INFLUENCES BY LARRY CORYELL: GIBSON GAZETTE, VOL 8 NO 2, CIRCA 1968

When playing in Gary Burton’s group there are five guitarists with whom I identify:  Django Reinhardt, B.B. King, Jim Hall, Grant Green, and Gabor Szabo…in that order.  
All my other influences are less important than these five, all of which I have seen in person with the exception, of course, of Django, who I’ve been listening to a lot lately on records.  
Maybe my judgement is clouded by the nearness of the hearing, but I think that somehow everybody from Bola Sete to Chet Atkins, owes it all to Django.  
He seems to have started just about everything from bending strings to string shaking vibrato to unbelievable chordal passages to octaves.  
There will never be anyone who can equal Django as a jazz guitarist.

When playing in other musical situations, such as Steve Marcus’s group, I also drew a lot from blue guitarists like B.B King, Freddie King (no relation), Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton, Elvin Bishop, Jerry Miller, Buddy Guy and Jimi Hendrix, to name a few.  
It’s not what they play that affects me but rather how they do it: bending strings, picking in special ways, (all down or all up strokes in some instances), playing ideas from unorthodox positions and utilizing different tunings.  And most use light gauge strings.  I suppose the most important (whimsical/mechanical) development to occur on the guitar (electric and non-electric) in recent years is the sophisticated use of light gauge strings.  It has freed the instrument from its previous servility to the piano and taken it up front where the saxes and trumpets used to be.

I have been asked so many questions about how I started out that it is necessary to talk at length about my early influences. 
The development of a musician is like the growth of the human personality and depends upon the interaction of the individual gene substances with the external environment.  It is therefore difficult to talk about the guitar because there are so many different kinds of guitars and ways of playing.  It is also difficult to accurately pinpoint those “influences” people ask about because everybody reacts differently to the same influence.  It becomes very much like problematical semantics in which the meaning of anything lies only in the mind of the one who is thinking and cannot be clearly and accurately transmitted to anyone else.  Consequently, statements about one’s musical influences must be qualified and I hope I have properly done so in the following statements.

Let me say that the most important thing for any musician, regardless of instrument or influences, is to be honest with himself and to play the music that is his own and not that of anyone else; that is not an order, but an inevitable state of being.  Once you have reached the initial plateau of musical maturity you can hear all other music and enjoy it but you will not be directly affected by it; that is to say, all of the confusing hodge-podge of music available, one’s own music remains intact.

I will now go back to the time in my life when I was musically immature and listening with my natural but unqualified ear.  
From the time I was about twelve I became in tune with anything having to do with the guitar (piano lessons left me bored and unsatisfied).
Wherever and whenever guitars were played I would be listening.  The first record I bought was a Chet Atkins LP, I was a big fan of Chet’s because he was the only guitarist my parents liked and he was featured a lot on the radio.  So there was no one else to dig because they didn’t play much Merle Travis or any of the other finger-pickers.  
Also, Chet is a great guitarist, his playing is clean and classically-oriented and those qualities appealed to me.

Something important happened the first time I saw a guitar player my age play hot lead guitar with a rock band called “The Checkers” out of Toppenish, Washington.
His name was John Hensly and he now plays with Sarge West in a club called “The Climax” in West Seattle, Washington.  He sounded like all the guitar playing I was digging at the time (which was my sophomore year in high school), he sounded most of all like Chuck Berry, and I had just been told by Gene Vincent that Gene’s favorite guitar player was Chuck Berry.
So I went home and tried to remember everything Hensly had played. The importance of seeing Hensly was identification, he was a guitar player with whom I could identify.
As I watched him tear into those very hot rhythm and blues passages I said to myself “so that’s how it’s done“.  Here was a new kind of excitement, different from Chet Atkins.
I had bought my first electric guitar- a Silvertone from Sears - my last year in junior high and discovered that just about everybody around my town of Richfield, Washington played the guitar. 

My first and favorite teacher was John LaChapelle.
He loaned me some valuable jazz guitar records: Barney Kessel (he was easiest from which to learn, I copped a lot from Barney in the beginning and when I toured Europe with him last fall I felt like a little teeny bopper who was seeing Donovan face-to-face for the first time; Johnny Smith (he was smooth and mellow and I could compare him with Barney because they played many of the same songs), Les Paul (He was playing jazz in his pre-multiple track days, I was later to dip out to Les’ “new sound”; he may very well have been the worlds first psychedelic guitarist); and Tal Farlow (It was very hard to copy his solos because he played so fast and his lines were more complex than either Barney or Johnny-a lot of people put Tal down for having a “nervous” time feeling, but when I saw him last winter in New York his time was perfect and his playing was absolutely incredible, just like his old records, only better).
Listening to all the great jazz guitarists of the 50s on record was one thing, but to see my own teacher, John LaChapelle playing all these those rapid single note runs and quick chord solos interspersed with lightning fast Django phrases was another thing altogether.
I and my guitar playing friends would go down to where he taught and ask him to play for us between his lessons.
We were in for a treat when a student would fail to show and Johnny would sit on the steps and really stretch out for us. 

Meanwhile there was another teacher in Richland, Danny Love, who taught Chet Atkins style. A lot of the younger players saw him a lot, so I got together with Danny as often as I could because I didn’t want to miss out on what people my age were learning. I remember seeing a friend named John Ehlers playing “Blue Echo”, a Chet Atkins tour-de-force and realize I had to get familiar with finger style guitar because it enables the player to play all the parts, plus, it had that country sound.  Believe me, at that time in my life there was nothing that knocked me out as much as that country sound- to me it really swung, and I didn’t even know what swinging was.
I would buy an occasional rock ‘n’ roll record (Rawhide by Link Wray, for example), keep it for a day then trade it for something more guitaristic like Les Paul.
One rock record I kept was “Guitar Boogie Shuffle”.  It was some of the meanest jazz-country picking I had ever heard. As was my custom, I learned the solo from that record, note for note, so close, as close as I could get it.  (Later on I learned “West Coast Blues” by Wes Montgomery.  None of this helped my playing directly but it gave me an intimate look into other guitarists’ heads.)

Besides learning from teachers and from records I was learning out of books.  My first book was a little ukulele chord manual that showed you how to play folk songs and stuff that was cool.  Then I bought a guitar book with a lot of chords in it.  The book claimed to have every chord in the world.  I came home from junior high every day and went through the book just playing all the chords. I really liked chords then.
One of the best books I ever got was Mickey Baker’s Jazz Guitar, Volume I.  It has the kind of chords John LaChapelle introduced me too… chords that didn’t use all six strings and chords that skipped over strings.  This Mickey Baker book also had some great single-note exercises…minor seventh runs,  augmented, diminished, etc…and some perceptive tips on improvising in front of the single-note section.
Also, there was the identification with Mickey‘s performance of “Love is Strange”, a hit record of that era, that I liked very much.
I found it attractive that a guitar player who could bend strings and play so bluesy could be so well-educated and comprehensive.   

At the time of this first Mickey Baker book I was about seventeen and had worked my first big-time job in a little club in Portland and I was trying to apply all this new-found college to the music-rather unsuccessfully I admit, because at the time I didn’t have any time feeling together, I remember the sax player always telling me I was rushing and it would disappoint me so because I thought I was playing some hot stuff.
During the day I would practice scales from some positions John LaChapelle had shown me.  I would play scales for hours trying to build up speed.  Later I discovered I needed to slow down a lot to achieve cleanliness and clarity of attack before I could exercise those fast passages I desired so much to play.  I thought it important as well to learn as many standards as possible in order to get work.
I remember liking “Laura”. 

When I hit college I continued collecting as much guitar knowledge as I could and tried to develop a sure-footed single note technique.  I guess my early preoccupation with playing fast and flashy came from my lack of ability to do all the fast and flashy things that boys my age were doing…driving cars and hot rods and drag racing and stuff like that.
All in all my early influences help me to learn the instrument my own way, but I developed some bad habits (poor finger-patterns and fear of playing with an original style),  that I had to break out later.
By the time I started college I had been playing seriously for three years but I still couldn’t improvise. 

I didn’t begin to understand jazz until I was in my third year of college and that involved rejecting everything “guitarist” and learning music from trumpet players like Sarge West and Mark Doubleday, pianists like Mike Mandel and Jerry Grey and bassists like Dave Press, Jerry Heldman and Chuck Metcalf…anybody but a guitar player. 

In my next article I will talk about the period when I threw away the guitaristic approach and tried to learn just plain old music.