Barney Kessel discusses working in the studio.

Listen Now Add to Play List Read Transcript (File Size: 0.23MB)

Barney Kessel on being a guitar player.

Listen Now Add to Play List Read Transcript (File Size: 0.66MB)

Barney Kessel discusses his influence on others as a guitarist.

Listen Now Add to Play List Read Transcript (File Size: 0.57MB)

If you are experiencing problems playing audio on this site,
please update to the latest version of Flash.

Transcription

Q: “I’ve never really thought of you, curiously enough, as a guitar player. You’re a musician who plays the guitar, and there’s a slight difference in that sense, and you really don’t work within a straight guitar tradition in a lot of ways. Certainly your technique is your own; you’re virtually self-taught as a guitar player. Some of the things you do must drive other players mad! I mean you use your thumb over the neck of the guitar and frets and your right wrist moves, theoretically, more than it should – you play in a different way than a trained guitar player plays…”

A: “That's true, and it could be devastating. It just happens that it isn't. On the other hand, some of the guitarists who have become well known and well loved in the world were tremendously unorthodox such as Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery. And it led me to the conclusion that when we say this is the right way to do something, whether it's playing the piano, Ted, or whether it's bowling or playing golf or any of the skills. When an expert tells you, "This is the right way and this other way is the wrong way." it came to me that what they're telling you is it's the fastest way or the way that most people, because of the physiology that we have and the way we're formed in our coordinative skills and everything, chances are they're saying, "If you do it this way, and thus it will come out better, faster." However, even if you start something in an incorrect way or particularly an outrageous way through repetition and through the desire to want to do this, through the determination, the perspicacity, you come to a point where you reach a new plateau, after struggling with this wrong way, this awkward way, you reach a new threshold. And that threshold is really what we're after whether we use the wrong way or the right way and what we're after is control. So what happened is Charlie Christian playing the wrong way, Wes Montgomery playing the wrong way, Django Reinhardt playing the wrong way and I hope, me, playing the wrong way reached a point that we did it wrong long enough that we were able to gain control of what we wanted to do doing it the wrong way.”