If you go back far enough, it gets hard to tell genres apart. Just under a century ago, it wasn’t totally clear yet what was jazz and what was blues, or what was becoming R&B and what would soon turn into rock ’n’ roll. And the guitar was near the center of them all.
Hear the fast, swinging fretwork of Lonnie Johnson or Teddy Bunn, playing in single-note lines, and you’ll hear jazz history being made — though their music is usually remembered as blues or early R&B.
As jazz ensembles grew, the six strings of the guitar sometimes had a hard time fitting in. But if the guitar hasn’t always been a central player in jazz, the best guitarists have usually had both the challenge and the advantage of having to define their own relationships to the genre.
Amid the bebop revolution, a young Charlie Christian blazed into Harlem jam sessions with one of music’s earliest electric guitars, sounding like a hot knife. Django Reinhardt, a Romani guitarist, invented perhaps Europe’s first-ever homegrown genre of jazz, working with only three fingers on his left hand. In the 1950s, hard-bop guitarists like Grant Green and Kenny Burrell helped reassert the blues’s role at the core of jazz. In the jazz-rock fusion era, John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey and others used six strings to seek something like spiritual release through the current of electrified sound.
Below, we asked 14 musicians and writers to name the tunes they would play to help a newcomer fall in love with the sound of jazz guitar. Read on, listen to the playlist with the article and don’t forget to leave your own picks in the comments.
◆ ◆ ◆
Ben Ratliff, former New York Times pop & jazz critic
Charlie Christian, “Swing to Bop”
Charlie Christian’s importance to the early jazz-guitar lineage is settled fact, but everything about his posthumously titled “Swing to Bop” remains uncodified. Here is a piece of life force from a jam session at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, in May 1941. It’s an amateur recording, an early bootleg; it’s been a gray-market item since its first illegal release in the ’50s. Christian enjambs and resolves his eighth-note flows over a rhythm section, altering rhythmic emphasis, listening at least four bars into the future. He phrases like modernist fiction: super-long sentences of wicked syntax followed by a dead-simple one, with provocative repetition; at the bridge of each chorus he explodes through the implications of the moving harmony, while shadowing and feinting with the drummer Kenny Clarke. Bop — that word in the title — didn’t quite exist yet in 1941. (The tune is really “Topsy,” recorded by his employer at the time, Benny Goodman.) The practice of playing an electric guitar in single-note patterns, like a horn, barely did either. Christian was 24 and would soon be dead of tuberculosis. There wasn’t a name for what he was doing here, and there isn’t a name for the way the music can make you feel.
◆ ◆ ◆
Miles Okazaki, guitarist
Grant Green, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”
Recording on a cold January night in New Jersey in 1962, this band lights a fire and fans the flames for over 10 minutes. In the hands of Grant Green, the guitar sings, shouts and joyfully swings through an epic, 18-chorus improvisation. After a quick take on Gershwin’s melody, Green eases into the solo, showing how he’s the master of using a raw, soulful tone to do a lot with a little. An exclamation a couple of minutes in lets you know that things will be heating up, as does Art Blakey’s relentless shuffle. The magic for me here is in the dynamic between the guitar and drums. The push and pull is irresistible — tap your foot or else. Three and a half minutes in, Green unleashes one of his signature repeating loops, as if to say, “Do I have your attention yet?” After he lands gracefully and seems to be winding down with some stutter steps, Blakey shouts “Go!,” urging him on for a final four rounds. This is the opposite of pretentious music — it’s from the heart and the earth, and if you surrender to the groove it can’t fail to move you.
◆ ◆ ◆
Vernon Reid, guitarist
Pat Metheny, “Bright Size Life”
I chose the title track from Pat Metheny’s debut album, released in 1976, the year that I graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, as an introductory track for any listener looking to get into jazz guitar. In many ways the tune’s propulsive openness and optimistic verve served as an expansion of my fledgling definitions of what I considered to be jazz guitar. I was already a fan of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra and had been recently exposed to both Wes Montgomery and Sonny Sharrock. “Bright Size Life” was a beautiful shock.
◆ ◆ ◆
Harmony Holiday, poet
Sonny Sharrock, “Black Woman”
There’s a sudden pop science trend asserting that humming to oneself is good for the soul, and has quantifiable positive effects on the nervous system, quelling the ever-present anxiety many suffer from. Perhaps Black improvisational music anticipated the prevalence of this haunting anxiety and as a remedy offered the rapture of the wordless vocal, scatted, hummed or screamed. In 1960, Max Roach’s “Freedom Now! Suite” was released and featured a track that required his then-wife, the jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, to scream for nearly eight minutes, eventually gathering what became exhausted intermittent yelps into a crest of moans. Nine years later, Sonny Sharrock would release the song “Black Woman,” the title track of an album, which featured his then-wife, Linda Sharrock, wordlessly, sometimes subvocally moaning while he played a slurred, barreling guitar that gathered and staggered around her voice without intervening on its six-minute path from exploratory whimsy to what feels tonally like revulsion and dissociation, the angst of someone being taken too deep into the nightmare of the subconscious against her will, but compelled or self-hypnotized into continuing.
Sonny wanted to invent a jazz guitar sound that felt like Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler tonally, texturally, he wanted to use the guitar to override itself, almost like a disclaimer for its presence amid horns, piano and drums. The result is confrontational in a delightful way. Linda laments, Sonny amplifies and witnesses her in a reverent tone, a slanted echo, and Milford Graves on drums keeps their pulse and helps shake the tensions loose. That’s just what you do, the hummed metronome comes later, its place in urban remedy lore much later than that, and Sonny Sharrock’s guitar is a descending staircase between them, our exposed nerves dulled and heightened by the cries they trigger.
◆ ◆ ◆
Kurt Rosenwinkel, guitarist
Tal Farlow, “Gibson Boy”
The great Tal Farlow. Here’s a track that has everything you want: groove, excitement, invention, sound, fun and swing. And we get two great jazz guitarists for one — the endlessly inventive, melodic, virtuosic Farlow with his warm tone and rhythmic touch, and also the wonderful full comping of Barry Galbraith. The tune is aptly titled for this article and all us guitar lovers: “Gibson Boy.” The harmonized double melody is instantly relatable with its upbeat tempo and frolicking attitude. The dueling-guitar aesthetic may bring to mind similarly enjoyable moments in rock history — “Hotel California,” for example. Who knows, maybe Tal and Barry were playing together back to back, even. Jazz at its best is always accessible to any true music listener, and this track is a great example of that!
◆ ◆ ◆
James Blood Ulmer, guitarist and vocalist
Nat Adderley (featuring Wes Montgomery), “Work Song”
For me, it’s not what Wes Montgomery played on the guitar, but how he played it. What he played on it was personal, but how he played — that’s what was so special to me. The kind of music that he was playing was not the kind of music that I would play; his kind of music wasn’t heavy blues or anything like that. But it was its own style — the Wes Montgomery style. The way he used to solo, after he played the melody, that was his weapon. When he started playing part of his solos in octaves on the guitar, that was really different. If you listened to the sound of what he was doing, you had to go from there.
He played the guitar naturally, without using a pick. When your finger and your thumb is doing it, you’ve got something that is more or less everlasting. When you play with your hand it gives you much better comfort than when you have to buy a new pick every few days. To me, when I heard Wes Montgomery and I heard that he wasn’t playing with no pick, I threw away all my picks. I knew that I wanted that freedom, of playing with my hand. I liked that idea, so I started trying it, and it worked.
◆ ◆ ◆
Evan Haga, music journalist and editor
The Tony Williams Lifetime (featuring John McLaughlin), “Emergency”
At its apex, jazz-rock guitar delivers the most bracing elements of a handful of musical revolutions in one knockout punch — the shock of the new, compounded. This opening cut from the Tony Williams Lifetime’s 1969 debut, with Williams on drums, Larry Young on organ and the British guitar god John McLaughlin, summons up a few of my favorite musical-cultural milestones. I hear in it the breakthrough years of bebop, when pummeling speed and pugnacious mastery became an ethic for young jazz musicians; the psychedelic era, when expressive technology made rock sonics as vital a musical facet as melody; and various pinnacles of the avant-garde, including John Coltrane’s spiritual fervor and the pulsing scramble of Ornette Coleman’s groups. “Emergency” belongs to the epoch that produced Miles Davis’s early fusion, to which these three musicians contributed, and Davis appreciated McLaughlin’s playing to the point of homage. But “Emergency” offers its own motion, chemistry and fury. McLaughlin earned a reputation as one of the most influential guitarists of any idiom, in part through a kind of unforgiving electric virtuosity you might call ugly beauty. I’ve been listening to this record for decades now, and it never fails to frighten and astonish me. Every time I hear it, I feel like a child happening upon a Jackson Pollock on a field trip, and I love it.
◆ ◆ ◆
Brandon Ross, guitarist
Michael Gregory Jackson, “It’s Only a Flesh Wound”
This track, from Michael Gregory Jackson’s record “Cowboys, Cartoons and Assorted Candy,” on the Enja label, is performed solo on acoustic guitar and has an elliptical “blues/song” form — open and concrete, rooted and arranged, simultaneously loose, fractured and very Black American. A thing that I love about Michael’s playing is his musical centered-ness. I always hear melody and song, no matter the context he’s playing in. Until a listener can discern that fact about Michael, it might seem (depending on what area of his work one listens to) entirely not about “song.” Once acclimated, however, all notions of “free” playing as a stylistic reference recede, and the truer perception of his playing — “freely” — turns on an illuminating, inspiring awareness of possibilities previously unglimpsed. “It’s Only a Flesh Wound” dances, sings, stings and spirals in the vernacular of bop, blues of the Delta, organ trio guitar-isms à la urban blues, and something that is purely Michael’s. Something serene and pastoral, even idyllic — resonating in the heart and the imagination.
Ornette Coleman once said to me, “If you could get up to the roof, and start playing from there, that would be something, wouldn’t it?” Michael sneaked up that way early on, and walked past that “Do Not Enter” sign. That’s what I would say to a “newbie.” And then I’d play the track for them again.
◆ ◆ ◆
Mary Halvorson, guitarist
Johnny Smith, “Where or When”
I discovered Johnny Smith, one of the more under-the-radar jazz guitarists, later in life and couldn’t believe I’d been missing out. “Where or When,” from his classic 1956 album “Moonlight in Vermont,” is a great place to start. Listen for the clarity of tone on his perfect 20-bar solo here. Smith seamlessly mixes angular virtuosity with mellow melodicism: not easy to do, but he pulls it off so naturally. The combination of inside and outside playing sounds both classic and modern, almost like he traveled from the future back to 1956 to join Stan Getz on this recording. His guitar solos always blow me away, but don’t sleep on his chime-like cluster chord voicings, which reveal a kinship with the piano. (For more of his chordal playing, check out his 1962 solo album “The Man With the Blue Guitar.”) The tunefulness and depth of Smith’s playing are a great illustration of the power and beauty of jazz guitar.
◆ ◆ ◆
Steve Cardenas, guitarist
Jim Hall, “Young One, for Debra”
The track I chose features the guitarist Jim Hall, who was well known for his melodicism and beautiful sound, in addition to being an adventurous improviser. The tune recommended here is Jim Hall’s own “Young One, for Debra” on his “It’s Nice to Be With You” trio recording from 1969. It’s a guitar duet with Jim having overdubbed himself. The tune is a beautiful waltz that encompasses much of Jim’s aesthetics: a wonderful composition, imaginative and conversational improvisation, amazing sound. He invites you into the room to listen. There’s a directness to Jim’s music, a solidity that feels apparent from the first note.
◆ ◆ ◆
Giovanni Russonello, music critic
Ben Monder, “Emily”
Every instrument gives you the gift of its own limitations. Harmonically, the guitar leases you at most six notes, on a mix of thickly coiled (the lower) and sheer steel (the higher) strings. The question is how much you can do with four fingers and, if you’re wizardly, a thumb, which is partly a matter of your creativity’s relationship with time. Ben Monder uses all of a large left hand to sprawl across the fret board, and sometimes it can feel like an escape of linear time. Wiring out his chords crazily, he finds rare dissonances and buries single-note surprises you wouldn’t often hear in jazz voicings. He has an unbelievable finesse with counterpoint — so, a doubly quick awareness of his place in musical time — to the extent that on his version of the jazz standard “Emily,” he nearly channels jazz’s stride piano greats (think Earl Hines solo), or the old ragtime guitarists, or Bach, on his way to a radically reharmonized, ear-pulling spool of dueling lines around the song’s classic melody. It’s Baroque by way of 12-tone modernism. And what is the main point of hearing this wild solo-guitar take on an old standard? The point is that Monder has a profound sense of surrealism and mixed-up narrative, a way of expressing through the guitar that, as James Blood Ulmer says about Wes Montgomery above, he has his own grasp of the world. When you hear what he’s doing, you have “to go from there.”
◆ ◆ ◆
Camila Meza, guitarist and vocalist
Pat Metheny and Jim Hall, “Don’t Forget”
Two of the greatest guitarists and innovators of our time; the fact that we have both of them in one recording is a treat. This whole album is amazing, but this ballad, a composition by Pat Metheny, enfolds so many things I admire from them and the reason I fell in love with jazz guitar in the first place. A beautiful collaboration between two generations (Pat citing Jim as one of his biggest influences) — it’s so fun to witness the lineage. They both make the guitar sing, every note has so much intention and meaning, both guitar tones are exquisite and similar in their fullness, but highly individual. They serve the song — it’s not just a vehicle for them to show what they can do. I once read Jim Hall say, “I like to make some kind of composition happen while I’m playing. That involves motive development … I also love melodies.” Intrinsically they’re both innate storytellers. The care and attention they put to each movement, the dynamic range between one note and the next, the use of space and embellishments and their deep harmonic understanding, serve the communication between them, which all makes for the greatest music.
◆ ◆ ◆
Wendy Eisenberg, guitarist
Ted Greene, “Danny Boy,” and Danny Gatton, “Sleepwalk”
I suspect that most jazz guitarists begin playing music that isn’t strictly jazz. Instead, they move toward it, seduced by the complex mystery of the genre’s harmonic and rhythmic languages. In that spirit, I chose to highlight two Telecaster players — Danny Gatton and Ted Greene. Though their sounds are quite different, I believe their approach to jazz guitar asked the same question: How can you play the guitar so completely that it transcends itself — as both a jazz instrument and a guitar?
Greene’s version of “Danny Boy” is astonishing. His touch is so considerate that the introduction harmonics sound an articulation of the shadow of the guitar, or the halo he sees around it. There is a long tradition of perfect solo guitarists — George Van Eps, Lenny Breau, Baden Powell, Derek Bailey — but few have so thoroughly committed to translating Western classical harmony onto the electric guitar. The lavish outro evolves into something akin to the theme from “Twin Peaks,” then, absurdly, we get a victory lap of a reharmonized “Yankee Doodle.” Learning Greene’s chordal vocabulary on this record, living in his perfect counterpoint, is a constant inspiration for me.
On to Danny boy. This video of Danny Gatton encapsulates what I love most about jazz guitar as a discipline: its weird balance between hermeticism and extroversion, between the impossible and the homespun. He plays like a virtuoso, but never snobbishly, casting the Telecaster as a semiotic register of Western music (whereas Greene plays the Telecaster like a magic wand, nearly referenceless). I’ve never heard anyone play anything like Gatton, but hear so many musical histories in his playing. He is not limited by any dictum of what “jazz” or “guitar” should be, but mixes entire vocabularies of each practice. The result is sublime, like bar-band music heard in someone’s coolest dream.
Listen to Ted Greene on YouTube
Listen to Danny Gatton on YouTube
◆ ◆ ◆
Joel Harrison, guitarist
Gilad Hekselman, “Milton”
A tough task, this. “Jazz guitar” in 2025 can mean many things. It would be easy to choose something by a grandmaster like Wes Montgomery, George Benson or Pat Metheny, all of whom changed my life at an early age. But in my role at the helm of the Alternative Guitar Summit, I’m inclined to select a younger player. Gilad Hekselman is an important new voice in jazz guitar, and here demonstrates a gorgeous sound, enormous technique, great feel and unequivocal lyricism. When he plays, it always sound beautiful. This track is dedicated to the beloved Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento and offers a delightful take on a groove Nascimento has used himself. The piece has a singing melody that makes me smile. Gilad takes his time in his solo, he tells a story, parceling out phrase after lovely phrase. There’s lively interplay with Rick Rosato on bass and Jonathan Pinson on drums. I think this piece could leaven the darkest mood.
The post 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Jazz Guitar appeared first on New York Times.
