Interviews

Large ensembles are great. I love the challenge of finding your role in a band, and not straying too far from it. It becomes about the music as a whole as opposed to your individual […]

I first heard of Tomas Janzon many years ago when he submitted an album for review. Suffice it to say I really dug his playing and wanted to feature him in a Jazz Guitar Life […]

If you want to change your playing you have to change how you hear. Take note of the qualities in people’s playing that you enjoy. If their music resonates with you, it is telling you […]

Something else I might suggest, although it’s not really a component, is to keep an open mind and listen to everything that you can, because there are so many ways of playing guitar. And don’t […]

With a large majority of our Jazz Guitar Legacy players passed on, it is a rare moment indeed when one gets an opportunity to talk with such a player, especially one who has been around […]

What I would say is that nothing moves me more than people improvising with genuine emotional directness and range. All the greats have it, and not just in the jazz world. It’s nothing to do […]

During my formative years,  I guess my biggest jazz guitar influences were Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery. Both produced the sound that I wanted, but both were different in their approach to the instrument and […]

In recent years, I’ve been most interested in the problem of “being with others” and that of “authenticity”, more particularly how phenomenology, a modern branch of philosophy, treats them. Jazz busies itself with these two […]

Well, they didn’t have that then, but they did have something else. It’s a thing called “hot licks.” You know, you hear a hot lick and you say to yourself, ‘hey, play that again. Let […]

“Kenny Burrell was a champion and mentor to me during a still very formative time in my career. As the years have progressed beyond that time, the magnitude of what he was trying to do […]