Kenny Burrell that's the sound I'm looking for.
Early on I was more interested in gypsy jazz music until rock and roll came around and I listened to a lot of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and skiffle singer Lonnie Donegan.
And as far as guitars go, I loved Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West's stuff.
Growing up in Dallas, my first influences on the guitar were T-Bone Walker and Les Paul. T-Bone taught me how to play lead guitar behind my head and do the splits in 1951 when I was nine.
The Big Band Era is my era. People say, 'Where did you get your style from?' I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That's the best way I could explain it.
I'm not like other guitar players. In fact, I'm not even like most acoustic players because I use the nylon-string acoustic. I do play steel-string and the electric guitar, too, because I love rock 'n' roll and guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. But my bread and butter has always been the nylon-string.
Kenny Burrell is the grand master of jazz guitar.
Where Charlie Christian left off, Papoose started a new thing; he was an innovator of the guitar. The things he did during his recording career with Fats Domino in the Fifties and Sixties until the day he died was as much a part of the music of New Orleans as anybody else has had to offer.
Anything by Gonzalez Rubalcaba is unbelievable. I've been listening to the best of Django Reinhardt.
Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play.
Oftentimes, whenever I do interviews with guitar magazines and we discuss my influences, I mention people like Steve Morse, Alex Lifeson, Al Di Meola - but John Scofield's name never comes up. And that's funny because he's so amazing; he's the epitome of a really cool guitar player.
I've seen a lot of people getting into Jazzmasters because of me, and, well, people don't know what they're in for. I mean if you're looking for endless sustain, you're going to have to get it out of your hands (laughs). Because a saxophonist gets it out of his breath. You've got to work for it on the guitar - it means you have to pull it out of yourself, otherwise, what are you doing? You end up playing a lot of noise or scale exercises.
Of the whole bunch of guys who play hollow body guitar, I think Herb Ellis has the most drive
Mimi Fox is one of the most exciting contemporary jazz guitarists I've heard.
For guitar players especially, blues is the foundation of rock and roll. You take country music and rock and roll and jazz and you mix it together, and that's my basic makeup.
Kenny Burrell is overall the greatest guitarist in the world and he's my favorite.
After The Ventures I dug Johnny Smith quite a bit.
I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.
I was a big fan of Jim Hall as well. I liked his comping style, his accompanying. And that he played, generally, four note chords, the top four strings of the guitar.
I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell.
Hendrix inspired me, but I was still more into Wes Montgomery. I was also into the Allman Brothers around the time of those albums.
I had always been a jazz fan - Django Reinhardt, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, the early George Benson. And I come from the Hank Marvin melodic upbringing. So blues, I loved, but I also liked jazz. Therefore, my style was more lyrical.
I don't know whether it was his (Charlie Christian's) melodic lines, his sound or his approach, but I hadn't heard anything like that before. He sounded so good and it sounded so easy, so I bought me a guitar and an amplifier and said now I can't do nothing but play! Really, welding was my talent, I think, but I sort of swished it aside.
Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.
I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'
