Jim Ohlschmidt Liner Notes The Genius of Joe Pass, Vestapol 13073 Video, 2001
[Compiled in this video are a series of performances from 1962 to 1982 . . . [by] Joe Pass. Also brief interviews where Joe Pass discusses his origins as a guitarist and his thoughts on his music. ]
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"Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalaqua [1929-1994] was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey on January 13, 1929 . . . Joe's father . . . bought him a $17 Harmony guitar . . .
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"My father . . . would hum an Italian song, I would play it and then he'd say 'Fill it up!'"
". . . his father . . . bought him a Martin flatop . . .
"That was the first amplified guitar I ever played. I put a DeArmond pickup on it and played that guitar for many, many years. It was a fine instrument." Joe also began taking lessons with a local music teacher who played violin, guitar, saxophone and piano . . .
"By age twelve [1941] Joe was playing with a group of local musicians who gigged at the local V.F.W. hall. "We'd play waltzes, pop tunes, standards, just about anything" . . . We had drums, piano, tenor, trumpet, and guitar. There was no bass player, and I played all of the bass lines because the piano player was usually the local school teacher who just read the song sheet. We played things like Stardust, Christopher Columbus, and Body and Soul. I was twelve years old and improvising. They gave me all the room I could take."
"At age 14, [1943] Pass was playing in a wedding band that was loosely patterned after the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. "We had a bass, violin, a rhythm guitar, and me," Pass told Downbeat writer Lee Underwood. "We'd play swing tunes like Honeysuckle Rose and Lady Be Good, and I would play the melodies . . . " "Pass got his first taste of the road while still in high school when he toured with the Tony Pastor Orchestra in the summer of 1944. According to a discography assembled by Tabo Oishi published in Just Jazz Guitar magazine, Pass probably played his first studio date with the popular East Coast dance band that year . . ."
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"It would seem that at age 20, [1949] with nearly six years under his belt, Pass was the classic young turk poised to take the bebop jazz scene by storm. He no doubt found his way into some very interesting jam sessions, but he was all too eager to adopt the hard-drug lifestyle of that infamous nocturnal fraternity. Within a year Pass was a junkie with a serious habit.
"Staying high was first priority," he told Rolling Stone writer Robert Palmer in 1979. "Playing was second, girls were third. But the first thing really took all my energy." The next 15 years were the darkest period of his life. "From about 1949 to the end of 1960 . . . I lived in the cracks," he told Downbeat. As Palmer wrote in Rolling Stone, Pass' drug-addled existence during these years "could have been lifted from the pages of a Jack Kerouac novel." Pass spent a year in New Orleans, where he lived in a "crash pad" with several other musicians and author William Burroughs.
"In New Orleans I had a kind of nervous breakdown because I had access to every kind of drug there and was up for days," he told Palmer. "I would always hock my guitar."
After New Orleans, Pass hit the road and kept moving, working an endless string of nightclubs in Las Vegas, Peoria, Chicago and Fort Worth, Texas, where he was busted for dope and jailed for five years. Lee Underwood wrote in Downbeat that when Pass was released, he resumed his habit and soon was, in Pass' own words, "out on the street and not playing a note."
"It's unclear how Pass found his way to California that year, but as Underwood wrote:
"In 1960, he stood on the steps of Synanon's Santa Monica drug rehabilitation center holding a gunnysack full of onions, the only thing he owned. No guitar. No money. No future. No hope. A sack full of dusty onions and a broken life."
"According to Palmer's article, a former roommate of Pass, pianist Arnold Ross, convinced him to get with the Synanon program and clean up his act. It was a particularly fortuitous decision for Pass: Not only was he in the company of other jazz musicians in the throes of drug rehabilitation, but Dick Bock, owner of World Pacific Records, was one of the clinic's sponsors. Bock recognized the considerable talents of Pass, Arnold Ross, trumpeter David Allen, saxophonist Greg Dykes and several other musicians recovering at the clinic, and featured them on an album of seven instrumental selections called Sounds of Synanon recorded at Pacific Jazz Studios in Hollywood late in 1961.
"That album and the footage that begins this video confirm that Pass' stay at Synanon quickly and irrevocably turned his life around. Taken from a 1962 appearance on a Los Angeles television broadcast called Frankly Jazz, Pass (presumably accompanied by players featured on the Synanon album) states the melody of The Song is You and then launches into an extended flight of swift, melodic improvisations played with alert, coherent authority. Sonnymoon for Two finds Joe stretching out in a more relaxed, bluesy vein . . .
"A lot of kids think that in order to be a guitarist they've gotta go out and be a junkie for ten years, and that's just not true," Pass told Underwood. "I can't credit any of that time saying that was when I really learned. I spent most of those years just being a bum, doing nothing. It was a great waste of time. I could have been doing then a lot of things I'm doing now. Only I had failed to grow up."
"1962 was a banner year for Pass. According to Oishi's discography, he appeared on no less than seven albums, working at Pacific Jazz Studios with artists such as Les McCann, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Leroy Vinegar, Johnny Griffin, Bud Shank, and others. By year's end he was one of the busiest guitarists in Los Angeles.
"Although Pass coaxed a remarkably warm, fat tone from the Fender Jaguar he played in those days, a fan noticed that it wasn't the best instrument for Joe's style.
"Back in my Synanon days, I didn't have a guitar of my own; all I had was a solid body rock and roll guitar that belonged to Synanon," Pass told Sievert in 1976. "I was playing a gig at a local club with it when this guy named Mike Peak came in and saw me playing jazz with a rock guitar. A few months later, on my birthday, I came home and there was this brand new (Gibson) ES-175 that he had bought for me. He was in the construction business and played a little guitar himself and just felt that I should have the proper kind of instrument. It's the only electric I've used since then."
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"His studio work during this time also included such lucrative jobs as playing for several television series such as the Woody Woodbury Show, Good Morning America, and the Donald O'Connor Show. Although his work as an anonymous studio musician gave Pass a level of financial security most jazz musicians only dreamed of, it was a realm he apparently was not entirely comfortable with. As Pass told Lee Underwood in Downbeat: "You have to have your regular guitar, a 12-strings guitar, a banjo, a mandolin, a wah-wah pedal -- all the tools of the trade. When they call you, they expect you to be able to do everything that's contemporary. 'Can you remember what so-and-so did on such-and-such a hit record? Well, we want that.' And if you can't play that, they don't call you again."
By 1970, Pass was living comfortably in Southern California, he was married, and had started a family . . .
The Pacific Jazz label was defunct, and although sessions that year with a group of progressive L.A. jazz musicians including electric bassist Carol Kaye, saxophonist Tom Scott and pianist Joe Sample (reissued on a Hot Wire CD ironically titled Better Days) showed that Pass tried to adapt his well-informed and carefully built technique to the new scene, his heart just wasn't in it.
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". . . Norman Granz, founder of Verve records and jazz impresario behind the highly acclaimed Jazz at the Philharmonic records and concert tours, had formed a new label called Pablo, with world-wide distribution through RCA. Although Pass was still unknown to most of the jazz world beyond Los Angeles, Granz . . . recorded him in a live set with pianist Oscar Peterson and bassist Niels Henning Orsted Pedersen at Chicago's London House in May of 1973. The Trio album was a huge success for Pablo and won a Grammy award the next year . . .
"As a result, Pass' reputation skyrocketed throughout the country and across the Atlantic, and his name began appearing near the top of reader polls in Downbeat, Guitar Player, and Melody Maker. In November and December of 1973, Pass spent several days at MGM recording tracks for the most important Pablo album of his career, Virtuoso. As Lee Underwood wrote in Downbeat: "Virtuoso startled everybody: one man, one guitar, complex tunes, and a display of technique that raised the short hairs on the back of the neck." Released in 1974, the aptly titled Virtuoso album . . .
". . . Richard Cook and Brian Morton wrote in The Penguin Guide to Jazz, "Pass smoothes away the nervousness of bop yet counters the plain talk of swing with a complexity that remains completely accessible."
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"In 1994, Pass told Acoustic Guitar magazine editor Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers that playing guitar with your fingers instead of a pick was "the best and only way to play your guitar, because you're actually in touch with the instrument--you actually feel it, like a horn player feels a horn in his mouth."
In addition to developing an impeccable technique, Pass adopted an a Zen-like attitude toward mentally articulating the music while he played. As he told Downbeat: "You have to eliminate your own consciousness, because once you begin thinking about what you're doing, you're not allowing the music to take on its own shape and form and momentum. You're trying to direct the music. The idea is to get away from directing the music, and just allow it to flow out by itself. Sometimes I'm on the stand and I feel pretty good, and the music just starts coming out. When it's like that, I'm not making the music go places; it just goes. I don't play the same tune the same way twice . . . I never know where I'm gonna start, or where I'm gonna end."
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"In 1992 Pass embarked on a extended concert series with flamenco master Paco Peña, classical virtuoso Pepe Romero, and acoustic fingerstyle innovator Leo Kottke . . ."
"Pass' role in the Guitar Summit was cut short late in 1993, when he left the tour due to increasingly debilitating pain.
Kottke, Romero and Peña continued the tour . . . On May 23rd, 1994, Pass died of liver cancer at age 65 . . ."
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20VESTAPOL 13073 Running time: 115 minutes • b/w & Color • Cover photos by Tom Copi Nationally distributed by Rounder Records, © ® 2001 Vestapol Productions A division of Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, Inc.