By Jim Fisch

Last year, while preparing an interview with guitarist Howard Alden, I asked Jimmy Bruno, his confrere in The Concord Jazz Guitar Collective, for a few introductory words, which he provided. Now with Bruno under the journalistic lens, I asked Alden for his comments on Bruno, to which he succinctly replied, "Jimmy is an incredibly exuberant player... with chops to match. He has no inhibitions and takes no prisoners!"

Master luthier Bob Benedetto, himself a guitarist and man who has built guitars for the very best, further expands on the Bruno aura. "I first heard Jimmy Bruno on Philadelphia's Temple University jazz radio station. They were playing a cut from his CD, SLEIGHT OF HAND. I had to put my tools down, as the hair on the back of my neck stood up! I stood at my workbench listening in disbelief. When the tune ended, I had to sit down and rest for awhile, all the time thinking how, like Paganini, he did the impossible!"

Since the 44 year old Bruno burst on to the national jazz scene with the release of that album in 1992, he has quickly risen to top of the jazz guitar heap. Along with his well deserved reputation for musical excellence, he is also known as one of the instrument's most opinionated practitioners... never shying from controversy... ever ready to present a well-reasoned argument in support of his beliefs.

Always on the move, he has just seen the release of his latest Concord Jazz album, LIVE AT BIRDLAND, and he continues to seek out still more challenges. It is the continued mastery of the 7 string guitar, an expanding interest in composition and a total immersion in photography which presently occupy much of his time.

With the latter in mind, and tongue firmly in cheek, we shall attempt to put the amazing Jimmy Bruno in focus.

JF: Let's start out talking a bit about your background in your hometown of Philadelphia. Philly has always been a great city for saxophone players, and I hear a lot of that in your playing. On your new album LIVE AT BIRDLAND, you have a special guest appearance by one of the best, Bobby Watson. You do three Charlie Parker tunes, Sonny Rollins's "Valse Hot" and on previous CDs, you've recorded material by Trane, Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, to name a few. What is your fascination with the sax?

JB: When I first started to learn how to play the guitar, I of course listened to all the great guitar players. Hank Garland was my first big influence, aside from my father, who was also a guitarist. His (Garland's) record, JAZZ WINDS FROM A NEW DIRECTION (Ed. note, Columbia LP 1572) had a big impact on me. Then, I listened to guys like Johnny Smith, Joe Pass, Barney Kessel, all the greats. When I heard a Charlie Parker record, that made me start listening to a lot of saxophone players, too. The lines that they were playing were different. They weren't "guitaristic." I also started listening to piano players like Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans.

JF: Bobby and you do Parker's "Anthropology" on the new disc. That's one of the real proving grounds for sax players. You tear through that at super speed, but you both manage to maintain a very high level of musicality. It's just not running the changes. Do you constantly re-analyze a tune like that after having played it over and over again?

JB: Well, that tune is based on the "I Got Rhythm" changes, so I've been playing them for a long, long time to the point of never really having to think about it. I think that you only really start to make music when you don't have to analyze it. You learn to listen to it. It stops being intellectualization.

JF: What I hear in your playing, especially on a tune like that, is that you have a starting point, and you know where you want to end, but you are constantly revising your approach as how to get from point A to point B either melodically or harmonically. You strive to keep it fresh.

JB: Well, it sounds like I know where I want to end! (He laughs.) That tune was actually kind of a "throwaway." We were getting to the end of the set, and we just said, "What are we going to play now?" I know that Bobby likes to play those kinds of tunes, and so do I. So, we were either going to play that or "Cherokee," just some kind of fun tune to finish things up. We really didn't plan it.

JF: That's jazz! How did you get hooked up with Bobby?

JB: This is kind of a far out story. There was a guy... an older black gentleman, named Joe Downey. He was in his seventies. He'd been coming to see me play for a couple of years and he was very sick with cancer. A lot of stuff was wrong with him. He would always come around and be talking about the old days of jazz in Philadelphia and New York and say that he knew people like John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. He had a lot of stories... but there are a lot of guys like that... and we always used to think that it was just so much B.S. We really liked the guy, but we always wondered if what he was saying was true. One day he came by and said, "Bobby's in town and he's a good friend of mine. I'll bring him by to play with you." I remember that Craig Thompson, the bass player, and I just cracked up. We said, "Bobby who?" He says, "Bobby Watson! I'm bringing him down Wednesday night." Well, we kinda' laughed and said, "O.K., great!" but all along we're thinking, "How's he know Bobby Watson?" Sure enough, the following Wednesday, in walks Joe with Bobby Watson, and Bobby took out his horn, and that's how we met. It turned out that all the stories that this guy had been telling us were really true! He's died since, and I really never knew what his connection to the whole jazz scene was. He said he was at the famous John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman sessions (ed. note. JOHN COLTRANE & JOHNNY HARTMAN, 1963, Impulse Records 40) We talked to Bobby about it and he said, "Yeah, it was all true." There was something really likeable about this guy. He was a real good listener, and musicians were drawn to him. To be honest with you, a lot of the jazz audience is full of it. They don't know one thing from another. At any rate, it was amazing how the whole thing came together. From the very beginning... like the first eight bars of that evening... Bobby and I looked at each other and smiled, because we knew that we really had a musical connection. Every time that we've played since then, it's among the best musical experiences of my life.

JF: You just hit on something that I was thinking about this morning. You guys perform "My One And Only Love" on the CD, a song that I always associate with Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane.

JB: That's the first time I heard it... on the album with John Coltrane. It all connects with this thing with Joe Downey. It always just stayed in my mind. We had to do it on the record.

JF: When you pick a ballad, do you choose it for objective musical reasons, like the changes or melody, or do you just dig it as a song?

JB: It's funny. In the beginning I used to think it had to have good changes and stuff, but over the past couple of years I discovered something that a lot of people already knew... the lyrics. It was something my father had taught me. When you know what the lyrics are, it kind of makes you phrase things differently.

JF: From what I know of you, I assume that you were brought up in an Italian household. Were you exposed to the records of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and did they have an influence on you in this respect?

JB: Absolutely. That, plus the fact that my father was a guitar player and my mother was a singer.

JF: Tell me a little bit about your father's career.

JB: He was a guitar player around Philly, and he did a lot of sessions here when that "crap" music was around. He always wanted to play jazz, but he was too busy trying to make a living. He was a real good commercial guitar player and a real good jazz player. He had a hit record in 1959, "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" with Frank Virtue and The Virtues.

JF: How big a group were they?

JB: Well that was in 1959, so I don't remember too much about it. They did make quite a bit of money. My father had some kind of falling out with Frank Virtue, who was a real ass. You can print that! They cheated my father out of a lot of money. He split up with Virtue, and they never had another hit record. The two of them had been boyhood friends. That's all I know about it.

JF: What type of stuff did your mother sing?

JB: She was a lounge singer... a typical "chick" singer.

JF: I don't know if your mother would be flattered by being called a "typical chick singer."

JB: I'm sure she'd get a laugh out of it. She was pretty good. She sang all the old standards. I don't think that I ever knew what rock and roll was until I was 16 or 17 years old.

JF: This seems like the right time to bring this subject up since you've all ready mentioned it. A few years back, in another publication, you made some rather strong statements regarding rock music. Would you care to revisit that?

JB: Sure. Why not? There's good rock and roll and there's bad rock and roll. I guess they don't really say rock and roll anymore. It's rock. When it's played well, it can have a good feel and I can see the attraction to it. Obviously, that's why it's popular. For me however, it really doesn't hold anything. It's basically just not interesting enough musically.

JF: You have two kids. Are they into rock?

JB: Well, my son is 18 and my daughter is six. My son likes classical music and jazz. The thing about rock is that if people have any kind of musical education, they can see the music for what it really is. It's entertainment. It's simple. But like anything else, the better educated you become, the more you are able to appreciate the better things. Music is a science and an art. If someone thinks he's an architect, and he goes to build a building without really knowing anything about architecture, the building is going to fall down. There's nothing to hold it up. That's the way I feel about a lot of rock music. It just crumbles.

JF: Great analogy!

JB: Many rock players have a great desire to make music, but they lack the discipline to really learn anything about it. There are a lot of players out there who play rock or fusion, and they're really quite good at it. My take on all of this fusion stuff that came about in the '70s, and whatever it got transformed into now, is that it happened mainly because so many jazz musicians were starving and making no money. So, if you find yourself in a situation like that, the most logical thing to do is to find out how to make your music more accessible to more people. The first thing they did was to make it a lot simpler. They simplified the harmony. Then they said, "Well people can't understand the ride cymbal in jazz." So, they made that simpler and put a repetitious rock beat behind it. They simplified the harmony, played simpler lines over it and suddenly they had a larger audience because they had "dumbed-down" the music. It was good in a way, because it opened up a lot of people to the existence of jazz, but it really wasn't jazz that they were listening to! In a way it was tragic. They lined their own pockets, but were destroying the art.

JF: I know what you mean. It cut both ways. For many people, fusion served as sort of an entry level to jazz, which was good. Conversely, there are a number of musicians out there today, who are labeled as jazz musicians, and they make artists like yourself cringe. If the listener never gets beyond them, they've deluded themselves into thinking that they are experiencing jazz.

JB: Jazz is a very elusive term. I just read something where Duke Ellington was quoted as saying,"If you call this music jazz, it's never going to go anywhere." I think he was right. It's just music... and some music is better than others. Did you ever check into a Holiday Inn, and you look on the wall... and there's a painting... done by who knows?! It's a cheap copy, or some ordinary picture. Well there's that type of music and then there is jazz, which I think is truly America's classical music. It's an art. That's the difference. Not everybody likes Picasso. Not everybody likes Monet. What can I say? That's American society. The way this country is now, it has absolutely no culture whatsoever... in any way shape or form. Look at our television shows, look at our movies. Those Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies that make millions and millions of dollars... they're nothing more than a glorified comic book on the screen. The reason those actors are paid millions of dollars is because the public buys that stuff. Let's face it, we don't live in a very educated, cultured society. We would rather overpay someone who is a sports star than someone who is an artist. I don't necessarily mean myself. I know tons of starving artists. It's a shame, but that's the society we live in.

JF: Well, let's talk about an artist who sadly never made a ton of money... Hank Garland. You mentioned him as a major influence on your playing, and you perform "Move" which was a highlight of JAZZ WINDS on your LIVE AT BIRDLAND disc. What was it that you heard in his playing?

JB: When I first heard JAZZ WINDS, I absolutely wore the record out. When you're young, you often don't really know why you like something, but I loved it. I couldn't tell you if it was good or bad. I loved the sound that he got out of the guitar. There was just something about it. It made me want to play jazz. From that point, it led to all sorts of other things. Now, of course, I know a lot more about the music and can tell you why I like it, but back then I wasn't so sure.

JF: Since we got on sort of an art vibe, you've got another tune on the album entitled "f 8," which in case some of our readers don't know, has to do with the aperture setting on a camera. It seems like everywhere I see you these days, if you don't have a guitar in your hands, you've got a camera. How long have you been into photography.

JB: About a year and a half. I like to take black and white pictures. I really don't know how that started. Somebody gave me a camera, and like everything else I get interested in, I get really involved in it. I've got to completely check it out. It's a good hobby... a good release from playing music.

JF: Do you have your own darkroom?

JB: Yeah, everything. I've even sold a few pictures recently, and I've worked a few gigs as a photographer. I've made a couple of bucks and had a lot of fun. It's a lot like music. You're dealing with light and space and there are a lot of variables involved. There are choices and there are rules, so there's a connection there. The thing about photography which really turns me on is that the pictures can last forever... not literally, but you can capture a moment and it stays. In jazz, you can play a solo, and it all comes together, like, for example, on "Anthropology." I can remember when we recorded it. We started trading licks back and forth. At one point, Bobby and I got so hooked up that we ended up playing the same thing. Well, that was a high at the moment... but now it's gone. Thank God it's on the record, but for me, that moment is history. With a picture, however, it seems to stay.

JF: Have you been influenced at all by that whole genre of so-called "jazz photographers," like William Gottlieb and Herman Leonard, who were responsible for so many of the classic photos of jazz musicians?

JB: Oh yeah! Milt Hinton too. He's got a great book out. There's another guy, too. Claxton... William Claxton. I think those pictures are so tremendous. This is all new to me. Since I was 16 my whole focus has been on learning jazz. These days, I'm more apt to be hanging out with photographers than musicians. I'm very interested in it and I'm learning a whole lot of new stuff.

JF: Bill Claxton did many of the photos that were used on Pablo and Fantasy record jackets over the years, notably pictures of Joe Pass. That gives me a nice seg to talk about Joe's influence on your style. Listening to Bobby and you playing a duet on "These Foolish Things" reminded me of the record Joe did with Zoot Sims, BLUES FOR TWO (Ed. note, OJC-635.)

JB: Joe was a major influence. I mean, when you talk about playing solo guitar, who else is there? Joe and George Van Eps are it, as far as I'm concerned! They are the two giants. You can't get any better than that.

JF: I also heard a lot of Joe in your playing when you got together with John Pisano at The Classic American Guitar Show. Of course if anyone can bring it out, it would be John.

JB: That was such a thrill for me. When I was in L.A., trying to be a studio player, I met John through Joe Pass. We became good friends, but we never really got a chance to play together. We'd hang out and drink wine and eat and cook, but we never really played any music.

JF: John's a great cook!

JB: Yeah, he is, and that's so typical of life in L.A. We never got a chance to play guitar together until I chucked all that (studio work) and got back into jazz. If you want to talk about someone who is unrecognized... John Pisano plays as well, if not better than anybody! What can I say? He's one of the best guitar players in the country and nobody knows it!

JF: And he's also one of the nicest guys in the world.

JB: Oh yeah, I know.

JF: You worked quite a bit with Tommy Tedesco when you were out in L.A.

JB: I still get to talk to him every once-in-a-while. In fact I spoke to him a few months ago. He's pretty sick right now. If it wasn't for Tommy, whatever studio work I was able to do in L.A. would never have happened.

JF: How active was that scene? I know that today there is very little studio work available.

JB: I was there maybe 10 or 12 years ago and there was a lot going on, but I don't know what's happening now. It was never really my thing. It was the case of making a lot of money playing little pieces of music. Those guys who do it, and do it well, make an it an art unto itself. I have the greatest respect for the guys who are able to do that stuff. I don't think that I was ever really that good at it.

JF: If I can bring this back to solo guitar playing once again, on the BURNIN' album, you did a solo version of "Our Love Is here To Stay" on a nylon string guitar. Do you play much nylon string?

JB: Not any more. Since I switched over to the 7 string guitar, I've just been concentrating on that.

JF: My next question was going to be if you've considered getting a 7 string classical guitar?

JB: I think I would like to. I've talked to Bob Benedetto about it a couple of times and we go back and forth about it. I don't even know if they make a classical guitar string in a heavy enough gauge that it could be used as a seventh string. It would be real nice. I think that Bob's still fooling around with the idea, but he's such a perfectionist. If he's gonna make that kind of guitar, it's got to be the best in the world, like everything else he makes. I don't know how much he would want to make a guitar that is not an archtop. I don't know if it holds any attraction to him.

JF: Let's talk a little more about your early career. I know that you were quite young when you joined Buddy Rich's band. That must have been quite a learning experience.

JB: It was a learning experience only as I look back on it. At the time, I thought it was a prison sentence. He was not the easiest person to work for. At the time, I thought he was a huge ass. He'd just be babbling at times, and have these psychotic episodes. I'd think, "What have I gotten myself into?!" If you were to quit, you'd have to pay your own way home... and he never paid you enough that you could afford an airline ticket. As I got older, and looked back at it, I understood a lot more about why he was the way he was and the various things that he did. Mel Torme' wrote a really good biography of him. If you read that, and look at his childhood and his whole career, his behavior doesn't seem that bizarre to me anymore. I say to myself, "He was right... and I was the ass."

JF: Mel was one of the few people who had a really good relationship with him over the years. He managed to see a good person underneath all the posturing.

JB: Buddy basically was a good person. A lot of it had to do with his growing up in the big bands. Let me tell you something. Musicians can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I only have a trio. Buddy had to deal with 18 different musicians in his band. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do. He wanted certain things his way, and that was that. He was at the point of being the best in the world, and he was not going to compromise his standards for anything or anybody. That's what made him do the things he did. I remember a time in England. We were on a television show which was the equivalent of what the Johnny Carson show was in the U.S. Somebody asked him about Ginger Baker, the English drummer. He said that he belonged in a "home for retarded wrists." That's the way Buddy was. He wouldn't compromise his standards or his art. Musicians don't stand up for their art anymore. I have a lot if respect and admiration for Buddy Rich. He stuck to what he believed in, and he never sold out. Nowadays, everything has to be so politically correct. You ask someone about something, and they say, "Oh yeah, yeah. It's great, it's great," but it's really a wishy-washy answer. Nobody wants to offend anybody, but also it seems as if people aren't entitled to their own opinions anymore. You have to watch what you say. Of course, I don't!

JF: It seems like the right time to ask you about having worked as a musician in Las Vegas.

JB: It's like an elephant graveyard. It's the dumbest music you could ever possibly listen to. I mean, how many times can you play the same show over and over and over again? You're not dealing with art or musicianship there. You're dealing with an entertainer or whatever.

JF: Were you basically a "pit" musician?

JB: Yeah, so I played for every idiot that came through town. There are not many that I can mention who were exceptions. Doc Severinson was one. He was beautiful to work for and the music was good, but that's because Doc Severinson is a great musician. He just happened to get caught up in the entertainment thing. He treated the musicians great, he knew what was happening and he was fun to work for. Anthony Newley was another... excellent music... good conductor. I can't think of too many others who come to mind. On the other hand, you had Liberace and Wayne Newton... the complete opposite. Musically, Vegas was a place to get steady money. It was like a regular job, benefits and everything. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but talk about a place where there is no culture whatsoever. Not just music, but anything! It really is a desert.

JF: I understand that you've got a video coming out on fretboard visual, fretboard visuali... It's a tongue twister. I can't get it out.

JB: Fretboard visual... visualization. I can't say it either. I'm going to have to change the title! I'm in the process of editing it right now. In fact I was working on it before you called. It's a simplified approach to seeing certain things on the guitar fingerboard. There's such a flood of stuff on the market. All the latest gimmicks. There's just too much of it. They all seem to make it real complicated... even for me. I watched some of the videos, and after a while I don't have any idea of what they're talking about. This is the simplest way that I can think of doing it. It's an entry level video which shows you where the chords are, where the scales are, and not that many fingerings of them. You don't have to go insane. That's another pet peeve of mine. There are people who write books, people that I've never heard of... who knows if they can play or not... and they make these outrageous claims as to what they can do.

JF: Can you sort of capsulize just what your approach to the fingerboard is. You hear people talking about "caged" systems or whatever.

JB: That's another thing, the terminology. I think to myself, "Wow! It's not that hard!" Ever since I was kid, just starting to play, if I was ten years old, and there was another kid who was also ten and he played the saxophone, he was always better than me. He could always read faster than me, and he'd have an ear. He could always pick a melody out and I couldn't. I would wonder just what was goin' on. In the beginning I thought that maybe I didn't have as much talent. As I grew older, and started to understand the mechanics of the instruments, it started to make sense. When you play the saxophone, and finger a note, the fingering will always be the same. You put your finger down and you hear that note. That's not so with a guitar. There are too many choices. What I did was to devise these symmetrical fingerings... there are six of them... six major scale fingerings. Basically, the same part of the scale of every fingering produces the same sound with the same fingering. It's almost symmetrical all the way up. If you start the fingering on the fifth string, it's symmetrical all the way up to the "E" string. With these scales, if you don't play the first note of the scale, you end up with a Dorian mode... that is, you have a Dm7 if you're in the key of C. So you don't have to learn a whole new fingering for the Dorian mode. Or you don't have to learn a whole bunch of Mixolydian fingerings. They're all within these scale forms. There's too much B.S. out there with all that. A lot of times I can see that a lot of these people (who write methods) aren't really players, but they think about it and come up with all this stuff. There's really no need to have a new fingering for a "D" Dorian, it's just a C scale and you just don't play the first note. It should be the same fingers. Mixolydian is the fifth mode. You don't need to know a different fingering if you already know the fingerings inside the major scale. If you learn to visualize it, there are no new fingerings for each mode. It's all inside that major scale. That's basically the approach of the video in a nutshell.

JF: Is there ever a day that goes by when you don't pick up a guitar?

JB: Sure. I think that if I played all the time, I might get burnt out. When I was younger, I constantly had the guitar in my hands. Literally, every waking moment I was playing the guitar. I don't really sit down and practice that much. I might pick it up to learn a new tune, or to try something that I've been thinking about. Right now, I'm working on trying to move three different voices in different directions at the same time. So, if I do pick it up, I'm playing with something like that. You reach a point where you can practice it in your mind visually and mentally. Then, when I pick up a guitar to play it at a gig or something, it comes out.

JF: Relative to that, Bob Benedetto told me that when you picked up your first 7 string from him, you sat down and played as if you'd played a 7 string all your life.

JB: Well, I knew that I was getting one and I had thought about it. I knew the names of the notes on that string and I had practiced playing it mentally. I think Bob is being a little bit kind. It wasn't quite that easy, but it still wasn't foreign to me because I had thought out what I was going to play on the lower strings.

JF: Is the 7 string still opening up to you?

JB: Oh yeah... everyday! Every time I pick it up I learn something. I think that guitars should have had a seventh string from the very beginning.

JF: If you look at all the recent converts, it seems as if the 6 string guitar may become an endangered species in jazz.

JB: You may be right. In the beginning, when I first got mine, I already had a 6 string Benedetto, and I didn't want to stop playing it because it sounded so good. Then I realized that the more I kept going back and forth, I was never going to get to the point that I wanted to be on the 7 string. I remember talking to Howard Alden at the time, and he said, "Think about it. There isn't a thing that you can play on a 6 string that you can't play on a 7 string." Once I realized what he was talking about, I thought he was absolutely right. It's just that I had been playing a 6 string all my life. As they say, "Old habits die hard!"

JF: Well, nobody makes more sense playing the 7 string guitar than Howard Alden.

JB: Absolutely! You've got that right! Howard is such an inspiration to me. I'm so glad that I've gotten the chance to play with him. Not only is he a fine guitarist, but his musicianship in general is unbelievable.

JF: I found that there is not a record or artist than you can mention to him that he doesn't know.

JB: That's true. He can tell you the original changes to a tune, all the substitutions, plus some that he invented himself. He's tremendous. What else can I say?

JF: What are the current plans for the Concord Jazz Guitar Collective?

JB: We might make another record together. There's a live recording that we did at the Manchester Crafters Guild, and I don't think we'll be making a new one until Concord decides what to do with that. We've got a couple of gigs coming up over the summer.

JF: When I saw you, Howard and Frank (Vignola) play together for the first time, one of the things that I really got a kick out of... and so did a number of people that I spoke with afterwards... was how much you seem to enjoy comping. You really know how to play rhythm guitar.

JB: On THE CONCORD JAZZ GUITAR COLLECTIVE record, we had one of the finest rhythm sections that you could ever want play with... Jim Hughart on bass and Colin Bailey on drums... but if we record another CD, I want to do it with just the three guitars... with very little amplification, or maybe none at all. That's my vote. I kind of think that Frank and Howard may feel the same way. When we rehearsed for the first record at my house, a friend of mine videotaped it. If you think the record sounds good, you should hear that tape! I don't care if I get a solo. I love playing that Freddie Green type stuff so much. There's just something about it.

JF: I've found that musicians can often be their own harshest critics. Is there anything that as a guitarist or composer you feel that you either have to, or want to work on?

JB: The answer to that changes daily. Right now, I want to play over some new kinds of changes. Not bebop any more. But what that new thing is, I really can't tell you, because I don't know. I haven't found it yet. On the album LIKE THAT, I wrote a lot of the music and it made me play something different. I don't know if that was the direction, but writing the material is where I want go. I think I feel too comfortable playing bebop. I want to see if I can take the music in another direction without selling out. Some people have told me that maybe there isn't anywhere left to go, and maybe that's so. I don't know. I think I got close with LIKE THAT. It's hard in art to find something new. I mean, you're never going to find something that's totally new. I've often wondered if Charlie Parker or John Coltrane had lived longer... where would they have gone? It seems like the growth of jazz... while it didn't really stop... went from left to right. It doesn't push the envelope any more.

JF: Right now, we are in sort of a "retro-jazz" phase for lack of a better word.

JB: That's right. There just doesn't seem to be something ahead. Coltrane took it about as far as you could possibly go before it reached that fine line where it became noise. I had no idea what he was doing.

JF: It's hard to say if people like Coltrane and Parker were maybe burning their brightest when they died. Maybe, if they had lived, their music would have gotten worse, not better. Maybe they would have just burnt out.

JB: Good parallels can be found in all the arts... painting sculpture, classical music. Look at Stravinsky. He came along in the '20s with "Petrouchka" and "The Rite Of Spring." After "The Rite Of Spring" the question became, "Where was he was going to go after that?" He got into neo-classicism, which I guess in its way is the same as retro-jazz. The difference is that he put his own spin on neo-classicism. This retro-jazz just seems to be an imitation of old styles without putting any modern twists on it.

Bruno's Gear

• GUITARS: Jimmy plays Benedetto 7 string guitars exclusively. He plays Bob's standard 17" model, serial #33195, blonde w/ Benedetto S-7 suspended pickup. (See photo w/ Howard Alden) He also plays a custom 16" model, serial #34995 which is only 2 1/2" deep. It is also blonde w/ built in pickup and volume and tone controls mounted in the top. Both guitars are X-braced and were made in 1995.

• AMPS: Jimmy endorses Raezer's Edge Custom Cabinets, which he uses in conjunction with a Walter Woods amplifier and "just a little bit of digital delay." Recently, he has also been using George Alessandro's Hound Dog tube amps.

• CAMERA: Nikon FM2