Les Paul has had such a staggeringly huge influence over
the way American popular music sounds today that many tend
to overlook his significant impact upon the jazz world.
Before his attention was diverted toward recording multi-layered
hits for the pop market, he made his name as a brilliant
jazz guitarist whose exposure on coast-to-coast radio programs
guaranteed a wide audience of susceptible young musicians.
Heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt at first, Paul eventually
developed an astonishingly fluid, hard-swinging style of
his own, one that featured extremely rapid runs, fluttered
and repeated single notes, and chunking rhythm support,
mixing in country & western licks and humorous crowd-pleasing
effects. No doubt his brassy style gave critics a bad time,
but the gregarious, garrulous Paul didn't much care; he
was bent on showing his audiences a good time. Though he
couldn't read music, Paul had a magnificent ear and innate
sense of structure, conceiving complete arrangements entirely
in his head before he set them down track by track on disc
or tape. Even on his many pop hits for Capitol in the late
'40s and early '50s, one can always hear a jazz sensibility
at work in the rapid lead solo lines and bluesy bent notes
-- and no one could close a record as suavely as Les. And
of course, his early use of the electric guitar and pioneering
experiments with multitrack recording, guitar design and
electronic effects devices have filtered down to countless
jazz musicians. Among the jazzers who acknowledge his influence
are George Benson, Al DiMeola, Stanley Jordan (whose neck-tapping
sound is very reminiscent of Paul's records), Pat Martino
and Bucky Pizzarelli.
Paul's interest in music began when he took up the harmonica
at age eight, inspired by a Waukesha ditchdigger. Paul's
only formal training consisted of a few unsuccessful piano
lessons as a child -- and although he later took up the
piano again professionally, exposure to a few Art Tatum
records put an end to that. After a fling with the banjo,
Paul took up the guitar under the influences of Nick Lucas,
Eddie Lang and regional players like Pie Plant Pete and
Sunny Joe Wolverton, who gave Les the stage name Rhubarb
Red. At 17, Les played with Rube Tronson's Cowboys and then
dropped out of high school to join Wolverton's radio band
in St. Louis on KMOX. By 1934, he was in Chicago, and before
long, he took on a dual radio persona, doing a hillbilly
act as Rhubarb Red and playing jazz as Les Paul, often with
an imitation Django Reinhardt quartet. His first records
in 1936 were issued on the Montgomery Ward label as Rhubarb
Red and on Decca backing blues shouter Georgia White on
acoustic guitar. Dissatisfied with the electric guitars
circulating in the mid-'30s, Paul, assisted by tech-minded
friends, began experimenting with designs of his own.
By 1937, Paul had formed a trio, and the following year,
he moved to New York and landed a featured spot with Fred
Waring's Pennsylvanians, which gave Les nationwide exposure
through its broadcasts. That job ended in 1941 shortly after
he was nearly electrocuted in an accident during a jam session
in his Queens basement. After a long recovery period and
more radio jobs, Paul moved to Hollywood in 1943, where
he formed a new trio that made several V-Discs and transcriptions
for MacGregor (some available on Laserlight). As a last-minute
substitute for Oscar Moore, Paul played in the inaugural
Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles on July
2, 1944; his witty chase sequence with Nat Cole on "Blues"
and fleet work elsewhere (now on Verve's Jazz at the Philharmonic:
The First Concert) are the most indelible reminders of his
prowess as a jazzman. Later that year, Paul hooked up with
Bing Crosby, who featured the Trio on his radio show, sponsored
Les' recording experiments, and recorded six sides with
him, including a 1945 number one hit, "It's Been a
Long, Long Time." On his own, Paul also made several
records with his Trio for Decca from 1944 to 1947, including
jazz, country and Hawaiian sides, and backed singers like
Dick Haymes, Helen Forrest and the Andrews Sisters.
Meanwhile, in 1947, after experimenting in his garage studio
and discarding some 500 test discs, Paul came up with a
kooky version of "Lover" for eight electric guitars,
all played by himself with dizzying multi-speed effects.
He talked Capitol Records into releasing this futuristic
disc, which became a hit the following year. Alas, a bad
automobile accident in Oklahoma in January 1948 put Les
out of action again for a year and a half; as an alternative
to amputation, his right arm had to be set at a permanent
right angle suitable for guitar playing. After his recovery,
he teamed up with his soon-to-be second wife, a young country
singer/guitarist named Colleen Summers whom he renamed Mary
Ford, and reeled off a long string of spectacular multi-layered
pop discs for Capitol, making smash hits out of jazz standards
like "How High the Moon" and "Tiger Rag."
The hits ran out suddenly in 1955, and not even a Mitch
Miller-promoted stint at Columbia from 1958 to 1963 could
get the streak going again. After a bitter divorce from
Ford in 1964, a gig in Tokyo the following year, and an
LP of mostly remakes for London in 1967, Paul went into
semi-retirement from music.
Aside from a pair of wonderfully relaxed country/jazz albums
with Chet Atkins for RCA in 1976 and 1978, and a blazing
duet with DiMeola on "Spanish Eyes" from the latter's
1980 Splendido Hotel CD, Paul has been long absent from
the record scene (some rumored sessions for Epic in the
'90s have not materialized). However, a 1991 four-CD retrospective,
The Legend and the Legacy, contained an entire disc of 34
unreleased tracks, including a breathtaking electrified
tribute to the Benny Goodman Sextet, "Cookin'."
More significantly, Paul began a regular series of Monday
night appearances at New York's Fat Tuesday's club in 1984
(from 1996, Les held court at the Iridium club across from
Lincoln Center), attended by visiting celebrities and fans
for whom he became an icon in the '80s. Arthritis has slowed
Les' playing down in recent years, and his repertoire is
largely unchanged from the '30s and '40s. But at any given
gig, one can still learn a lot from the Wizard of Waukesha
