There are thousands of really great jazz guitar albums out there, but today I want to share the five albums that really shaped how I play guitar. Some are iconic, some may be surprising, and a few may actually blow your mind. And hey, please drop your favorite jazz guitar albums in the comments. I'm always looking for hidden gems.
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Wes Montgomery Smokin’ at the Half Note with the Wynton Kelly Trio.
So I remember vividly where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard this record. I put it on, and I’m like, okay, cool. And then five minutes later I go, oh my God, again. Oh my God. So the first track on this is called No Blues. It's a straight-ahead 12-bar. They played it at a medium-up tempo, and I had the experience as a young jazz player to transcribe a lot of this by hand. It’s really full of surprises.
It's a 12-bar blues, but the way Wes crafts his lines and the fact that it's live and they keep on building and building and building is really satisfying. So this is definitely my number one all-time jazz record. And the trio backing Wes is really on fire, so Wes can take all of his liberties and be himself in a live setting.
Pat Metheny Day Trip with Antonio Sánchez on drums and Christian McBride on bass. So this one is more recent, but personally I think we will find out later in history that it’s one of his best ones. This is a trio record with certain solo tracks and quite frankly, the playing and the maturity of Metheny at this point in his life (around 2008) is really surprising and fulfilling.
One of my favorite tracks is When We Were Free, which starts with a very basic bassline, and then it builds into this sort of 3/4 or 6/8 shuffle, which is just fantastic. And Metheny’s synthesizer blows, which is great. There's another track I started to transcribe, which is a solo acoustic guitar piece called Dreaming Trees.
Very cool. Not very bebop or standards-oriented—very original—but at the same time, not the typical fusion stuff we hear from Metheny. So it's a straight-ahead record of compositions, with great collaborations from these three musicians.
Ed Bickert and Don Thompson At the Garden Party. So this is what a jazz guitar duo with bass should sound like.
And nothing personal against Jim Hall and Ron Carter, but this is, to me, the pinnacle—the ultimate way of playing standards on record. The way I discovered it: I was just getting into Ed Bickert, and I found out that this was a mid-70s record where they're basically playing live. And the title track is Alone Together.
They start with a sort of vamp—it’s in G minor—and the head is played by the bass player, Don Thompson. It's just magical. It's beautiful, and it's amazing just to hear Ed in the background come up with some of this stuff. You go, yeah, this is familiar guitar stuff, but also innovative—not unheard of at this point in history.
So definitely check that record. No drums, just warmth, beautiful driving music. To me, this is Canadian jazz at its finest. If I'm driving the car, this is on for sure, especially the first track.
So this is John Scofield EnRoute. This is the trio with Steve Swallow and Bill Stewart. Bill Stewart still plays with Scofield.
This is an interesting trio in that the first track is called We, and they play Rhythm Changes, but it's gritty—not quite fusion-ish. It's a trio, but my teacher would say there’s “some hair on the sound.” It's not quite traditional head jazz, but it has all these elements of language, full of surprises, full of interesting twists and compositions by Scofield.
So this whole thing is very legato, very unpredictable, and I think it was a great entry point for me as a kid. First time I heard it, I'm like, oh, this is what jazz sounds like, man. You know, it's not that bad. People say it's an acquired taste—I’m like, this is a good entry point, even for a jazz purist.
Don’t come for me. So this is number five, and this is a second Metheny record, but this one is the Pat Metheny Group, and the album is Letter from Home. This is excellent, very polished, very highly produced. People say, well, it’s sort of smooth jazz, so it doesn’t really fall in that category. I still think it's an excellent record.
We even have voice as an instrument on there.
I think the beauty of the whole polishing and crafting is that the devil’s in the details. Some of the tunes have passages in 7/4 and you're not even going to notice. Some stuff has odd meters and whatever, but just refer to the first track, Have You Heard, where they thoroughly arrange the head in and the head out. The solo sections are baked into C minor blues followed by a C# minor blues after the bridge, which is just fascinating.
It doesn’t sound like that on your first listen. You're like, this is Muzak, right? Elevator music. But when you dig into the details, you realize the variety, the complexity, the contrast, and the fact that they all make it look very easy. This is a really solid group, and a really solid record to listen to.
Not straight-ahead, but still something that really shaped my playing over time.
So there you have it: Wes Montgomery Smokin’ at the Half Note, Pat Metheny Day Trip, Ed Bickert & Don Thompson At the Garden Party, John Scofield EnRoute, and Pat Metheny Group Letter from Home. I'd love to hear your comments and your suggestions on your best top three or top five albums that shaped the way you play.
So drop me your comments here, and if you'd like to explore these sounds and concepts further, please be sure to look at my video here on how to comp masterfully in a jazz style, how to improvise lines in the style of Wes, Pat Metheny, Ed Bickert… and I'll see you in the next video.
