Allied forces liberated Paris. Composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein turned 26 and would soon bask in the Broadway success of On the Town. There was, however, another birthday that day (literally, the day of his birth). It was of another great musician whom it was my privilege to know, the guitarist Pat Martino (1944-2021).
It is almost impossible for me to grasp that he would have turned 80 today. In fact, he’s been gone almost three years. To me, he’s still the “guitar god” I met at Folk City on West Third Street in Greenwich Village, when I was 19 and he an old man (in my eyes) of 28. I distinctly remember chatting with him on the northeast corner of West Third and Sixth Avenue (yes, just outside the basketball court informally known as “The Cage”) about how I was picking up the jazz tradition on our common instrument. A few months later, he’d offer to teach me if I’d be willing to travel to his hometown of Philly.
My first initial impression of his playing, like that of many young listeners discovering their favorite musicians, was of his speed of execution. (“Look how fast he plays!) I slowly but surely realized that “fast” does not capture the beauty of his streams of eighth notes. The excitement I so poorly conveyed derived from his melodic inventiveness and “pulse.” He didn’t sound like anyone else, but you knew if someone else was playing his lines
“I never got into Charlie Parker,” Pat once remarked about the leading stylist of the Beboppers. Pat was a child of the Hard Bop era, John Coltrane (with whom he shared a city and music teacher, Dennis Sandole) being perhaps the most famous of its exemplars. (See my link-studded tribute “Pat Martino: The Hard Bop Years” on a different blog exactly 14 years ago.)
Pat Azzara was performing in public by the mid-’50s, appearing once on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. Pat’s trio, “The Hurricanes,” included Nick DiLisis and Ed Lalli; he began the transformation to Pat Martino when he discovered in his father’s LP collection the great Wes Montgomery. Pat methodically explored the work of the greatest of jazz guitarists, eventually becoming the “monster” that almost persuaded Pittsburgh native George Benson—unimpressed by the diminutive Martino on the stage of Small’s Paradise in Harlem in the early 1960s—to reconsider his career and take the bus back home once Pat’s playing tore the joint up. (We’re all glad George persisted. Pat and George, who turned 80 last year and is still with us, became great friends and mutual admirers.)
I cannot now review the nearly six decades of his career and my interaction with him during during most of those years, including his medically remarkable recovery from total amnesia. In 1980, the arteriovenous malformation with which he was born hemorrhaged; he suddenly couldn’t recognize himself in the pictures family, friends, and musicians showed him; couldn’t remember ever playing the guitar. It took him four years to recover.
I am, however, proud to have urged upon him the idea of a biography; I went to Philly in 2006 to consider the possibilities. He eventually went with Bill Milkowski who ghostwrote Pat’s 2011 autobio, Here and Now.
He was a great soul, a generous, accessible teacher who held nothing back. The technology we only dreamed about fifty years ago eventually enabled him to put his insights into a high-quality audiovisual course in which he all but puts your hands on the guitar. (Here’s a good example.)
There’s so much more I can say, and maybe I’ll add to this post if things occur to me (e.g., the memorable shows, including “Sunny” from his first live album) but I fear this is the last time I’ll write about Pat Martino. He battled illness in his last years, including a paralysis that made him unable to play music; I am unable to write about it with equinimity. I close by sharing more photos.
