Originally Posted by
44lombard
That's a great clip that I've been meaning to return to.
In the interview at the beginning, he talks about being sort of blindsided by rock and roll. He really did come of age at the very end of the period before rock and R&B transformed popular music. He moved to Toronto around 1952 from rural Western Canada and was gigging pretty soon after that.
It's true that had he been listening closely to late-1940s R&B, or western swing, or even some early electric jazz guitarists like George Freeman, he wouldn't have been caught off guard by, say, Duane Eddy. And he often wasn't terribly precise with his language, so he could have been referring to anything from Elvis Presley to Bitches Brew when he mentioned "the beginnings of rock 'n' roll coming into the music..."
But if he'd been born 10 years later (for example, the age of George Benson and Pat Martino)...the rock / R&B sound would not have seemed so strange to him. Ironic that he's one of the players who makes the lowly Telecaster into a bona fide jazz axe. I love all the seeming contradictions in his life and art.
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