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George Van Eps
George
Van Eps was a quiet legend among jazz guitarists, one
who as far back as the 1930s pioneered a harmonically
sophisticated chordal/lead style that was eclipsed in
influence by the single-string idioms of Charlie Christian
and Django Reinhardt. Yet Van Eps, like his brassy colleague
Les Paul, also stood apart from them as an iconoclastic
inventor, designing a seven-string guitar in the late
1930s that adds an extra bass string. Thus, Van Eps was
able to play bass lines simultaneously with chords and
lead solos, a jazz equivalent of fingerpicking country
guitarists like Merle Travis and Chet Atkins. Van Eps
puckishly referred to his style of playing as "lap
piano," and his seven-string guitar has been adopted
by a select few figures like Howard Alden and Bucky and
John Pizzarelli.
Van Eps came from a talented musical family; his father
Fred was a famous master of the ragtime banjo and a sound
engineer, his mother played the piano, and he had three
brothers, Bobby, Freddy and John, who were also professional
musicians. Self-taught on the banjo, Van Eps began playing
professionally at 11, and after falling under the influence
of Eddie Lang two years later, he learned the guitar well
enough to play alongside Lang for six months as a teenager.
From there, Van Eps worked with Freddy Martin (1931-33),
Benny Goodman (1934-35) and Ray Noble (1935-36) before
moving to Hollywood to become a freelance musician, author
of a how-to guitar book, and instrument designer. After
returning to Noble in 1940-41, Van Eps worked in his father's
recording lab for two years before returning to the freelance
arena, where, among other things, he worked for Paul Weston
and took part in the 1950s film and TV series Pete Kelly's
Blues.
Van Eps only made a handful of recordings as a leader
or unaccompanied soloist, including Mellow Guitar (Columbia,
1956) and My Guitar, George Van Eps' Seven-String Guitar
and Soliloquy for Capitol in the late 1960s. A bout of
serious illness in the early 1970s, plus a 1977 hand injury
that resulted in three broken fingers, reduced his activities.
However, Van Eps returned to the studio in 1991 for the
first of three exquisite duo albums for Concord Jazz with
his former student Howard Alden, mixing venerable standards
with a few Van Eps originals, and he shared a solo guitar
album with Johnny Smith in 1994. Even in his 80s, he remained
an eloquent exponent of easygoing modern swing, dying
of pneumonia on November 29, 1998.
Visit
the unofficial George Van Eps website here
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BECOME
A MASTER JAZZ GUITARIST!
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My
Guitar - George Van Eps
1966's My Guitar was George Van Eps' first album in almost
a decade, and the first of three LP albums that the guitarist
would record for Capitol. Paired with current, popular material,
'tasteful, new studies of contemporary hits' is how the
album cover read George Van Eps' superb performance remains
an enduring tribute to his musical genius. Sundazed 2002.
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here from Amazon.com
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