Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar

“Davey played that tune and I fell in love with it, and I
got him to show it to me,” Baker says. ”I like it because
it’s not an obvious melody line for guitar. The writing on
that tune was very much influenced by pianists like Bobby
Timmons and Horace Silver. Davey just played it through,
he didn’t improvise, but I don’t see why not. I asked him
why he named it ‘Forty Ton Parachute,’ and he said that
the title came to him while he and a friend were watching
the end of the lunar mission on TV and he was so impressed
with the parachute that brought the forty ton space capsule
down into the ocean. It’s also interesting that it’s written
by a Scotsman. Chet Atkins and Merle Travis fans love it
because they think it sounds like Jerry Reed.”
Bakers’ many solo guitar records and videos, including
two recent projects on the music of Thelonious Monk and
Herby Nichols, allude to his vast knowledge and insatiable
appetite for popular music and culture.
“My interest was always in all kinds of American
music,” Baker says. “Even when I was listening to Jelly
Roll Morton and Scott Joplin in the mid–sixties, along with
all the rock and blues music of the period, I also heard
Monk, and then I got into free jazz. I still like listening to all
of it. I don’t go along with the notion that jazz is in an ivory
tower, that it’s ‘America’s classical music.’ That kind of
connotation smacks of cultural insecurity.”
Good answer.