Although early in the year Martino had fiddled around with many styles, and that nothing truly relevant come out of those experiments, he eventually found a path that suited him fine late that summer of 1976;Fusion was hardly a novelty but all over the world many were the enthusiastic musicians and audiences passionately driven by the possibilities it opened up and by how an excellent mirror for outstanding playing, a renewal of songwriting instincts and rules and chops display it was; this latter issue led to many abuses and unashamed revelations of mere self-indulgent overplaying but the exceptions that justified its existence were enough to keep the genre alive; this album is one of those.
Our shy Italo-American enlisted the help of a trio of Funk oriented and astoundingly reliable in spite of their youth Afro-Americans (Delmar Brown keyboards, Mark Leonard electric bass and Kenwood Dennard drums and percussion)…
There are a mere handful of guitarists that have changed the way we think about the guitar over the past five or six decades. Pat Martino is perhaps one of the greatest and best-known of those icons. The term “genius” is overused today, but Pat Martino was definitely one. His life story was the very definition of the word. Before Martino's passing in November, 2021, the Alternative Guitar Summit honored him and his enormous contribution to jazz in this set of studio recordings by 14 jazz guitarists playing selections from his imaginative and varied catalog of compositions. Producer Joel Harrison is thrilled to have brought together this crew of great musicians to show their love for him while HighNote Records is proud to present this first volume of their recordings.
Few musicians in any genre or on any instrument can boast guitarist Pat Martino's combination of supple, fast mobility and rich, tight control. In the 1960s, Martino earned his chops playing in a number of organ combos with Jack McDuff, Richard "Groove" Holmes, and Jimmy Smith, so the overall concept of hard-hitting, funky music has been familiar to the guitarist for decades.