Our latest YouTube feature is a deep dive into the surprisingly terrifying shred technique of a younger Joe Pass. It’s a collaboration with peerless transcriber and guitar educator Levi Clay, who supplied the musical and historical erudition, while Cracking The Code handled the plectrum plumbing. It’s a mammoth 40-minute investigation that is one part documentary and one part instructional video.
The Elder Statesman
When you think of Joe Pass, you probably imagine a smiling avuncular figure, seated alone on a stage with an almost comically oversized jazz-box guitar, performing toe-tapping, fingerstyle renditions of standards like “Ain’t Misbehavin'”.
And you wouldn’t be wrong. This image was cemented in the popular consciousness by the massively successful latter half of Joe’s career. Through numerous television performances, both solo and as an accompanist with jazz legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, Joe may have done more than anyone before him to elevate the guitar to headline status among mainstream audiences.
He had the same effect on guitarists. His ubiquity on music store shelves was such that even a 1980s teen who aspired to glam rock greatness might likely own a copy of Joe’s “Guitar Style” (the orange one) or “Guitar Chords” (the blue one), both from Alfred Publishing.
I bought the blue one because Joe Satriani had mentioned it in an interview once. I didn’t know what to do with it. But Pass had become so representative of jazz guitar skill that it was reasonable to think you might somehow become jazz-level smart just by possessing one of his totems.
The Hotshot
But… there’s another Joe. This one displays the more obvious kind of superpowers a Satrani fan would be looking to acquire. He’s a young hotshot melting faces with blazing single-note lines on a solid-body Fender Jaguar through a blonde Bandmaster.
And despite what the Jaguar’s beach-focused 1962 launch campaign would have you believe, the sound is not surf rock – it’s bebop. In this amazing live television performance from same year, the player is a thirty three year-old Joe Pass absolutely laying it down:
The Synanon Era
After a tumultuous run of incarcerations under the overly punitive drug laws of the 1950s, and a two-year stint in rehab in the early sixties, Joe had emerged with a clean slate and fire in his belly.
He appeared on a local Los Angeles TV music program, “Frankly Jazz”, hosted by jazz radio personality Frank Evans, in November of 1962. The players, including Joe, were assembled from the patients at the Synanon drug treatment center in Santa Monica.
Synanon would go on to infamy as a cult, including its own murder scandal, later in the decade. But Joe appears to have dodged that bullet. Early Synanon was closer to a more empathetic and recovery-focused vision of rehab. It attracted an array of amateur and professional jazz artists struggling with addiction.
The center produced an actual vinyl LP release, “Sounds of Synanon”. Its cover art was a clipping of a DownBeat article debunking the association between drugs and jazz. If it was propaganda, it was worth it, because it featured a refreshed and unleashed Joe Pass who was finally ready for his closeup.
The Song Is You
On “Frankly Jazz”, the quartet barreled through a swinging uptempo take of the Jerome Kern classic “The Song is You”. As this stunning footage makes clear, Joe’s picking was a full-blown USX technique with all the trimmings: fluid and fast upstroke escape motion, downstroke sweeping, legato slides, and Gypsy-style eighth-note downpicking at 270 beats per minute.
Joe’s lines displayed his trademark tasty harmonic awareness, but this time rendered in high-octane for a sixties guitar audience. His two-minute solo is athletically daring and relentlessly inventive, full of catchy hooks and clever outside excursions.
In the lesson we take a detailed look at all of these technical elements, along with a biographical overview and musical commentary from Levi. Head on over to the clip and check it out. If you can’t resist grabbing a guitar before its forty (!) minutes are up, we won’t be surprised.