And I’ve seen some great ones. Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughan, together in “The Fire Meets the Fury” tour of 1989… Vaughan was always a force of nature, but ultimately a little predictable. Beck was a revelation, though – even playing the dreaded jazz-fusion. I had no idea he could summon all those incredible sounds from his Stratocaster with just bare fingers against strings, and very few special effects.

Dickey Betts had so much presence and authority before he got the boot from the Allman Brothers Band. Maybe substance abuse does make you a more interesting guitar player (Clapton, anyone?). Speaking of substances, I also had the good fortune of wandering into a Grateful Dead show in Cleveland back in ‘73. Jerry Garcia sounded amazing toward the end of the concert. Too bad I had to sit through a three-hour sound check to get there.

On a smaller (small club, that is) scale, Gatemouth Brown was the most naturally gifted, effortlessly soulful player I’ve seen. I remember watching him duel with Roy Clark on TV’s “Hee-Haw.” Clark was pretty hot too – but you could see Roy sweat with every single note. Gatemouth would tear him to shreds while looking like he was waiting for someone to serve him a drink.

Brother James and I stumbled across the Nighthawks, with the great Jimmy Thackery on guitar, at the Rome Inn in Austin, TX. He took the small crowd on a side trip to virtually every musical landmark in America – Memphis, Clarksdale, Chicago, New York (Mickey Baker) and L.A. (Johnny “Guitar” Watson) and left us begging for more. I’m glad I saw him in his prime.

Young Danny Gatton

I’ve seen Muddy, Hooker, B.B., Lonnie Mack, Roy Buchanan, Mick Taylor with the Stones, nine-string freakshow Charlie Hunter… But when it came down to sheer virtuosity and feeling, Gatton was the man. He could burn with mind-numbing speed, and then slow down to caress a timeless theme like Harlem Nocturne or Melancholy Serenade. Simply put, he was a master of his instrument. But more important, he mastered every major form of American roots music – blues, jazz, country, rockabilly, western swing… Did I mention that Gatton was the man?

Like Buchanan, Thackery and another one of my favorite pickers, Evan Johns (who gained little renown with his band, the H-Bombs), Gatton was a product of the fertile roots music scene in and around our nation’s capital. And fittingly, I first saw him play at a club right off of Pennsylvania Ave.

Physically, Gatton was not an imposing figure. He was a pudgy little guy with smallish fingers that looked like they had no business strangling a Fender. He wouldn’t bother with badass poses or a bad attitude, preferring to flash an occasional goofy smile while destroying every convention of the three-sets-and-out (and carry your own shit to the van) bar-band routine. Gatton’s playing seemed to transcend his physical presence and everything around him – including the crappy dives that kept him in business.

I won’t get into the usual Gatton-related discussions regarding gear (like many of his country music idols, he preferred the Telecaster, and he invented his own special effect called the Magic Dingus box) or technique (he often used “banjo rolls” to sound like a small army of guitar players). Suffice it to say, Gatton could do virtually anything he wanted with an electric guitar. And if you had a basic appreciation of the instrument, seeing Gatton live in a small club was truly a life-altering experience.

He named one of his instrumentals Funhouse, which is a perfect word to describe a Danny Gatton performance. Jaw-dropping be-bop figures would segue into soaring blues runs, which would then dissolve into the carnival-like sounds of a Frank Zappa-influenced composition. The guy clearly had a boundless love for all forms of American music, and he claimed to have a weakness for the Blue Note recordings of Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers. But he was especially dangerous playing rockabilly, which seemed to synthesize all of the great influences he absorbed growing up in a city with a cosmopolitan spirit and a southern heart (let’s not forget D.C.’s location relative to the Mason-Dixon Line): 88 Elmira St.

That cut was from one of two solid but fairly slick albums he recorded in the early ’90s for a major label (Elektra). Gatton worked long and hard to taste that success, having slogged his way through countless bars and a few questionable record deals. He started out in the mid-‘70s playing what he liked to call “Redneck Jazz” (the title of his second album, on the small NRG Records label). And he usually recorded with a worthy foil, like fellow guitar shredder Johns or the outstanding pedal steel player Buddy Emmons. Here’s Gatton and Emmons dueling on a tune by Hammond B3 maestro Jack McDuff… Rock Candy

Amos Garrett, himself no slouch on guitar, gave Gatton the nickname “The Humbler.” If one of his bandmates would start to get a little cocky after a gig, Garrett would whip out a tape of “The Humbler” blazing his way through one of his legendary live performances. I guess it was just Garrett’s way of keeping everyone honest, including himself.

As Gatton’s reputation grew, he added more session work to his busy schedule of bar and club gigs. Among other artists, he recorded with country star Roger Miller, rockabilly singer Robert Gordon and moody rocker Chris Isaak – although you’d be hard-pressed to find Gatton in the final mix of Isaak’s “San Francisco Days” album (another one of those effectively sparse productions from Isaak). I’m guessing he provided the whacked-out fills on this cut: Beautiful Homes/Chris Isaak with Danny Gatton(?)

Sometime in the mid-‘80s, I dragged a friend to see Gatton at a little club in Manhattan called U.S. Blues. We recognized a few other musicians in the crowd, including a couple from Bob Dylan’s touring band. But that night, they were just like the rest of us – standing there in awe of Danny Gatton. We barely moved for two hours, having planted ourselves about 10 feet from the front of the stage. And although I’ve played guitar for years, I still struggle trying to describe the experience to other musicians. It’s like closing your eyes and hearing a musical conversation among all your favorite guitarists, then opening them to realize it’s all coming from one guy – and he looks like your auto mechanic.

Apparently, Gatton’s unique genius was fueled by a fair amount of pain. And the professional indignities of being “the world’s greatest unknown guitarist” must have been more than he could bear, especially after he lost his record deal with Elektra. In 1994, Gatton shot himself dead at his home in Maryland – only a few miles from the small clubs where he first honed his chops.

Several months later, Les Paul, James Burton, Albert Lee and other six-string legends paid tribute to Gatton during a series of shows in New York that helped raise money for his widow and daughter. But even a roomful of celebrities couldn’t erase the humbling reality that Danny Gatton, a true giant of the electric guitar, remained a virtual unknown in the world of music.

We’ll close with this cut from the appropriately named album “Unfinished Business”: Melancholy Serenade

Danny Gatton on video… Thankfully, there are enough Gatton freaks out there to keep the youtube beast fed for years. Here’s some schtick that never gets old – from a 1991 performance on Austin City Limits (one of nephew Dan’s favorite Gatton clips):

For all you guitar-pickers out there, here’s a five-minute lesson from the master… Remember, if you can’t find your tuner, the dial tone on your phone is an F!

The album: Chico Hamilton’s “The Dealer,” released on the Impulse! label in 1966. The guitarist: a 23-year-old Larry Coryell, making his recording debut. The bandleader: a legendary jazz drummer who started playing back in the late-‘30s in L.A. with his high school classmates Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus and Illinois Jacquet.

Technically, “The Dealer” is a jazz album – but it stretches the meaning of that term at every turn. A couple of songs are in that riff-based, soul-jazz vein that the Blue Note label mined so well back in the Sixties. One is a fairly straight-ahead blues, at least the kind that you’d hear a classic organ combo play. Another takes a left turn into “psychedelic jazz” – because you couldn’t swing a dead, or stoned, cat back then without hitting a song aimed at that vast new audience known as the American hippie.

Rumor (aka Wikipedia) has it that Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor was a big fan of Coryell’s playing on this album. And to help prove the point, I’ve combined samples of solos from “The Dealer” and “Sticky Fingers.” First, you’ll hear Coryell launching into his break on For Mods Only (did they have to make the swinger reference so obvious?). Next, you’ll hear Taylor’s playing on the jazzy second half of Can’t You Hear Me Knocking. Given that Taylor appropriates big chunks of Coryell’s solo, I think it’s safe to say he spent a lot of time between ’66 and ’70 hooked on “The Dealer.” For Mods Only/Can’t You Hear Me Knocking

But the most startling moments on the album are right out of the gate, as Coryell makes a huge statement on the title cut. It’s the only jazz solo I’m aware of that sounds completely indebted to early rock ‘n roll – specifically, Chuck Berry. Coryell’s playing on this tune gets my attention every time it randomly shows up on my iPod. Clearly, he misspent much of his youth woodshedding along to rock and blues records… then he probably migrated to some Wes Montgomery, and maybe Django too. But all of these influences seem to come together organically – sorry, can’t think of a better adverb here – in Coryell’s loose and playful solo. The Dealer

As you can tell, Coryell also isn’t afraid to take his playing a little outside too. But he does it in a way that doesn’t sound the least bit calculated. I like how this next solo starts out fairly conventional and then devolves to the point where Coryell’s almost off the fretboard altogether. And Chico, another restless explorer, eggs him on with a few well-placed cracks of the snare. Now this is my idea of free jazz… Thoughts

Just when you think Coryell’s completely off the rails, he settles down and pulls off some pretty convincing blues licks. Although he’s credited with “writing” the next tune, it’s really not much of a composition – just a basic organ-combo workout that you could hear in countless inner-city clubs back in the Sixties (check this for more on the glory days of the B3). And he had the cojones to name the thing after himself, with a nod to another fearless wanderer… Larry of Arabia

If all this jaw-dropping guitar weren’t enough, the 1999 release of “The Dealer” on CD includes four bonus tracks from other sessions featuring the great Hungarian-born jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo. A master of the second-note drone and other exotic flourishes, Szabo was a big influence on Carlos Santana and many other Sixties rock guitarists (Santana used his original, Gypsy Queen, as the coda to Peter Green’s Black Magic Woman). Here’s Szabo strutting his stuff on El Toro… El Toro

Coryell went on to a successful career playing in a number of settings, including jazz-rock with his band The Eleventh House (can’t say I’m a fan; I prefer one of his more acoustic outings, which we touched on here). Approaching his 90^th birthday, Chico currently teaches at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City and occasionally tours with his band Euphoria. He played in Lena Horne’s band… scored music for film and TV… recorded with Rolling Stone Charlie Watts… mentored more contemporary rockers like former Spin Doctors guitarist Eric Schenkman and Blues Traveler John Popper… and, for my money, almost stole the show on the HBO documentary “The Jazz Baroness.”

I’m sure both men look back at “The Dealer” as a defining moment – a near-perfect start for Coryell, and a high point in Hamilton’s successful run as a bandleader in the Sixties, often with the popular Charles Lloyd on sax and Szabo on guitar.

We’ll close it out with Coryell playing some very Wes-like runs on this ballad, written by Chico and arranger Jimmy Cheatham… Baby, You Know

Chico in 2009, Live at Borders… When I’m 88, I’d like to have a steady gig at the local bookstore (but I’m assuming such establishments won’t exist when I’m that age).