Ed Bickert

[RonD]

Thanks for posting these David.
There's a lot of new members since the original thread.
If they weren't aware of Ed before, this is a wonderful introduction.

Cheers, Ron

[P.J.]

I love Ed's playing!! Any footage of him playing a strat? I have a jazz guitar book that mentions that he played a strat but it could be a mistake.

Thanks,
PJ

[kris]

He used Tele.

[AndyV]

From Jazz guitarist Jeremy Hepner:

When I was a student at Mohawk College back in the early ’80s, Ed Bickert, arguably Canada’s greatest jazz guitarist ever, came to do a master-class. We were so excited to have him coming and all of us guitar players were agog when he showed up. I guess the most compelling part of his playing for me was the unique ways that he could play chords on the guitar – they had both flow, direction, motion, and went from great density to an airy gossamer.
We peppered Ed with lots of questions about chord scales, voicings, and all things guitar related and his answers were never quite getting at what we were hoping to hear – you know – “the answer” – the easy way out! Finally, he said, “Why don’t I just play and if you hear something you like, stop me and I’ll explain what I was thinking about in that moment.” It sounded like a great idea and thus he started to play solo guitar and it was simply magnificent. At one point he did one of these very typical yet sublime cascading chord runs that began high up on the neck on and then wound beautifully through a variety of “grips” (as Ed referred to chords) until the line concluded at the bottom of the neck. I think we all jumped out of our seats at the same time and said “That! What was that”? “Well,” says Ed, “I started with this chord up here at the top of the neck,” and he played it, “and I was aiming for this last chord here at the bottom of the neck,” and he played that too, “and then I just played some other chords to connect the two.”