The musician George Harrison said every guitarist loves: “It’s wonderful stuff”
The guitar always seemed to come naturally to George Harrison every single time he picked it up.
While John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked tirelessly back in the day until they found the right songs to work with, Harrison was usually the one bringing a little bit of spice to everything they had, like the solo in ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ or the one little lick that kicks off ‘And I Love Her’. Most lead guitarists would try to solo to their heart’s content, but all of Harrison’s heroes know how to use their instrument to serve the song.
That’s not to say that Harrison didn’t have the chops to pull off a great solo if he wanted to. The mini guitar duel happening in the middle of ‘The End’ was proof enough of his lead playing, and even though he claimed not to have the same kind of musical superpower that Eric Clapton did, Tom Petty is among the first to say that Harrison could turn anything into gold if he had the right opportunity to show his stuff.
He could make any guitar sing, but the artists he followed when he was a kid were much more concerned with making the greatest melodies on guitar. His idol, Carl Perkins, never overplayed whenever he took a solo, and even when listening to the Eastern textures that he worked on with Ravi Shankar, even the most accomplished sitarists in the world were telling a story with their instruments instead of turning everything into a shred fest.
Because even in the days when artists could play a mile a minute, the biggest names in jazz were still anchoring everything down with melody. Are there those who simply wanted to show their stuff? Sure. Just listen to John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ for that, but there were also people like Joe Pass who could play the most intricate lines in the world but never lose the essence of the melody when he was playing by himself.
But in the world of jazz guitar, there’s a certain place of musical heaven reserved for what Django Reinhardt could do. Any other guitarist that managed to lose the ability to use half of their fingers would have probably thrown in the towel and started working on something else, but the fact that Reinhardt persevered and was able to make some of the most beautiful lines ever made only using two fingers is the kind of redemption story so insane you’d swear it was out of some feel-good movie.
His story may be remarkable, but Harrison felt that every guitarist should listen out for the melody that Reinhart put into everything, saying, “I like guitar players from the older times like Django Reinhardt. Show me a guitar player who doesn’t like Django Reinhardt, because he was just brilliant. He only had about two fingers that worked and he tuned his guitar in some weird way so he could [play]. But he’s just got this sound. It’s wonderful stuff.”
It’s not exactly the same kind of guitar playing that is going to have virtuosos itching to play or whatever, but you have to admire the dedication that Reinhardt put into everything. He was one of the faces of what a guitar player should be, and even if the world told him that he wasn’t going to be playing for the rest of his life, he could still find ways to get the music in his head through the two working fingers that he had.
So whenever any guitarist gets down about their own playing or is convinced that they’ve lost it, Reinhart’s performances can practically be prescribed to them in their lowest moments. Because no matter how many times people say that they’re stuck in a rut, the fact that Reinhardt created the most beautiful phrases with half of his fingers missing is enough to inspire anyone to get up off their ass and follow their dreams as well.
