazz but not than commercial music. The tempi of jazz were slowed to an easy, laid-back pace. The backgrounds tended to become more predictable, more formulaic, almost like canned music, and the edge of these backgrounds was blunted by the use of strings or other orchestral instruments. The favored instruments in this style were first the soprano or tenor sax, with the guitar coming in second places. Montgomery’s increasingly mellow and commercial music opened the door to musicians such as George Benson and Kenny G, and the ensuing style called adult contemporary.

Montgomery’s work, especially in three albums produced by Creed Taylor for A&M Records beginning in 1967 showed an abandoning of jazz in favor of a purely commercial style. The songs on these records were drawn not so much from his compositions or the jazz repertory, but from the commercial radio genre. The result was a “hip” but diluted jazz guitar rendering by Montgomery, against an orchestral background, of hit songs by various pop artists such as Dionne Warwick (“Say a Little Prayer for You”), Simon and Garfunkel (“Scarborough Fair”), the Beatles (“Eleanor Rigby”) and the Mamas and the Poppas (“California Dreamin’ ”). His part was little more than recitation of the melody, with little or no improvisation at all. These commercial recordings did earn him considerable wealth and recognition and, perhaps more important, lead a newly interested public to his earlier, purer recordings.

The recordings were a huge commercial success, but Montgomery would not live to reap the rewards. He died in June 1968 of a massive heart attack, doubtless the fruit of years of functioning without sleep and his two-pack per day Lucky Strike habit. The various periods of his music left a lasting mark, influencing such musicians as Pat Martino, George Benson, and Pat Metheny, as well as a host of truly mediocre musicians.

His playing style was an unusual one in that he did not pluck with his fingers and he never learned to use a pick. Instead he plucked with his thumb, with the fingers of his hand splayed on the guitar face for support and balance. Since he worked late hours and often practiced between the end of the gig and the beginning of his early morning shift at the factory, he played with his thumb instead of a pick in order not to wake his wife. The use of the thumb gave a bassier, mellower tone than that of his contemporaries. Hs thumb was double jointed and he could bend it back to touch his wrist, and little carnival trick he loved to use to make people uncomfortable. Even so, Montgomery did not like the brittle treble sound typical of acoustic guitars or of electric guitars played with a pick. He usually adjusted the settings on his guitar so that the treble pot was closed completely, that is, so that the bass was favored in amplification. It is a sound much emulated by today’s players. Note right hand in pictures below.

Critics have noted that his approach to soloing was multi-tiered. He followed the combo tradition of playing the head (melody of the composition) in single notes for the first and last stanzas, grounding he piece. The usual improvisational treatment of the first stanza or two was to use single-line melodies. In the subsequent stanza or two, Montgomery usually played his improvised in parallel octaves, a device first used by Christian but developed to its apogee by Montgomery. Both the single-note and octave passages heavily utilized sequences. The stanza in octaves would usually culminate in chromatic chords.

Montgomery’s work did not go unnoticed by the music industry. He was nominated for two Grammy Awards for Bumpin' in 1965; received a Grammy as Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by Large Group or Soloist with Large Group in 1966 for “Goin' Out of My Head”; nominated for Grammy Awards for "Eleanor Rigby" and “Down Here on the Ground” in 1968; and nominated for Grammy Award for “Willow, Weep for Me” in 1969. His album, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery, earned him Down Beat magazine's "New Star" award in 1960. In addition, he won the Down Beat Critic's Poll award for best Jazz guitarist in 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1967.

Wes Plays "Jingles" duing 1965 tour of Belgium