A few suggestions: if we’re sticking to 3 discs, it’d be:
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Wes Montgomery: The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (Riverside); with Tommy Flanagan, Percy Heath & Albert Heath.
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Grant Green should be towards the top of your list. Idle Moments is the classic; two long slow moody performances in the title track & “Django”; two tough hard-bop numbers. Street of Dreams & the 2-CD set of The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark are the other places to go. Some of the most atmospheric & compelling music ever released on Blue Note.
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Bill Evans & Jim Hall, Undercurrent (originally on United Artists, reissued by Blue Note/Capitol). The best piano/guitar duets ever recorded; mostly it’s ballads, but there’s an unexpectedly uptempo “My Funny Valentine”.
Martino & Coryell are fine players but I’d not really put them at the top of my list; I’d put Stanley Jordan way below (cf. the entry in Jazz: The Rough Guide: “all of Jordan’s recorded output is a mix of pearls and gravel”). Reinhardt of course is important, though perhaps a touch overadulated (the music isn’t an exciting group music–Reinhardt & Grappelli are great but the Hot Club is basically chugging along in the background). Charlie Christian is an essential reference-point, as the first guitarist of note to use amplification (there’s a disc on Columbia of all his most important recordings with Benny Goodman–this is good). If you want to hear early acoustic jazz guitar, go to Eddie Lang, esp. his duets with the blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson & with the jazz guitarist Carl Kress.
One mainstream guitar disc I liked a lot lately was Howard Alden’s Your Story: The Music of Bill Evans. The gently latinized version of “Time Remembered” is worth it on its own. It’s got a couple oldtimers here–Frank Wess & Al Harewood–who perform extremely well. Nice to hear them still doing their thing.
I guess I should mention Joe Pass, though I’m not a big fan. Rather than the Virtuoso series, which are big on technical fireworks, try his backup work on Stephane Grappelli’s Tivoli Gardens live disc on Pablo. – Oh yes: Kenny Burrell. I don’t have any of his discs, though know his work; his famous ones are Midnight Blue & Guitar Forms. I liked Blue Lights, a 2-LP (now 2-CD) set of definitive hard bop with a group including Bobby Timmons, Art Blakey & Tina Brooks.
Lenny Breau had, even by jazz standards, a remarkably star-crossed career, mostly due to drug addiction. He was one of the most technically astonishing guitarists ever, often creating the illusion of two guitarists playing at once; his music was very much informed by the instance of Bill Evans. Search out the recently reissued Live at Bourbon Street, which contains the material previously available on Quietude & Legacy plus previously unreleased stuff.
You didn’t ask but: for more contemporary (i.e. harder-edged, often rock- or blues-tinged) guitar styles:
John McLaughlin, Extrapolation–not quite a “fusion” disc, having been cut before his spell with Miles Davis, but instead a contemporary jazz album informed by blues & rock. Very different from his Mahavishnu work of the 1970s.
Joe Henderson, So Near, So Far: this has John Scofield on it, playing “straight” jazz rather than the jazz-rock of his own discs (which increasingly seems to be leaving jazz behind). Some of Scofield’s best work, & one of the few “tribute” albums of the tribute-heavy 1990s that actually is a great disc. Scofield’s own Time on My Hands is also worth getting.
Bill Frisell, Have a Little Faith: Frisell’s gotten rather soft-centred lately, but this is a terrific disc focussing on Americana of all types–jazz renditions of Copland’s Billy the Kid, Sonny Rollins’ “No Moe”, Sousa’s “Washington Post March” & Madonna’s “Live to Tell”, among other things. Live on Gramavision is good too, despite the indifferent recording quality.
John Abercrombie should be in here. Some would also add in Pat Metheny (perhaps the recent trio discs), though I’m not a big fan. Exercise caution with Metheny as the music ranges from pop-jazz pablum to howling distorted mayhem (the execrable Zero Tolerance for Silence), but there’s some solid straightahead jazz somewhere in the middle. Forewarned is forearmed.
Might as well toss in a couple names from the free-jazz/noise end of the spectrum: if you’re looking for background music you’ll hate these with a passion, but these are important artists. Derek Bailey–Drop Me Off at 96th on Scatter is a good instance of his acoustic playing (complete with a tribute to Teddy Bunn that has some 1930s-style blizzards of picking); No Waiting is a good instance of his electric guitar. Sonny Sharrock–Ask the Ages is a blissful/painful guitar-driven variant on Coltrane’s music, with Pharoah Sanders & Elvin Jones in tow.
Oh yeah: Jazz flute? This is an area I’m much less familiar with but a few votes: Lew Tabackin & Frank Wess for straight mainstream styles; Eric Dolphy, Roland Kirk, James Newton, Robert Dick for left-of-centre players (note that Kirk, Dolphy & Wess were multi-instrumentalists so their albums aren’t usually exclusively devoted to flute, except for Kirk’s charming I Talk with the Spirits). One of the loveliest flute performances ever committed to disc is on Dave Holland’s Conference of the Birds, by Sam Rivers & Anthony Braxton (on the title-track)–the rest of the disc is rather thornier, I should perhaps add in warning.
Hope this helps. I’ve tried to signpost the stylistic differences clearly as “jazz guitar” is such a diverse field. There are a lot of other players I could mention but I think that covers the biggies. If you’re seriously interested in jazz you should get a good reference-book: the best out there is Cook & Morton’s Penguin Guide, now in a nice big blue updated edition.
(edited to fix post formatting)
[Edited by Arnold Winkelried on 07-03-2001 at 04:53 PM]