# Jim Hall was a modest maestro with immense influence: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/12/03/jim-hall-was-a-modest-maestro-with-immense-influence-video/
- Published: 2018-12-03T22:05:18+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**04.12. – Happy Birthday !!! The jazz guitarist Jim Hall was a modest maestro with
immense influence. Hall played an electric instrument often prone to hyperbole with
an irresistibly quiet delicacy, and his improvisations were as shapely as fine songs.**

He was still performing and initiating new projects in his 80s. When he played at
the London Jazz festival in November 2012, he won the audience over before he had
even played a note by declaring with characteristic understatement: “It’s great 
to be … any place, actually.”

On that occasion he performed with a trio: his ingeniously lyrical music sounded
just as engaging as it had when his gently weaving lines and coaxing chord-playing
with Jimmy Giuffre’s trio graced the title sequence of Bert Stern’s documentary 
about the 1958 Newport Jazz festival, Jazz on a Summer’s Day.

Hall spent half a century collaborating with some of jazz’s greatest originals. 
He toured Europe with Ella Fitzgerald in 1960; played improvised duets with the 
pianist Bill Evans; imaginatively shadowed the thundering saxophone lines of Rollins
in the trio that recorded Rollins’s landmark post-sabbatical album The Bridge (1962);
worked with the composer and saxophonist Paul Desmond (1959-65); and, in his later
years, put his classical training to use in mixed-genre compositions for jazz groups
and string quartets, and orchestral works including the guitar concerto Peace Movement.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Hall was raised in Cleveland. After taking up the guitar
at the age of 10, he was playing professionally as a teenager. Although influenced
by Benny Goodman’s pioneering young guitar star Charlie Christian, he listened to
saxophonists as much as guitarists, for their rounded voice-like tone and their 
conception of melody.

Hall studied theory and piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music in the early 1950s(
guitars were not on the programme), as well as classical guitar in Los Angeles, 
and worked with the the drummer Chico Hamilton’s quintet – a significant presence
in the reserved new “cool jazz” movement – in 1955-56. He made Jazz Guitar, his 
first album as a leader, in 1957, and worked until 1959 in a trio with the sophisticated
reeds player and composer Giuffre – an experience Hall later credited with training
him to keep flawless time without drums. He also taught at the forward-thinking 
Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts, and performed with Rollins, Desmond, Evans,
Fitzgerald, Lee Konitz and Ben Webster during a busy freelance period in the 1960s.

Hall later moved to New York, where he performed as a sideman, co-led a group with
the trumpeter Art Farmer and formed a trio including the pianist Tommy Flanagan.
He briefly joined a talented studio band for Merv Griffin’s TV show in 1965, began
his remarkable run of duo explorations with Evans (1966) and Ron Carter (1972), 
and showed how punchy, affectingly bluesy and melodically succinct his calm improvisations
could be, on the album Jim Hall Live! (1975).

In 1981, Hall recorded with both the swing piano star George Shearing and the classical
violinist Itzhak Perlman, and throughout the 1980s and 90s he continued to lead 
sympathetic bands featuring acclaimed younger partners such as the keyboardists 
Gil Goldstein and Larry Goldings, the saxophonist Chris Potter and the drummer Bill
Stewart. In 1986, he partnered the saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the pianist Michel
Petrucciani for gigs at the Montreux Jazz festival and the Village Vanguard in New
York. Four years later he hosted a guitar concert at the JVC Jazz festival in New
York, at which he performed with John Scofield, Pat Metheny and John Abercrombie.

In 1991, Hall and Metheny played four duo concerts and later co-led a quartet with
the saxophonist Joe Lovano. Hall also began to give unaccompanied shows, aided by
electronics that allowed him to play contrapuntally, but without ever blurring the
motivic logic and discreet pungency of phrasing that always shaped his signature.

For the 1995 album Dialogues, Hall wrote almost all the music, designed to steer
intimate conversations with partners including Lovano and the guitarist Bill Frisell
and Mike Stern. For Textures, in 1996, he moved closer to classically inflected 
chamber music. His jazz quartet was augmented by strings on the album Jazzpar Quartet
+ 4 (1998), which was recorded to celebrate the guitarist’s receipt of Denmark’s
prestigioushis receiving the Danish Jazzpar prize and which included Hall’s classical
piece Thesis and a version of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.

Composition and teaching played significant parts in Hall’s later career. He taught
at the New School for Social Research, in New York (1990-95), and wrote the instructional
book Exploring Jazz Guitar (1991). Transcriptions of his playing have guided aspiring
guitarists everywhere.

In his 70s, Hall seemed to get even better as a performer. The live albums Grand
Slam: Live at the Regattabar (2000) and Magic Meeting (2004) found him sometimes
sounding more animated and carefree than he had in his circumspect youth. In 2004
he received a Jazz Masters award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and though
health issues troubled him later in the decade, he continued to compose and perform.
In 2013 he began releasing new live recordings through ArtistShare, a platform financed
by fans’ contributions. In the summer of 2013 Hall returned to the Newport Jazz 
festival to play with the 25-year-old guitarist Julian Lage, a musician of comparable
melodic grace and fertility of ideas.

After the announcement of Hall’s death, Rollins declared: “I don’t know anybody 
who didn’t love him, including myself. He was the consummate musician, and it was
a privilege to work with him.”

Hall is survived by his wife, Jane, whom he married in 1965, and by his daughter,
Devra, who was also his manager.

James Stanley Hall, guitarist, born 4 December 1930; died 10 December 2013.

![Картинки по запросу Jim Hall](https://i0.wp.com/www.veojam.com/
photoart/jim-hall/1.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

### _Related_